August 23, 2024
FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription.
The sun will rise tomorrow and men still will not be women.
- Sall Grover, August 23, 2024
Photo: Sall Grover X profile pic, used with permission.
Today’s FFS Friday honors Sall Grover (@salltweets on X), an Australian woman who has been taken to court for refusing to allow a man to join her female-only app and who is refusing to stay silent. The court reached a verdict at 9:00 a.m. Sydney time Friday morning (7:00 p.m. last night for those of us in the east coast in the U.S.). And the verdict is …
According to the Australian Federal Court, some men are women if they say they are, and sex is changeable.
This is my second time writing about Sall in these pages. The first was in April of this year, when I posted about how in 2020, Grover founded Giggle for Girls—a mobile women-only social networking app. It was intended as a platform centered around women connecting with, and supporting, other women. The purpose was to provide an app that allowed women to connect with each other safely.
In 2021, a man named Roxanne Tickle complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) that he had been removed from the app, alleging that the removal constituted discrimination against him because he claims to “identify as a woman.”
This is him:
Photo: The Daily Aus
Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald
Photo: The Post Millennial
The AHRC offered conciliation between the parties, one condition of which was that Grover would agree to undergo “sex and gender reeducation” and allow men who claim to have woman identities to use the app. She refused.
In December 2022, he filed a lawsuit in the Australian Federal Court. He sought damages and aggravated damages amounting to $200,000.
Heading into the hearings, Sall gave an interview with Sky News Australia, where she explained that allowing men to claim to be women is a disaster for women’s rights and that it’s also:
a disaster for freedom of speech, freedom of belief, and of association, and if we don’t have those in a secular liberal society, we don’t have anything.
Throughout the hearings, which took place over the course of several weeks, Grover consistently refused to bend to the idea that Tickle is any form of woman. She consistently told the court that she would not address him as “Ms.” and that even if he claims to be female, she will see him as a man.
In April, I said:
I’m not sure when her legal team is expecting a ruling, but I’ll be looking out for it.
Well, the waiting is over.
I listened while the court read the verdict out loud at 9:00 a.m. Friday Sydney time, 7:00 p.m. US Eastern time. The judge repeatedly referred to Mr. Tickle using “she,” “her,” and “Ms.” and to actual women as “cisgender,” and said that sex is changeable. He decided in favor of Mr. Tickle and ordered Sall to pay him $10,000 plus legal costs.
The Australian Federal Court has fully accepted that “gender identity” is real and that it supersedes sex.
Sall tweeted this late in the evening (her time) today:
I don’t want to opine on whether an appeal is desirable. Some seem to think it is and others disagree; it’s not for me to weigh in on that.
Sall, I’m sorry. I admit that I have come to expect losses for those of us who know that sex is real; however, I did not anticipate the utterly bizarre degree of gaslighting I heard coming from the Federal Court.
But women will never stop fighting. Today’s FFS Friday is for you.
Sall Grover is infinitely admirable and courageous. The decision is infinitely asinine and idiotic. Someone put up this poem, by Wendy Cole, and I thought it worth including here:
HE TELLS HER
He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.
So disappointed by this outcome.So proud to be the same sex as Sall, and to see her post-decision tweet.