ON APRIL 16, 2025, the UK Supreme Court issued what was hoped to be a landmark ruling confirming that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refers exclusively to biological sex, not to a person’s legal gender. For Women Scotland, a campaign group focused on women’s sex-based rights, won their case. The definition of ‘woman’ did not include transgender men with a Gender Recognition Certificate.
Most people welcomed this as a victory for common sense. However trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs, welcomed it as a blow to what they still deem to be ‘patriarchy, men and their misogyny‘.
‘To the dismay of their Australian sisters the Federal Court of Australia has just made a ruling that undermines this victory, stating in effect that sex is mutable. It has upheld a discrimination ruling on appeal after a transgender man, Roxanne Tickle, was excluded from Giggle for Girls, a women-only networking app. Tickle sued its chief executive officer, Sall Grover. While it might all sound a bit marginal, the ruling is far from trivial.
Grover is understandably devastated; after the ruling she said, ‘It is women who are being discriminated against.’ She plans to appeal to the High Court of Australia (Australia’s Supreme Court).
Grover is right to do so. Transactivism is tyranny. Where she and so many radical feminist forbears have gone wrong is to imply that perceived male behavioural traits, are the root of the problem, that misogyny from men alone and not also from complicit women. The word figures so often in Grover’s tweets that trolls call her Sall ‘Misogyny’ Grover.
The fact is that perverted men have been allowed this pretence of being women for decades now. Thanks to the too many influential women who could have said no but who self sabotaged. And for which the rest of the female sex has paid the price.
Of the three judges on the Federal Court that ruled that a women-only app illegally excluded a biological male, two were women. The law itself was written by a woman. Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner is a woman, Dr. Anna Cody, who’s been advising the court that men can become women and must be treated as such.
The legal architecture that once protected women was not dismantled by men. It was dismantled by women who mistook the performance of compassion for the substance of it. This is what suicidal empathy looks like in practice, and women are paying for it with their safety, as cultural commentator Carlz J Söda points out.
Protections for women weren’t destroyed by men, but by influential women who ‘decided that the feelings of a few outweighed the safety of the many, then made it a federal offence to disagree’.
How did Australia get here? How did lunacy become law in the first place?
Australia’s 2013 Sex Discrimination Amendment (SDA) violated the spirit of Australia’s original Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. It destroyed sex-based protections, included newer protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, both gravely undermining what a woman is. A total of 58 federal laws had to accommodate its notorious provisions.
The SDA resulted from sustained lobbying by radical feminists and intersectional feminists. But vulnerability of sexual orientation rather than of sex or womanhood weighed more heavily on their minds. So, they aimed for quick wins, embracing a coalition comprising men: gays. And, yes, transgenders.
You don’t have to agree with all political commentator John Macgowan says, but in his chronicle of Australia’s decline he is right to recall the havoc wrought by feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw: ‘In the 30 years since Kimberlé Crenshaw published Mapping the Margins and birthed Intersectional Feminism, those values have come to philosophically dominate every level of bureaucracy and academia. Women have acquired tremendous political, cultural and institutional power. Female tastes define our entire society. At an economic level, it’s lead to the creation of whole skyscrapers full of pointless jobs, sinecures, crèches for the daughters of intersectionality to occupy.’ https://x.com/john_macgowan/status/2055167182536163588
Australian feminists were instrumental in cementing the T to LGB in the Australian Capital Territory: the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Amendment Act 2003, the Sexuality Discrimination Legislation Amendment Act 2004.These laws and their clones wouldn’t have materialised without groundwork by feminist senator Susan Ryan, the first woman from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to serve in cabinet who was notably involved in the creation of the more classical Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunities in Employment) Act 1986.
For years, Grover-style feminists were so busy being radical or intersectional they forgot that, as feminists, their overarching allegiance was to women, not to lesbianism or other identities. They coaxed the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) into conducting the 2006-7 National Inquiry into Discrimination against Same-Sex Relationships which produced the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements report.
What stood out?
All ten people on the inquiry team were women.
Eight of the nine on its Legal Team were women.
Two of its three consultants were women.
More than half of nearly 700 written submissions were from women.
More than half of those at public hearings across Australia were women.
Since 1984, ten out of 11 of the AHRC’s Sex Discrimination Commissioners and four of its eight Presidents have been women.
And who were the shrillest pro-SDA voices? Influential women senators: Penny Wong, Nicola Roxon (Australia’s first woman Attorney General), Penny Wright, Sue Boyce, Louise Pratt, Sarah Hanson-Young, Christine Milne, Larissa Waters. Topping it all was transactivist-in-chief Julia Gillard, first woman to be Australia’s PM. Does it matter who was radical, who intersectional, and who TERF? What matters is that they were influential women who could have and should have protected ordinary women but did the opposite.
Against that (radicalised) feminist backdrop, the 2013 SDA was a foregone conclusion.
As if on cue, the AHRC and senators took seriously the mischievous testimonies of sex-therapist-led Sex & Gender Education (SAGE)and its ‘brother’ sex-diverse organisations. By then the antagonistic feminism of ‘sexuality, gender’ had replaced the ‘classical feminism’ of ‘sex, woman, womanhood’. Is it surprising that Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies all but replaced Women’s Studies? All preoccupied with sex diversity, sexual orientation, and gender-affirmation or non-conformity, depending on the day of the week.
In the stampede for solidarity with Grover, now framed as martyr-champion for women and girls, it’s tempting to overlook the fact that radical feminism is at root rapacious indoctrination, as diabolically divisive as gender ideology, just differently. When she started her business, eager to profit from the poison that radical and intersectional feminism had injected, she glibly tweeted: ‘trans girls are 1000000% welcome on Giggle.’
It’s all very well for Grover et al to have afterthoughts on the lines of ‘sex, not gender,’ but having enforced the Judith Butlerian brand of ‘gender, not sex’ thought policing on an industrial scale, they can’t wish away decades of antagonistic propaganda simply by claiming to be TERF. It’s as if being TERF and protective of sex as a binary gives them licence to engender in women followers their proudly sported loathing of men, heterosexual marriage and motherhood, and fondness for abortion.
Sensibly, lawyer Helen Dale clarifies that in the absence of physical risk to women (Giggle isn’t explicitly a dating app) it’s now harder for Australian feminists to secure women-only exceptions claiming that anything short of it is misogyny. After all, Australian feminists once denied men their men-only exemptions, even if nobody then called that misandry.
Now, sensing the shifting sands and surging sympathy for Grover, some political parties may change tack and try to undo the SDA’s damage, just as radical feminists like Grover are trying to shrug off predecessor and peer solidarity with transactivism.
But what of the humiliation, shame, fear and assault that ordinary women and girls endured from transgender men for 13 years because of transgender rights in bathrooms, locker-rooms, sports fields, gyms, prisons and shelters since the SDA became law?
Neither Grover nor her colleagues owned up to the decades of misdirected taxpayer time, money and effort toward propping up transactivists, who’d be nowhere today had it not been for sanctifying alliances offered them by Grover’s sympathisers and her ‘radfem’ predecessors and peers.
Does anyone care? All anyone seems to care about now is solidarity with Sall; look, my feminism is bigger than yours. Sadly, there was nowhere near this scale of public solidarity with millions of voiceless women and girls traumatised in the SDA’s wake for over a decade.
If Grover had devoted even half her time, money and effort to tearing down the SDA she might be more of the feminist heroine she’s being made out to be. Still, better late than never.
