Amy Hamm: Australia’s Sall Grover fined a disgraceful AU$120K for running female-only app

Sall Grover, the founder and CEO of a female-only app named Giggle. Handout

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In 2020, Australia’s Sall Grover launched a female-only social app called Giggle for Girls. By summer 2022, the app was shut down as a precaution against further human rights complaints or litigation, and Grover found herself in federal court attempting to prove what a woman is.

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What a woman is not, as per Grover: the transgender-identified male, Roxy Tickle, who first took Grover to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and, later, federal court, for having been booted from the Giggle app for being a biological male. Australia’s court system disagrees, however.

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Grover lost an appeal on May 15 at the Federal Court of Australia, and was told that her jettisoning Tickle from Giggle not only constituted direct discrimination (a previous judge had ruled that it was a lesser, indirect discrimination) but that she, a single mother whose income source was taken from her, must pay Tickle double the damages, and twice the costs—for a grand, disgraceful total of AU$120,000 (C$ 118,680).

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It’s outrageously stupid. The type of stupid thing — á la my own, ongoing legal saga, or that of Barry Neufeld’s — that we should expect to continue occurring in Canada, unless and until we repeal the bad legislation that has baked the pseudo-religious belief system called gender ideology into our institutions, including our judiciary.

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Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) was amended in 2013 to include “gender identity” as a protected characteristic. The same amendment repealed the very definitions of “man” and “woman” in the SDA, previously defined as “members of the male (or female) sex,” to allow for persons to self-identify as either. But wait, there’s more: it also transposed all mentions of “opposite sex” with “different sex,” to enshrine the anti-scientific falsehood that human sex is some sort of non-binary spectrum into law.

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How can Australian women protect their rights when they are no longer defined in law? Clearly, they cannot.

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Canada’s laws are no better. Our Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, which received royal assent in 2017, similarly added “gender identity and expression” as a protected characteristic. This ensured that any provincial and territorial human rights code that didn’t already protect “gender identity” had to fall in line.

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These kinds of laws are incompatible with reality. They provide ideologically-captured judges and human rights commissioners with a means to dismantle women’s rights, while offering supremacy to the unfalsifiable idea of an innate gender soul.

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Australia’s SDA defines gender identity as “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 further defines the concept as “elements that are intrinsic to the sense of self and outward social markers.” This loosely translates to: “whatever I say I am at any given moment is what I am, without question, or else.”