A judge in Australia has just ruled that “sex is changeable”, an utterance that flies in the face not only of common sense but also of incontestable biological facts. For those of us who have been concerned about the ongoing capture of our major institutions by an ideology that demands acquiescence in the denial of reality, we had hoped that the judiciary might be immune. In Australia at least, this is evidently not the case.
The story began when Sall Grover, a former Hollywood screenwriter, established a new social media platform for women only in 2020 called “Giggle”. One of the innovations of the app was the introduction of facial recognition software to ensure that men could not participate. In the wake of #MeToo, this seemed like an uncontroversial notion.
The software wasn’t foolproof. A man who identifies as a woman and calls himself “Roxanne Tickle” was somehow accepted, and when the mistake was noticed he was barred from the app. For anyone who thinks there might be any ambiguity about Tickle’s sex, this is what he looks like:
Affronted at being denied access to a women’s only space, Tickle took Grover to court claiming discrimination. And now the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has ruled that this was indeed an instance of indirect discrimination (as opposed to direct discrimination, as it was not proven that Tickle’s “gender identity” was the discriminating factor). The ruling puts it this way:
A necessary part of proving that action has been taken by reason of a person’s gender identity, and therefore amounts to direct discrimination, is establishing that the alleged discriminator was aware of the person’s gender identity. The evidence goes no further than establishing that Ms. Tickle’s exclusion was likely to have been a byproduct of excluding those who were perceived as being men, by the use of visual criteria that failed to distinguish between cisgender men and transgender women.
We can all see the problem. A women-only app quite obviously will discriminate on the basis of sex, otherwise it will cease to be a women-only service. The law in Australia insists that “gender identity” is a protected characteristic, even though the overwhelming majority of people do not believe that such a thing exists. This is due to amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act that were passed by the federal parliament under the Labour government in 2013. Fast forward eleven years, and a judge has determined that one man’s belief that he has a gendered soul should automatically grant him the right to access women’s only spaces. Tickle has been awarded $10,000 and Grover will have to pay his legal costs.
Grover had relied on the definition of “women” in the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). As it happens, this case has not tested this definition, as the judge explained:
I was not satisfied that the kind of gender identity discrimination alleged by Ms Tickle under s22 would be supported as an enactment of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) (CEDAW). The respondents contended that this was because CEDAW grants protections only to women, and the word “women’”in CEDAW only means adults who were female sex at birth. I do not need to decide whether that is correct or not, because the way in which the term “discrimination against women” is defined in CEDAW means it refers only to discrimination that places women in a less favourable position than men. It therefore does not cover the kind of four discrimination that Ms. Tickle alleges in this case, which is discrimination that placed her in the same position as men.
At the very least, we can say that in the wake of this judgement the international definition of “women” still holds firm. And yet if a man can successfully take legal action for being denied access to a women’s service, this effectively means that single-sex spaces for women can no longer exist. The Australian judiciary has decided that it is illegal for women to organise in their own interests.
We have seen countless instances of men identifying their way into women’s spaces, from sports to hospitals and, perhaps most disturbingly, prisons. Most lesbian dating apps are now mixed-sex, and the option to filter out men is not permitted because this is considered “transphobic”. In other words, lesbians are being shamed for being same-sex attracted by the very organisations that are meant to support them.
All sexuality is discriminatory. It could hardly be otherwise. To suggest that women who are attracted exclusively to other women should include men in their dating pool is about as homophobic as it gets. That this is now codified into law should surely be a cause for concern for anyone who believes in the rights of minorities. And when it comes to women more generally, it is a clear-cut matter of safeguarding. Women’s spaces exist because 99% of sex crimes are committed by men and 91% of victims of sex crimes are female. This really shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
Of course Tickle is entitled to equal protection under the law. But he should not be entitled to enter spaces where women have decided to gather with their own sex. There will hopefully now be an appeal to the High Court, and with any luck the 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act will be deemed unlawful. There is a strong case here, as many have pointed out that it is unconstitutional to redefine “woman” as a matter of identity rather than biology.
