Giggle v Tickle: The End of Women

The High Court of Australia declined Sall Grover and Giggle’s application for special leave to have their appeal in Giggle v Tickle heard on 10 September 2026. The orders handed down by 6 of the 7 justices means that Australian women and girls are no longer recognised as a distinct protected category on the basis of their female sex in our federal discrimination law. Transactivists are a litigious bunch and they have form for taking such decisions and applying it as broadly as they are able to get away with, in the USA they took the Bostock v Clayton County decision pertaining to gender identity at work which led to state and federal courtroom showdowns as they attempted to apply that principle to the education arena. But unlike Australia, the US Supreme Court restored sex-based rights for women under federal civil rights law Title IX with the recent Little v Hecox and West Virginia v BPJ decision.

Sall Grover, CEO of Giggle, sought to overturn the decision handed down in the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia on 15 May 2026 that followed on from her unsuccessful first instance decision of 23 August 2024. The complainant, Roxanne Tickle, a biological male with a transgender woman identity, having altered their sex descriptor on their birth certificate and, according to the evidence, had “gender-affirming surgery”, had been removed from Grover’s female only social networking app, Giggle.

Tickle said the High Court decision was a “beacon of light”, but this is cold comfort for Australia’s women and girls who can no longer exclude biological males who appear male but claim a gender identity from female only spaces, services and sports. Their right to say no to men has been removed, and the men have assumed these women’s rights for themselves, leaving them without hard-won safeguards and historical protections. Ironic for a nation whose current cultural discourse frets over consent on a daily basis. Every case has a ratio decidendi, it is the legal reasoning for a court’s decision that can be relied upon as a principle for future cases. For Giggle v Tickle, the ratio is that gender identity overrides biological sex; a biological male who appears male but has a gender identity is a woman for the purposes of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth). Transwomen ARE women, in other words. It was found that a male facial appearance is an attribute that usually pertains to “transwomen” and if such an individual - a male who appears male but has a gender identity – is discriminated against on the basis of his male appearance (such as being excluded from a female only digital networking platform based on an on-boarding selfie assessed by both AI and a human) because his appearance is part of his gender identity, the excluder has discriminated against him. In reality, this may also include situations where the excluder has no knowledge of the gender identity or has incorrectly but without malice assumed the gender identity.

Obiter dicta is a legal term for judicial opinions given in a decision that not essential to the outcome and do not establish a precedent, but it may be persuasive and useful for future cases. The obiter for Giggle v Tickle is the redefinition of sex from its ordinarily understood biological and binary meaning, to a new one where it is “changeable”, “not necessarily binary’ and “the determination of the sex of a person may take into account a range of factors including biological and physical characteristics, legal recognition and how they present themselves and are recognised socially.”

This legal imbroglio is further compounded by the definition for gender identity - circular, amorphous, based on performance of sex stereotypes (name, mannerisms, dress) or not, surgery and medical intervention or not, alteration of sex descriptors on government issued identification or not, “living as” the sex the person wishes to be or not, disclosing it or not, self-declared pronouns or not, and confusingly predicated on biological sex despite sex being redefined to essentially mean gender identity. I hope you are able to follow this convoluted reasoning, I have been thinking about this issue and its application to the law for years, and even I get frustrated trying to make sense of it. But of course, that is the intended consequence – removing clear and accurate language and confounding everyone is the only way society could have been bamboozled into accepting that biological sex does not exist in the ordinary way that has been understood for millions of years.

The end result is that men who fervently wish to be women, whatever steps they do or do not take to achieve that fantasy, now have more rights than women themselves and an Access All Areas pass to female only spaces, services and sports. Human beings with an ounce of common sense are well aware that altered identity documents, cosmetic surgery to create a simulacrum of the opposite sex and clothes bought in the opposite sex clothing department of Myer do not change the reality of the biological sex that one is born.

The legal distinction between sex and gender identity has been collapsed, the precedent is now settled, so the question is now, what can be done to restore common sense and biological reality to our law? There have been many casualties to this ideology with the imposition of civil and criminal penalties, damages and costs should a person resist or refuse to play along with the ideology, and the intrusion into the right of individuals to freedom of speech, association, conscience, belief and religion. In the post-Giggle world, “transwomen are women”, clear and accurate language has been displaced by ideological confusion, gender identity is paramount to biological sex, and biological sex is collapsed into gender identity. This leaves the ordinary person, who never asked for this, in a quagmire without a map to navigate this brave new world.

Grover and Giggle have exhausted all their domestic appellate options, the High Court decision was the end of the road. They may decide to take the matter to the United Nations Human Rights or CEDAW Committees on the basis that the member state of Australia has failed in their treaty obligations, but the assemblies and committees are strongly divided over this issue and thus far, on a number of discrete matters, they have found in favour of gender identity. Even if Grover and Giggle were successful, the outcome is not enforceable or binding here in Australia, merely a recommendation.

We will have to turn to the legislatures to remedy this problem for women and girls, the very institutions that caused the problem in the first place.

One Nation was the first party to table legislation in the federal and NSW parliaments to attempt to reverse this ideological capture of our laws, policy, programmes and cirricula, and prevent the indoctrination of children. Indeed, I gave evidence in the NSW parliamentary inquiry on the gender fluidity bill (Education Legislation Amendment (Parental Rights) Bill 2020) in 2021 in my capacity as spokeswoman for Save Women’s Sports Australasia. I will never forgive the LNP for not fixing this issue when they held state and federal power pre-2022, because this failure to act has enabling the ideology to become entrenched in every aspect of society. It was a significant reason why I left the Liberals, I wanted to be aligned with those who have had the courage to stand up for women and girls when the problem was first brought to their attention. Four years on from the gender fluidity bill and the Liberal and National parties have FINALLY realised, now that it is politically expedient and culturally safe, that once people understand the burden and harms of gender identity ideology on not just women and girls, but society more broadly, and the actual costs to the taxpayers of funding the ideology under the banner of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, they reject it. With the insidious influence of the wet moderates in the Liberals, it remains to be seen if they can hold this policy line federally and adopt it at state-levels. One Nation was the first out of the trenches to defend sex-based rights and protect children, and we can be confident they will continue to fight on our behalf.

In any case, while the Labor-Greens-Teal-LGT cabal hold power, nothing will change. Labor started this culture war, so they certainly won’t end it - there is no imminent light at the end of the tunnel. Even if Labor governments are voted out in the upcoming state elections, the Giggle decision limits the ability of the States to legislate to restore sex-based rights, as State legislation cannot be in conflict with Commonwealth legislation pursuant to section 109 of the Constitution.

Having said that, there are amendments that can be made at a state level to go part-way to remedying this dire situation, while it is critical for the federal fix we don’t have to wait until 2028 to start to the recovery and rescue mission to restore common sense. Stay tuned for the next article in this series. As always, Australia First KD Find me on: X Katherine Deves

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Attending NSW Parliament for the Gender Fluidity inquiry on 21 April 2021