Women’s rights vs trans rights: how I was drawn into a very modern battle
When Sall Grover’s online platform was flooded with trans activists, she asked herself this question: as profoundly fraught as the trans issue is, why should women’s rights come second?
Sall Grover marks February 7, 2020, as the day her life changed. Only in retrospect, of course. On the actual day, around 7am, when she woke in her Gold Coast home to all hell breaking loose, she thought it would blow over. She told her mum it was too ridiculous. “It will pass,” Grover assured her.
Thousands upon thousands of selfie photos of men had been uploaded overnight to her brand-new start-up app, Giggle.
This was meant to be a little corner of the internet just for women, as Grover would later tell a judge. Conjured up in the kitchen of Grover’s parents’ house, Giggle would offer a range of online support services for women only, including a chat room. Yet the new platform, barely a month old and not yet formally launched, was inundated by profiles of thousands of men. Certainly the photos looked like men.
Grover was on a fast-learning curve about trans politics.
“We were being called bigots, transphobic bigots. They were writing ‘KILL TERFS’ to alert other trans to join in. I had never heard the word TERF before,” Grover tells Inquirer from her Main Beach home, referring to the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist made infamous by trans activists.
Grover says she has since learned that the human brain, in particular the female brain, can distinguish between men and women pretty well. It’s part of our deeply rooted biological makeup, picking up cues to help us to choose between fight or flight when faced with potential danger.
Grover chose to fight. She removed all the profiles featuring photos of men from her Giggle app. She also took to Twitter, expressing her view that women should be entitled to women-only spaces. Grover had been drawn into a very modern battle between women’s rights and trans rights.
A screenwriter who had worked in Los Angeles, Grover tells Inquirer she was “a good little liberal”, fully on board with the LGBTI movement. “I had heard of trans. I didn’t live under a rock. I knew it was now LGBT. I’m a supporter of the LGB part, and if there’s a T attached (for trans) I was like, no problem, I support that too.”
But when her new online platform offering services for women was flooded with trans activists, Grover asked herself this question: as profoundly fraught as the trans issue is, why should women’s rights come second?
Grover was three months’ pregnant when Roxanne Tickle, a man who identifies as a woman, filed a complaint in December 2021 with the Australian Human Rights Commission about gender discrimination by Giggle after being blocked from the women-only app.
In August 2024, Federal Court judge Robert Bromwich found that Giggle and Grover had indirectly discriminated against the trans woman based on gender identity.
Grover’s daughter is now three and the Giggle founder’s legal battle to create a women-only space is into the next round with an appeal to the full bench of the Federal Court due to run over four days from August 4.
The history of gender discrimination law explains why an Australian court finds itself knee-deep in the morass of conflicting rights.
In 2013, both the Labor government and the opposition waved through changes to the Sex Discrimination Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, with little understanding of the far-reaching and serious consequences. For starters, in the head-on conflict between women’s rights and trans rights, what would it mean for women’s sport or women’s prisons? What about crisis hostels for women, or bathrooms and other women-only spaces?
When, early on, some women here and overseas, most famously JK Rowling, raised concerns about the possible dangers of trans women entering women-only spaces, they were fobbed off as intolerant and mean-spirited nutters. Yet they had identified the central issue: is it fair for the law to blithely set aside the rights of women to have their own spaces, free from biological men?
Earlier this year the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex, clarifying the operation of equality laws about single-sex spaces. This means that while transgender women are protected from discrimination under the Equality Act, they are not considered women for the purposes of single-sex spaces and services.
The court concluded that any interpretation other than one based on biological sex would render the operation of the Equality Law 2010 incoherent and impracticable. This does not affect transgender rights in other areas, such as the workplace, pensions, retirement and social security.
One rarely hears of biological women identifying as men – in other words, trans men – demanding access to men-only spaces, whereas men who identify as women routinely try to get access to women-only spaces.
Today, Giggle remains permanently shut down, the victim of trans activists who knowingly barged into a women-only space to make a political statement.