Above all, we should all be chilled by that phrase “sex is changeable”, uttered by the judge as though any of us could possibly believe it. The law might well seek to upend reality, but that does not make it true. Not even the most senior judge in the world can simply decide that human biology no longer exists. Yet such is the power of this new religion of gender identity that even the judiciary will state falsehoods in its name. If nothing else, this ruling has settled once and for all the question of whether this ideology has seized control of our society. Case closed.
Andrew Doyle is a writer, comedian and broadcaster who hosts the GB News show Free Speech Nation. He is the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters and The New Puritans. He created satirical Left-wing activist Titania McGrath, whose two books are Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism. This article was first published on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
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Easy. The profits and the access to BBC “comedy” programmes etc give the editor a very satisfactory lifestyle.
Why else?
You could also add ‘smarmy little g*t’!
Well said.
Would the BBC have given Hislop two decades of unbroken guest appearances if he held the establishment to account via his magazine or on Have I got News for You.
Bigger fools those who buy Private Eye.
My assumption is that Hislop is a lefty like most people in the media, and thinks that all the causes you mention are just espoused by the far right.
Is he a lefty or is he one of those right thinking, educated, sensible people who can’t think for themselves but thinks he does because he has all the formal credentials and social status to prove it?
I suppose I am using the term “lefty” as shorthand for what you set out. he probably doesn’t think of himself as “left wing” because he believes in “capitalism” and isn’t overly keen on everything being nationalised. He probably regards himself as a moderate liberal.
…an interesting theory!
More likely he’s an Oxbridge Arts or Humanities graduate, with a belief that Intelligence is a valid substitute for knowledge and experience, especially from the Scientific and Engineering disciplines, and what he doesn’t know or understand isn’t important.
Used to be good.
Sadly four plus years ago it became, well just s++t.
It embraced Clown world mainly because of that cretinous “MD” apology for an expert on all things medical. I hold him in visceral contempt. The man is just a bigpharma stooge with no ability to actually think for himself.
And that’s quite odd because he used to be very critical about the lack of transparency in pharma trials and the fact that failed drug trial information is hidden when it should be available so that researchers can identify things that don’t work before they commit to an expensive development that repeats previous failures.
I stopped subscribing a decade ago or more, and I don’t bother reading it even though the In The Back section may still be worth it.
Indeed.
At the outset of “covid” he basically said don’t panic as it was just like Flu.
He changed tack shortly afterwards and hasn’t been the same since. Same with NPI’s.
Sadly he’s been captured, but I wonder why.
There had been no NATO expansion towards Russia since 2004 (Baltic states) until Finland became a member in 2023 because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Depends what you consider NATO expansion. Declaring that Ikraine and Georgia would join NATO (in 2008), plus an orchestrated coup in Ukraine to replace a (elected) president sympathetic to Russia with a pro-western one, who then begins a covert civil war against eastern Ukrainians sympathetic to Russia might be considered by some as part of an eastwards expansion of NATO.
I consider NATO expansions NATO expansions. Nothing else.
Additional remark: I had a moment of high respect for Putin in 2022 as the guy who proudly set a torch to the rule-based international dogfart because he believed this to be in the best interest of his own country. But Putin the scheming liar (and an exceedingly poor liar at that) who constantly claims that he didn’t really do what he most certainly did plus his horde of credulous fans who’ll buy even into the most absurd contortions, 150% of which are probably Americans from the so-called American right who have a Pavlow dog reflex to mindlessly oppose everything Biden supported, lost this respect again very quickly.
The people I don’t have respect for are the imbeciles on our side who keep dragging us into wars that we can never win. We were never going to conquer Afghanistan or Iraq. We certainly weren’t going to build liberal democracies there. We have no chance of beating Russia regardless of what any of us think of Putin, without investing insane amounts in money and human deaths. And probably not even then.
We can pretend we didn’t provoke the war in Ukraine to a very large degree. Or we can accept the facts without having to state any view about Putin.
And perhaps that is what I respect the least about the bastards that wield power on “our side” – treating us like idiots (again), telling us how horrible Putin is, how horrible Sadam Hussein was, how horrible the Taliban are, how horrible Gaddafi was. As if that was ever the reason for any of their actions. Only braindead people think any of these things are about goodies and baddies.
