This article was originally published in the Sep-Oct edition of Southern Cross Magazine.
Tickle vs Giggle sounds comical. It is far from that. This court case, ongoing as I write this article, is a modern Australian version of a longstanding game plan of eliminating biological sex and replacing it with determined gender. This muddies, if not destroys, the good and beneficial distinctions that God created between male and female.
Tickle vs Giggle
At the heart of this case is the decision in 2020 by an online app named Giggle for Girls to block Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman. In 2021 Tickle lodged a complaint about gender discrimination with the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Giggle was set up by Sall Grover as a safe women-only space. However, the platform was less than a month old when it was inundated with profiles of what seemed to be thousands of men, many of them transgender activists.
Grover denied them access to her platform and posted on Twitter her view that biological women should not have to share women-only spaces with transgender females.
The court ruled in Tickle’s favour finding that Grover had indirectly discriminated against Tickle.
In his ruling, Justice Bromwich stated that sex is non-binary and interchangeable.[1]
At the time of writing this article, Grover is appealing this decision.
It is appropriate for us, as Christians, to discern our times so that we live wisely, and the intention of this article is to help us do that.
It is thus not my primary purpose to critique the individuals involved. Rather, it is our cultural landscape that is under scrutiny.
Honouring every person as created in God’s image is a value we need to uphold. Recognising that we all live sinful lives that need the restoration of Jesus is also critical. Moreover, the love of Christ that we have received demands that we show grace and compassion to the many, also in our circles, who experience lives that are complicated and painful in this area of sexual identity.
Our Cultural Moment
This court ruling in Tickle’s favour did not happen in a vacuum.
Justice Bromwich’s comments that sex is non-binary are not highly controversial for most in our Australian context. However, they contradict God’s plain revelation in Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created them.” This truth lies buried in Australian culture, perhaps forgotten.
We have grown used to assumptions that binaries, including the differences between male and female, should be challenged and destabilized. We live in a context where meaning is fluid with endless interpretations and where truth is often seen to be elusive.
We can trace these views to, amongst other people, Jaques Derrida, an influential French-Algerian philosopher in the 1960s. Derrida argued against the concept of a central fixed locus or an original point of meaning. We know this to be the Creator God from whom all truth and meaning originates.
For Derrida, the binary of male and female is neither inherent nor innate. Instead, it is inevitably unstable and socially constructed. He thus contributed to a wedge being lodged between biological sex and gender identity.
Whereas previous generations had assumed that biological sex and its accompanying gender identity as either male or female are, at least to some extent, inherently intertwined, the period of second-wave feminism[2] separated these two concepts as having no correlation. Instead, gender is now perceived to be fluid and psychologically determined.
Earlier, Simone De Beauvoir had written, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”[3] That is, femaleness is not biologically innate but is socially constructed. It was De Beauvoir’s view that social forces were stacked against women: “Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
These theories were both critiqued and developed by Judith Butler in the early 1990s. Butler argued that feminism’s flaw is its focus on the concept of “woman” and was influential in “women’s studies” becoming “gender studies” with its emphasis on non-binary fluidity. Her primary goal was to destabilize heterosexuality being viewed as normal and natural.
These examples of second and third wave feminism created a generation that was trained out of expressing even a whiff of the thought that differences between men and women might be intrinsically deeper, traced to the Creator of male and female.
We now live in a culture that values expressive individualism and our right to determine our own gender identity untethered from biological sex and where God’s will for male-female complementarity is denied.
This is reflected in Australia’s current version of the Sex Discrimination Act. Amendments passed in 2013 now prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.
The decision in Tickle’s favour was thus to be expected.
To deny someone who identifies as female (although born a male) into a women-only space violates our common cultural code.
The problem is that, in this instance, one person’s rights denies another person their rights.
A Feminist Battle
For Grover, the issue at stake is the cultural prioritising of transgender rights over women’s rights.
Despite all the social conditioning of the last sixty years, in Grover’s mind biological difference matters.
Her experience and observations of the vulnerability of women in a world that continues to exploit and mistreat women prompted her to double-down on the need for safe female spaces where anyone born male may not participate.
