Once upon a time re-education camps were a feature of Chinese communism. Now re-education is the program of choice of Australian thought police. Take the case of Ms Sall Grover, the founder and CEO of an app for women called Giggle for Girls.

Ms Grover was inspired to create the app after almost ten years of working in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Grover returned to Australia devastated by her first-hand experiences of the sex discrimination that launched the ‘MeToo’ movement. After talking it over with her mum she decided to create a space to connect ‘girls/women/females from all around the world for freelance work, roommates, activism, emotional support and much more’. Giggle has been enormously successful and has been used in 84 countries.

Grover is hardly a poster girl of the right. The one book she would recommend that her community reads is Becoming by Michelle Obama. But this week Grover found herself in the Federal Court because she refused to undergo sex and gender ‘re-education’ ordered by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) as part of its ‘conciliation’ process.

The sex and gender re-education was ordered because Ms Grover revoked access to her app to Ms Roxanne (Roxy) Tickle. Tickle is a transgender woman who was ‘assigned male gender at birth’ but was issued a birth certificate stating she was female a year after undergoing gender-affirming surgery in October 2019.

According to Tickle’s lawyer, Georgina Costello, ‘gender is not merely a biological question, it is partly social and partly psychological’ and despite her birth assignation, Tickle has ‘changed to being a woman and that fact is clear in this case’. Costello stated in court that, ‘The evidence will show that Ms Tickle is a woman. She perceives herself as a woman. She presents herself as a woman.’

You might wonder who it is who needs educating or re-educating about the facts of life since the immutable truth is that it is not possible to change your sex no matter how often you close your eyes, like Peter Pan, and say you believe in fairies.

You might also think that Ms Grover should be within her rights since the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) in Section 25 on Clubs specifically states that it is not ‘unlawful to discriminate against a person on the ground of the person’s sex if membership of the club is available to persons of a different sex only’. It is obvious, after all, that Giggle for Girls is a club for persons of the female sex, and while Tickle has changed her gender identity she has not, and cannot, change her biological sex.

But the case is not cut and dried and was deliberately rendered so by that supposed great champion of women’s rights, Julia Gillard. It was the Gillard government, in its dying days, in June 2013, that amended the Sex Discrimination Act, deliberately eroding its meaning by repealing the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and not replacing them with anything.

The AHRC says that the repealing of these definitions was done ‘to ensure that “man” and “woman” are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, transgender women and transgender men from accessing protections from discrimination’.

Instead, the Bill deliberately introduces protection from discrimination on the grounds of ‘gender identity’ which is defined by the curiously circular explanation that ‘gender identity means the gender‑related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender‑related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth’. It’s as if Dame Edna could be defined as a woman based on her glasses, dresses and the tone of her voice.

For Tickle, looks seem to count a lot. She shared on her Facebook page a picture of transgender singer Kim Petras on the cover of Sports Illustrated busting out of a gold lame bikini top and wrote, ‘Apparently some people are referring to Kim Petras as a man. Shoulda gone to Specsavers.’ There is no doubt that Petras looks like a woman but is that what it means to be a woman? For those of us, Tickle included, who are not going to make the cover of a ‘men’s’ magazine any time soon, it seems like a dubious argument.

Tickle also used her Facebook page to share her preparation for the Federal Court case. Her ‘court prep’ on 3 February was ‘60 minutes of upper lip electrolysis’ in a Byron Bay beauty parlour. On 17 February she wrote of her upcoming Federal Court appearance on 9 April, ‘Four weeks growth … will I or will I not have a face free of terminal hairs by the 9th April? After working on this particular sub-project for 5 or 6 years I for one hope so.’

For Grover, the hair experience has been different. She told Peta Credlin on Sky News, that the experience of being sued by Tickle in the Federal Court was a ‘nightmare’ and said, ‘I’ve got a bald spot. I’ve lost hair from stress over the whole thing.’

The sad fact is that it is quite likely that Grover will lose her case in the Federal Court and that the best she can hope for is that she is allowed to appeal to the High Court. In the High Court, she could argue that the Sex Discrimination Act must not contravene Australia’s undertakings to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women as a signatory of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

The happy fact is that CEDAW defines discrimination against women as, ‘any distinction, exclusion, or restriction, made on the basis of sex, with the purpose or effect of impairing the enjoyment by women of political, economic, social, cultural, or civil human rights on equal footing with men’. The crucial point here is that women are defined by their sex, not by their appearance or mannerisms.

Despite the stress, Grover is committed to fighting on. She says that every time she feels like it’s too much she looks at her 20-month-old daughter and says, ‘I cannot send her out into a world where she cannot state her boundaries’. For the sake of all of Australia’s daughters, let’s hope she wins her fight.