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Tickle v Giggle — Gender critical voices lose, again

Rachel Saunders
4 min readAug 23, 2024

Copyright Roxanne Tickle

In the way only a judge can deliver Roxanne Tickle got legal vindication that her identity was legally valid and should be protected from discrimination. Online, the losing respondent Sall Grover and other self-proclaimed TERFs vowed to fight on, to protect their understanding of reality. A whole ocean of salt was spilt on Twitter, with comments egging Sall to continue the fight. Amidst it all no-one bothered to read the actual judgement or listen to precisely what the judge said as any appeal can only succeed if the judge erred in a point of law. Judge Bromwich was precise, reasoned, and laid out the fact: Sall Grover and her company were proven to be discriminating indirectly and that at law it was possible for a person to change their sex under the Australian legal system.

It should also be noted that this was the case in which Helen Joyce was rejected as an expert on all matters trans and Kathleen Stock’s evidence was dismissed as irrelevant. This highlights the significant gap between political posturing and legal understanding, which is especially acute with Joyce as she has been riding the gender critical movement for every pay check she can muster. For her part Grover appears to be unfazed by the case, yet as she is going to pay at least $AUS50,000 in costs and compensation it will hit her were it truly hurts, the bottom line.

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Rachel Saunders
Rachel Saunders

Written by Rachel Saunders

Writer, researcher, and generally curious

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Good! You cannot argue for your own body autonomy while arguing someone else's ability to make decisions about their own body that simply do not affect your life. Trans women making decions sbout their own bodies and wanting to be recognized or called what THEY want to be called, costs a person nothing!

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T v G epitomises the fact that applied gender critical beliefs are both arbitrary and morally unconscionable, founded on the erroneous assumption that at law your understanding of sex i...

That means each of us (in most situations!) is the expert on our own sex, right? Because no average person-on-the-street should use their own beliefs, i.e., arbitrary prejudices, to decide in which sex category their neighbor is allowed to live.
I…

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