Grover’s story began long before this case with its fantastical name of Tickle v Giggle reached the Federal Court. “I’d worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter from 2009 and I came back in 2018,” she says. “The sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood were rife. My best friend at the time was Harvey Weinstein’s longest serving female assistant. It was as bad as they claim. I had men put their hand down my pants in meetings.”
Grover says when she raised the harassment and assault with managers, they would say: “ ‘He wants you to write a script for him.’ And I’m like, I don’t want to be in a room with him. I should have left long before I did,” Grover says. “I hated it by the end. But anyway, I didn’t. I stayed. I was like, I’m not going to let them win.”
But the Hollywood men who abused and harassed her did win.
Grover came home to Australia for a three-week holiday and never returned to Hollywood. Her parents, she says, saw a shell of a person and told her to get some therapy. It was during two months in therapy, with Grover determined to regain her confidence, that the germ of Giggle was planted. Her therapist told her she needed a strong female support network in her life.
“There was a lot of dialogue around that at the time, sort of in 2017, 2018, because women didn’t realise that this was all happening to women,” she tells Inquirer from her home on the Gold Coast.
“These sorts of places, Hollywood or politics or any sort of big industry, they are quite isolating by nature. And I had this light bulb moment.”
Grover and her mother spoke that night. The young woman was having a whisky, her mother a wine. They talked about creating a female-only roommate app after Grover’s own bad experiences trying to find a flat with a safe roommate in New York. Across the next few days, the idea grew bigger.
“If you’re going to create this as a business, it has to be scalable. What else would women need? What little corner of the internet would women need?” she recalls.
“We had in mind a general chat platform, too, like a Twitter-style thing where women could interact with lots of different women and have opinions. Lesbian dating, freelance work too, and if you’re a woman who wants an electrician, you’re bringing people into your home, like these are all things we thought about. Motherhood, pregnancy, just anything that was relevant to women.”
Still in the early stages of testing in January 2020, security settings were still being developed, bugs were being ironed out, algorithms not yet set. The beta version of Giggle on the App store was being trialled on a group of Grover’s friends and family. The early platform used an artificial intelligence tool called Kairos Gender Detection to distinguish between women and men. Grover chose a 94 per cent accuracy setting.
Grover tells Inquirer she didn’t want the AI filter set so high that some women couldn’t access the support network. If that meant some men would slip through the filter, so be it. She and those helping her would instead manually block men from Giggle. The manual filtering process was time-consuming but important in maintaining the integrity of the app as a women-only space. If Giggle went well, attracting good reviews, Grover could monetise the app with advertising. And her new business would be off the ground.
Grover’s Federal Court affidavit picks up the story.
“During development, I would often say, ‘I want to ensure that women can have access to a female support network in the palm of their hand whenever they need it’ and that is essentially what we were creating. The vision was an online women’s refuge, so to speak. The vision was to have a positive impact on women’s daily online and social media experience.”
Some trans activists had other ideas. In hindsight, Grover says, “We were cancelled right out of the gate.” Once it was inundated with men, it was “for all intents and purposes … now a male-dominated space”.
“We decided to ‘tread water’ for a while, naively thinking that the ‘culture war’ would blow over quickly, after which we could stage a new launch. I thought this would be a quick process.
“My experience had made me resolute that a female-only online space was necessary.”
It has now been 14 months since the app was shut down.
Grover later discovered that she had had some Twitter exchanges with Tickle in January and February 2021. “Changing the rules of female spaces isn’t the answer. It’s not right or fair,” Grover tweeted. “A lot of women enjoy female spaces because of the camaraderie & safety. I feel like trans women should have that with trans women, in these situations.”
Tickle was born a man. From mid-2017, Tickle underwent a gradual process of transitioning to a woman – socially, legally and medically. In October 2019, about the same time that Grover was developing Giggle, Tickle’s birth certificate was reissued to reflect a female sex marker by the Queensland Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Tickle joined Giggle in February 2021, apparently knowing full well Grover’s views about wanting some female-only spaces.
