Almost 150 years ago, the famed British jurist A. V. Dicey wrote that sovereign parliaments ‘can do everything  but make a man a woman, and a woman a man’. Yet in Australia, Britain and elsewhere, parliaments now have done just that. Ideological and legislative contortions over biological sex and gender fluidity have created concomitant absurdities, something crystallised by an Australian court case attracting global attention: the improbably-named Giggle v Tickle.

Roxanne Tickle was born male but identifies as female. Tickle had gender reassignment surgery and erased her birth name, with a new birth certificate.

Sall Grover is an Australian businesswoman running an online safe space for women called Giggle.  She vets who applies to join Giggle. Tickle applied, providing a selfie for identification. Grover reviewed the photo and determined Tickle was not a woman; Tickle took Grover to court, and in 2024 not just won the case, but was awarded exemplary damages because Grover was amused by something in court, to which Tickle had taken offence.

Earlier this month, the full court of the Federal Court of Australia – equivalent to England’s Court of Appeal – handed down its decision. The full court not only upheld the trial judge’s decision that Tickle was unfairly and unlawfully discriminated against by Grover and Giggle, but the exemplary damages award against was doubled.

The trial judge’s reasoning was upheld: that gender is a fluid concept and not grounded in biological reality; that services intended for biological woman must be open to self-identified transgender women; and that all of this is sanctioned by a 2013 reworking of the definition of sex and gender in Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, which extended the Act’s protections against discrimination to self-identified – transgender – women.

The furore around the Federal Court’s judgment has accelerated momentum for the law to be changed, both to safeguard the rights of biological women, and to afford them safe spaces lawfully excluding biological men, be that Grover’s online app, or physical spaces including women’s toilets and dressing rooms. With her party’s support, this week an Opposition MP, Alison Penfold, introduced a private member’s bill to do just that. Her second reading speech endorsing Sall Grover went viral, tweeted by J.K. Rowling amongst others.

Regardless of the higher principles at stake, the current law patently needs changing because of the absurdities it’s created. These were highlighted this week in a surreal exchange between a senator and former Attorney-General, Michaelia Cash, and Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody, at a parliamentary estimates hearing.

Cash asked Cody about how the Sex Discrimination Act protected pregnant women, and whether trans women were covered by it. After initially agreeing trans women, as biological males, couldn’t get pregnant, Cody became entangled in a self-created web of illogic, asserting that while trans women couldn’t become pregnant, they could be discriminated against as ‘potentially pregnant’.

‘I’m very confused. A biological male can’t become pregnant’, Cash responded, astonished. Cody then tried, tortuously, to explain her position that a trans woman looking for a job could be discriminated against if she looked to be of childbearing age, which would make her ‘potentially pregnant’.

A lot of people have struggled to believe me when I say that the Australian Human Rights Commission is giving pregnancy protections in law to men who claim to be woman, because it’s so stupid it’s hard to believe anyone would say it.

Enjoy: pic.twitter.com/IveqVhN9KG

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) May 26, 2026

‘So if a bloke came in and (an employer) said, “were they going to have children?”, and he said “yeah, maybe”, are you saying he could also claim that ground?’

‘No, not a man,’ said Cody.

‘But they’re both biological men, it makes no sense…a biological man can’t get pregnant’ snapped back Cash.

‘But a trans woman may be assumed to be pregnant, or to be able to be pregnant’, Cody responded, her very bureaucratic earnestness making her sound even more absurd.

‘So what’s stopping a man in a dress walking in and claiming the protections?’, asked Cash, closing for the kill.

‘That would be up to a court’, replied the hapless commissioner, effectively conceding being ‘a bloke in a dress’ is enough to qualify as trans in Australia.

‘The law must change’, declared a victorious Cash. She had proved Australia’s gender definition  law is an ass, and she’s absolutely right. Unfortunately, however, the Penfold bill won’t pass. The 2013 definitions were enacted by then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, and her socially permissive Labor successor Anthony Albanese (whose own inner Sydney seat hosts a sizeable LGBT population) won’t have a bar it. ‘Look, I’m not engaging in cultural wars here’, he dismissively told an interviewer asking about the Opposition bill. Nor will left-leaning independents and the hard-left Australian Greens – whose deputy leader cannot bear to utter the word ‘grandfather’ and coined the ridiculous substitute ‘grandperson’ – support it.

But the parliamentary vote to block the bill will tell an unimpressed electorate which MPs are on the side of protecting biological women, and which ones aren’t. As in Britain, ensuring safe spaces for biological women has become a political fault line between the progressive political and cultural elites and the wider electorate. Giggle v Tickle, and how Australia’s judiciary so enthusiastically enforced the 2013 gender definition changes in the two judgments against Sall Grover, has cut through politically. It is what former Australian prime minister, John Howard, would call a ‘barbeque stopper’ conversation topic.

Grover insists she will take her case to the highest court of appeal, Australia’s High Court, hoping that common sense finally prevails, as it did in the UK Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling on the Equalities Act. Whether or not she succeeds, Sall Grover is a heroine of free speech and thought. Instead of being treated as a heretic and pariah by identity politics elites backing biological male Roxanne Tickle, for her daring to defy them, Grover deserves admiration for her courage in standing firm against the judicially-backed trans activists so determined to destroy her.