She says, “Women are expected to just give up our rights” and sees this as part of a larger issue attacking hard-won liberal rights for women.[4]
Grover’s views are controversial. She is up against powerful political and social forces, including Equality Australia, a highly influential lobby group for gay and transgender rights and which supports Roxanne Tickle’s legal battle.
For others, however, ignoring the biological distinction between men and women has ramifications for the safety and flourishing of biological women. There is debate and sharp disagreement about the inclusion of transgender women into, for example, women’s prisons and women’s refuges, or their participation in women’s sports, where their maleness can be used to the disadvantage of biological women in those spaces.
Prominent voices critiquing our culture in this area span generations of feminists, and include Germaine Greer, JK Rowling, and Louise Perry.[5]
As far back as 1979, Greer had opposed the granting of a fellowship to a transgender woman at the all-women Newnham College at Cambridge University. She has also gone on record to say that transgender women are “not women.”[6]
JK Rowling has been under immense pressure since 2020 because of her ongoing gender critical engagement in promoting that being female is determined by biology.
In her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry counts the cost for women resulting from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Her second chapter is titled “Men and Women are Different” and in it she argues the case for their essential differences, albeit from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.[7]
These three women are representative of international debate into which Grover has landed here in Australia.
Doubtless she would have been encouraged by Scotland’s Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in April this year that it is biology rather than psychology that determines who is a woman.
Even two or three years ago, few would have seen this coming.
How Should Christians Respond? A Few Thoughts
As Christians we can be heartened by these cultural curve balls in the public sphere. God is sovereign and works to achieve his sovereign purposes through unexpected means.
It would also be appropriate for us to recognise the courage of these women critiquing transgender norms at great personal cost and to thank God for them.
This should also be a time, however, when Christians do not shrink back in fear. It is easy to feel the heat generated by cases such as Grover’s, and to witness the furious backlash even within the feminist camp, and to duck for cover.
Instead, this ought to be a moment when Christians and churches speak up in support of Grover, to see that her struggle is part of a deeper struggle against the principalities and powers of our world, powers that its advocates may not even be aware they are serving.
Wisdom thus requires us to be culturally aware. These powers are not simply presenting alternative social norms. They undermine foundational theological principles of what it means to be human. We are called to faithfully honour the Creator by living out the beautiful duality of unity and difference found within his good design in creating male-female complementarity.
Moreover, complementarity has Christological and gospel implications. For example, disrupting the male-female distinction in same-sex marriage distorts the Bible’s teaching of marriage being a gendered analogy of the covenantal relationship between Christ and the Church.
Further, the political agendas of the powers of our world also help perpetuate the ongoing and terrible cost that women continue to experience at the hands of perpetrators that are largely men.
Supporting the concept of safe female-only spaces that exclude transgender women is thus a Christian concern of compassion and protection for the vulnerable. (This is not to say that transgender people should not be protected under the law but that is another conversation).
Finally, not shrinking back provides an opportunity to present an even better message than those who critique our age through a secular lens. Our message is one of gospel grace, where, through Jesus, God is transforming men and women created in his image to embody the gospel by serving him and each other. Our message is not simply cultural critique but one of eternal hope.
As Christians and as churches let’s lean into this cultural moment and proclaim the Bible’s teaching on gender and sexuality with clarity and courage. It may result in public derision. However, it would be an example of faithfulness and love, seen in our Lord Jesus and now in those who follow his lead.
[1] Panagopoulos, Joanna. “Giggle for Girls Founder Fights Finding that ‘Sex is Changeable,’” The Australian (Oct 3, 2024).
[2] Second-wave feminism: From the 1960s until the early 1980s. Third-wave feminism: Early1990s to early 2010s.
[3] De Beauvor, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949
[4] Albrechtsen, Janet, “Women’s rights vs trans rights: how I was drawn into a very modern battle,” The Australian (July 26, 2025).
[5] Greer is known, for example, through her book, The Female Eunuch (1970). JK Rowling is best known as the author of the Harry Potter series.
[6] For example, in an interview with BBC Tonight with Kirsty Wark (October 24, 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B8Q6D4a6TM
[7] Perry, Louise. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