I really don’t occupy any of these two positions.
The countries you refer to as liberal demoracies are neither liberal nor democratic, rather notoriously corrupt, morally completely rotten and in many aspects outright tyrannic oligarchies with mechanism for regular popular acclamation built in which doesn’t seem to be much different in practice from the way to former eastern bloc democracies also operated.
Just prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia demanded an agreement that Ukraine and Georgia would never be allowed to join NATO. The Biden/Blinken administration rejected this Russian demand. I’m surprised you weren’t aware of this.
I don’t care for any of these invented stories Vladi Puti uses to claim that he didn’t really attack Ukraine. He did. And I think he ultimatively wants to swallow it completely bite-by-bite. That’s just a case of a leader of one country making war on another because he believes that’s the right thing to do.
This was considered a perfectly normal event until the joint Anglo-American redrawing of European borders by force with a French junior partner and Stalin providing most of the canonfodder in exchange for finally getting a chance to fullfill Russia’s century-old pan-slavist plans with help of large scale ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe — already a Russian policy in conquered territories during the first world war.
The join Anglo-Americans and their communist best buddies were very much convinced that their Europe must never be changed again. Hence, they threw up the so-called rules based international order which decrees that that’s from now in strictly verboten. Like all human political arrangements, it will not last. That the Anglo-Russian-Americommunists never meant to obey the rules they laid down for others and never did will be instrumental in its demise.
Putin could have been honest, then he would at least have shone as minor star. But he chose to peddle the same old lies about Nazis and rules for thee and for me except when I cross my fingers while saying so. And hence, he’s just more of the same old.
Perhaps they should read the Babylon Bee to remind them what satire looks like.
“Like the brilliant Mark Steyn to warn us of the likely damage mRNA vaccines were causing.”
GB News threw him under the Bus. When was the last time GBN warned about the mRNAs? when have they had a proper climate sceptic. And on other matters, not seen Lady Colin Campbell on there for a while, have they fallen out with her. She is an elderly lady so maybe not very well? She was a good laugh unlike that bitch they had last night. Mark Dolan said what a pleasure it is to have Edwina Currie on the show — as long as you’ve had the jab! another vile woman is that Esther Rantzen. The depths of Hell is the best place for those two!
Glad to see someone else has noticed, since Steyn left all the other GBNews presenters went very silent about the Covid jabs.
Neil Oliver was silenced as well. The cabal did not want the truth upsetting the masses.
It is an interesting question. Some would argue that it was subversive when it first started but not really. Like the television programme Spitting Image. You could say that it was anti-establishment but always with a subtext of reverence for the real establishment. Perhaps Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were as far as we were allowed to go in this country. Nobody like Lenny Bruce has ever achieved success in this country. It is implicit that it wouldn’t be allowed.
HIGNFY and Private Eye are part of the media “Establishment”. Private Eye has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986 who is the epitome of an Establishment gatekeeper. He was head boy at his private school, an Oxford University graduate who went straight from uni to Private Eye, a devout Anglican and a regular for the BBC where he did a program praising the Rothschild bankers. He totally rubbished the report on the sinister organisation Common Purpose on Have I Got News For You and uses the programme to mould the opinion of it’s viewers just like he moulds the opinion of the infantile Private Eye readers.
Being pilloried by Private Eye should be regarded as a badge of honour.
This article provides no references for some of its assertions.
Some of those assertions appear somewhat dubious.
‘GENERAL SHALIKASHVILI: I think the issue has always been that NATO — and you’ve all heard it said NATO has never been a closed society. We look at their Partnership For Peace as a evolutionary process. It is our hope that that process in fact can lead to an extension of membership; but who, when and how is not — it’s a premature question today.
If there is a point that I could make is that in this whole discussion, it is useful to remember that we are talking so much less today about whether extension of the Alliance, but so much more about how and when.’
1994
The OSCE, of which Russia is a part, specifically stipulates, within the Helsinki accord, the right of all members to make foreign alliances as they see fit.
At least in the internet age we can see the juxtaposition of faux alternative media versus the real thing. That is something to be grateful for. Suddenly our intellectual landscape and architecture of our imagination is laid bare. A deceiver from the beginning. It will seep through this obfuscation of false respectability it just takes time.
