Tickle v 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 self-determined gender. This muddies, if not destroys, the good and beneficial distinctions that God created between male and female.

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 2021Tickle 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, some 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. At the time of writing this article, Grover is appealing the 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 wonderfully 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

The 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. We live in a context where meaning and truth is fluid, with endless interpretations.

We can trace these views to the period of second wave feminism (1960s-1980s). For example, Jacques Derrida – an influential French-Algerian philosopher in the 1960s – argued against the concept of an original point of meaning. 

For Derrida, the binary of male and female was not fixed but unstable. Similarly, Simone De Beauvoir had written earlier that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. That is, femaleness is not biologically innate but is socially constructed and fluid. 

Previous generations had assumed that biological sex and gender identity, as either male or female, are inherently intertwined. By the 1960s, a wedge had been placed between biological sex and gender identity. 

These theories were taken a step further by Judith Butler, representative of third-wave feminism’s (1990s-2010s) Queer Theory in the 1990s. Her primary goal was to destabilise heterosexuality being seen as normal and natural. 

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 Bible’s teaching, however, is different. 

The Bible’s code of complementarity

Grover is not the only one in this cultural moment to find herself in the eye of a storm. As Christians we, too, have a part to play.

This is not the time to duck and weave. Instead, this should be a moment when Christians and churches speak up in support of Grover, to recognise 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. Nevertheless, their political agendas contribute to the ongoing and terrible cost that women continue to experience at the hands of perpetrators that are, largely, men.

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. 

Christians know that all truth originates with our Creator God. We are called to faithfully honour him by living out the beautiful duality of unity and difference found within his good design in creating male-female complementarity. 

This 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. 

Moreover, understanding that men and women are created with equal dignity as God’s image bearers should naturally lead to concern and compassion for image bearers that are vulnerable in our fallen world. Echoing the psalmist, we confess, “You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror”
(Ps 10:17-18)

This brings us back to Grover’s case.

While our compassion should include anyone caught in the confusion of gender identity, it should not be at the expense of vulnerable women and children. With Grover, we should be concerned for the loss of safe female-only spaces that, until now, have excluded transgender women.

As Grover has identified, this court case highlights that one person’s rights deny 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 past 60 years, in her mind biological difference matters. 

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 that 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 female spaces where their maleness can be used to the disadvantage of biological women.

Grover has been propelled into a context where other prominent voices critique our culture in this area. These include feminists such as Germaine Greer, J.K. Rowling and Louise Perry.

As far back as 1979, Greer 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”. 

Rowling has been under immense pressure 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. In her chapter titled “Men and Women are Different,” she argues the case for their essential differences, albeit from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

The impact of their critique was seen in a controversial ruling by Scotland’s Supreme Court’s 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.

Christianity’s eternal message 

As Christians we can be heartened by these cultural curve balls in the public sphere. God is sovereign and works to achieve his purposes through unexpected means.

It would thus be appropriate for us to recognise the courage of these women critiquing transgender norms at great personal cost and to thank God for them. 

Moreover, it is a moment to stand with them, despite the heat generated by cases such as Grover’s and the furious backlash even within the feminist camp. 

This also gives 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.

Dr Veronica Hoyt is director of the Priscilla and Aquila Centre at Moore College. (pictured above)