Grover doesn’t recall blocking Tickle from Giggle. It would have happened, she says, during one of the regular sessions when she and a US-based friend who was helping her out would manually go through photos to deny access to anyone who looked like a man. Tickle was one of literally thousands blocked from Giggle.
In her affidavit to the court, Grover said the app activity data showed that Tickle had never in fact used it.
Grover walked away from the AHRC’s conciliation process following Tickle’s complaint. She simply couldn’t agree to the conditions Tickle put on the table. She says Tickle wanted her to publicly apologise, pay $20,000, attend sex and gender education classes and moderate all content on Giggle to ensure that men who identified as women were not offended.
She recounts what was going through her head back then. “Not only do you want to be on Giggle, you to want to control what happens in there too. How on earth am I as a moderator supposed to know what the hell would offend you? It’s not like we could meet halfway. If I did agree that men who claim to be women could come on (to Giggle), what’s the point of the app?”
That would be just another version of Twitter, Grover says.
Grover is headed back to the Full Federal Court hearing next month. Funding the action has been another drama, she says.
“I had watched many women in this fight get kicked off platforms like GoFundMe because it is activist driven, so we created our own website, Gigglecrowdfund.com.
“This case has been completely funded by 12,000 and counting individual citizens from mostly Australia but also around the world who care about this issue and want it fixed,” she says.
Unlike other cases, high-profile court stoushes such as Moira Deeming’s recent defamation case funded by a wealthy backer, Grover says she has never had any offers of help from a big donor. “No one’s ever contacted me to say: ‘Do you need help?’ I think some people think I’m being funded by the likes of, say, like JK Rowling. I’m not. She has supported the case by retweeting me, she has said that she supports the case publicly. But that’s it.
“Women are being expected to just give up our rights. But this is so much bigger even than that,” says Grover. “This is authoritarianism, this is freedom of speech, freedom of belief and freedom of association. The bedrock of a liberal society. And we are the canary in the coalmine.”
Grover’s legal team includes solicitor Katherine Deves. No stranger to the politics of trans rights, Deves was the Liberal candidate for Warringah in the 2022 election who raised concerns about children being medically transitioned at a young age.
Deves, who received death threats during that period, says Australia was once a global leader in the protection of women, embedding the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women into federal law in 1984. She says the 2013 changes to the Sex Discrimination Act, “treating sex as legally changeable”, have eroded these protections. “Favouring ideology over reality” is unacceptable, she tells Inquirer.
Though the wording of discrimination laws in Britain and Australia differ, Deves says the upcoming Giggle v Tickle appeal is “a critical opportunity … to restore fairness, clarity and rationality to women’s sex-based rights”. Similar to Britain, where rights of trans women not to be discriminated against in, say, the workplace remain intact, the law still allows for spaces for biological women only.
Grover says: “If I was writing a screenplay about gender ideology and I included in it a court case called Tickle v Giggle, I can tell you, guaranteed, the first note I would get back from a development executive is: ‘That’s not believable.’ ” On a more serious note, she worries that the case name means some people think it’s not real.
“Tickle v Giggle. It sounds like a puppet show,” Grover says.
“We had no idea that there would be any kind of controversy,” she says, still perplexed by the orchestrated campaign to destroy her fledging business to create an online space for women. “What are the odds of creating an app for women at the one time in human history when people are questioning what a woman is?”
Grover remains as adamant today as she was on that morning in early February 2020. “We all know what a woman is,” she says.
And even if the Federal Court appeal judges say sex is changeable, Grover says, “they would be wrong. Sex is not changeable. Documents are changeable. Laws are changeable. Sex has never been, and never will be, changeable.
“Our sex is part of every cell in our body. It is impossible to change it. So not only would judges be getting biology and reality wrong, they would also be using language inaccurately. You could potentially get a court to believe that a man is a woman, but you’re not going make me believe it.”
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