No point unless you are completely fearless. Youan have two fearless people going at it and it is a good thing the tumult. This is sick sardonic stuff. He who loves his life shall lose it. You can’t have any worldly concerns if you want to produce top notch journalism and information. A life of squalor and obscurity awaits you but you don’t care. 150 years ago journalism was a grass roots tendency, the desire of a newly literate class to speak out. Just compare the quality of the writing then with that which is proffered now.
In England you don’t have an alternative. The alternative was get out whilst you still can. That is being closed off. You can’t suffer it and yet you can’t leave it. Welcome to the new world order baby, have a nice day.
The boomers are a generations of socipaths at least. The younguns are full of vital energy that just needs to be activated in a time of gloom.If you had any heart you would see that tendency and nourish it. In that sense I am very optimistic about the future.
How many people do you know who feel willing and able to carry out exorcisms? It is an important question given the reality of our time. You don’t have to be schooled in Roman dogma to carry out an exorcism. If you had a visitation and defeated it then you are good to go.
You cannot ignore this realm. It comes with sleep paralysis. The feeling of a crone or hag sitting on your chest sucking the life out. Sometimes there is a Shadow Man holding the door closed. This has been studied all over the world, exactly the same visitiation. As human beings you can’t just keep quiet about it. Some of these visitiations involve deaths within a localised population. Nobody wants to mention the strangulating hag but it has to be mentioned.
You can shake her off and make the dirty little bitch scurry into the corner of your bedroom and make her disappear. But you have to have the spirit to do that. Then she won’t touch you. Ideally you teach other people how to deal with her.
Tha hag of winter. Even Odysseus had to deal with her. The presentation upon the chest seems to occur when someone is vulnerable to it. Just make sure that you didn’t leave yourself open to it on a moral level.
You would think some animal bunch would be all over HIGNFY for flogging a dead horse in public. It long ceased to be amusing and entertaining as the smug little gnome got more pompous.
This is one of the many troubles with the BBC – they hang on to programmes for so long, well past their sell by date. You’d think with all their money they could come up with more new things? The amount of programmes that originated more than 20 years ago and that are still being made and shown is quite high. I can’t imagine any of the streaming companies getting away with being so lazy.
Hyslop is a classic example of a ruling class journalist.
Excellent David. Thank you for sticking it to the erstwhile worth-reading Private Eye and the sold-out Hislop.
I used to look forward to every edition, I used to have a subscription.
Then a few years back it changed and now I don’t.
Me too. I cancelled it around covid time. Had been reading it since the 60s too.
Methinks you answered your own question, yep a good living, a very good living out of the beeb!.
So did Clarkson, but that doesn’t stop him slagging them off now and rightly so!
Now that you mention it yes it has become boring. It does support the man made climate narrative and covid lockdowns , at least the doctor does. The last outstanding expose was the post office computer.I shall have to reconsider my subscription. Daily Sceptic is more alligned to my views
Don’t buy it – ever. If you’re stuck in an airport there is a wide variety of publications and books available, there is no need – ever – to pay good money for Private Eye Propaganda and Ian Hislop’s career.
Exactly that!
These are dark days but i am ashamed to say that i was very slightly cheered when i read this morning that the odious Hislop had been knocked down by a bike.
Ah, well I think you’re going to get a kicking for this article. You’ve read one copy of the Eye and base your judgement on a few odds and ends. The Eye’s MD provided great coverage of Covid. The Eye campaigned endlessly over the Post Office scandal and has a long history of exposing financial scandals from the city. As a long term subscriber I no longer find it as humorous as it once was (e.g. front cover re Emperor Hirohito, and the one with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon). But there we are.
No. I read 2 to 3 copies a year. So please try reading articles before you comment on them. Then your comments would be even more insightful and valuable to other readers.
A good article but you overstated the blame Nato countries have for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And you failed to mention that Russia wrongly invaded a sovereign country. If you think that Russia weren’t looking for an excuse, any excuse, to invade Ukraine then I feel you’re being naive. The rest of the piece though was spot on.
The late great Christopher Booker, must be revolving at warp speed, in his grave.