Tickle v. Giggle is an Australian court case that, in its very name, evokes the absurd. Since it has scratched a legal itch and produced much gallows humour, there is something of a cosmic joke about the nomenclature of the case, which is the latest battle in the existential war over the category of “woman.”
So, what is it all about? Who are the central protagonists, and what are the implications?
Roxanne Tickle, a trans-identifying male, is the plaintiff who has brought the first case of “gender identity discrimination” in the Federal Court of Australia against the (now-defunct) woman-only app “Giggle for Girls.” Tickle, who was barred from the app in September 2021, claims that the exclusion of males who identify as transgender women is illegal discrimination. Thus, most of the proceedings have concentrated on what constitutes the legal definition of woman. The main question is whether Tickle can identify into the category of woman, and therefore whether sex is mutable in the eyes of the law.
As expected, the Federal Court ruled in favour of Tickle. In doing so, the court came down categorically on the side of gender identity, discriminating against women in the process and, paradoxically, using their own laws to do so.
Far from being a feminist victory, this ruling—and the ideology it represents—is a subversion of the work of foundational thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir. These women critiqued cultural conceptions of gender norms in order to free women from arbitrary constraints—not to deny biology or take away their access to private female-only spaces.
Source: The Absurdity of “Tickle v. Giggle” – Fairer Disputations
It’s shameful as well as an offence against Women and specifically lesbians is there no loophole that we can bring legally
Amongst other matters, the judgment fails to distinguish between a document that states a person has a particular categorisation – eg a passport, and a biological and physiological constitution. That a passport states a person is ‘female’ does not mean that that person is biologically and physiologically female. I am drawn back to my undergraduate days of studying philosophy and ‘what is a cat’. This is a most basic issue in philosophy. The law has a jurisprudential component – including legal logic which itself is a ‘division’ of jurisprudence – and that jurisprudence is the very foundation of law. Namely, that the law has a philosophical basis – namely, jurisprudence. Perhaps it is time for the judiciary to go back to basics – training in jurisprudential analysis? Would that Ilmar Tammelo, formerly of the Jurisprudence Department of the University of Sydney Law Faculty were here to supervise the training (https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SydLawRw/1983/8.pdf) and to add his commentary to the conundrum that appears to confront the court (the conundrum having been brought into existence by that very court). Exercising his decisive intellect, he would make very short shrift of the ‘argument’.