What is beyond the lie?

On 23 August 2024 the Australian courts confirmed that gender identity is more important than sex; any man can be a woman if he says so.

At 9am Australian time on 23 August 2024 judgment was delivered in the case of Tickle v Giggle. Much has already been written about this judgment and its implications - for example, Andrew Gold or Jo Bartosch. My aim here is not to attempt detailed legal analysis as frankly that is beyond me and much better brains will be available. I want to look at something broader - but I think just as important - how a lie takes hold and what lies beyond the lie.

In short, a man called ‘Roxy Tickle’ (not the name he was assigned at birth) decided that he was a woman and he wanted to join an app which was for women only, named Giggle. He was refused - because he is a man - and he took the app’s developer and owner Sall Grover to court, pleading discrimination. He won. The court declared that a transgender woman - i.e. a man - was just as much a woman as a ‘cisgender’ woman - i.e. a woman. The law in Australia has apparently held for 30 years that sex is ‘changeable’. Grover was ordered to pay damages and costs. I hope she will appeal. Because this ruling tells women in Australia that they may have nothing for their own sex. Their own sex in fact does not now exist, because any man may claim it for his own.

Amnesty International had its usual cloth eared take, which happily suffered significant push back on social media.

That’s not what Roxy Tickle looks like of course. He looks like this.

This got me thinking hard about truth and lies, and what we find beyond the lie. The astonishing speed and success of ‘gender identity ideology’ in capturing entire societies remains amazing and largely unexplained. We know that it is not possible to change sex, we know that women are uniquely prejudiced and at risk of harm because of their sexed bodies, we know that men and women are different in many significant ways.

We ALL know this. And yet, law and policy have been captured now by the idea that an assumed ‘gender identity’ is more important than, or even operates instead of, sex as an organising category. A man who says he is a woman, is a woman. End of. If you refuse to let him into female single sex spaces, you are guilty of unlawful discrimination.

How has this lie taken hold and what are its consequences? A big part of the how is the sheer impenetrability of the law around discrimination. As Levins Solicitors noted on X, both legal teams dropped the ball here and failed to notice that Tickle’s team had conflated direct and indirect discrimination.

Further than that comment, I cannot go as I don’t understand a word of this. And I am a person with a first class law degree from University College London, who has been a barrister for nearly 30 years. If this makes my brain ache, what will it do for the person who doesn’t have any legal training? And this I think is an important part of understanding how the lie took hold, because it is protected and scaffolded by a complicated specialist area of law which has been easy for others to twist and obfuscate; very few have the expertise to confidently challenge the lies told about the law.

So you tell people that they must ‘be kind’, that it is wrong and horrible and bigoted to say ‘no’ to men who were ‘born in the wrong body’ and you buttress the natural impulses of most people to be ‘nice’ and fair and ‘live and let live’ by telling them it is what the law also demands. So you cement the lie.

So what happens to the lie now? I think Susie Orbach said it best in 2019

Lying is not just a moral category, it has psychological import. It divides us from aspects of ourselves. To maintain a lie we have to scaffold it, to separate it off from doubt and questions. Then we become defensive and more insistent, as though by being more forceful, the deceit will hold us within it. What is on the other side of the lie becomes unreachable,'

But the attempts to maintain the lie carry within it the seeds of its own destruction. It takes enormous effort to maintain a lie that attempts to deny material reality. And recent activities in the UK show me where hope lies; we have finally woken up to the medical abuse that is perpetrated on children to support the lie of medical transition. The Government has recently extended the ban on prescribing puberty blockers to children and the Court of Appeal has given leave to appeal a case that refused to recognise provision of hormones to 16 year olds as a special category of treatment.

It is no mystery that Australia was and is so ripe for capture. Its understanding of the harms of medical transition lags far behind the UK and other jurisdictions. Its courts have decided that provision of hormones to children is ‘therapeutic treatment’ thus making it more difficult to properly analyse issues of consent and capacity.

It is our flesh and blood that will defeat the lie. However much energy you expend to promote a lie, you will find it difficult to explain away the 15 year old girl given a near fatal dose of testosterone by Gender GP, or the young woman who died after complications with her phalloplasty operation, aged only 24.

Our bodies are wonderful, resilient and pliable things. But there are limits to the interventions our bodies will permit and we mess with that at our peril. There is no lie on earth that can give a man a vagina or a woman a penis. And so I still have hope that the so far intricate scaffolding around the Great Lie of Gender will fall, and as it does we will all see how brittle it has always been, and just a little gust of truth brought the whole sorry mess tumbling down.