A MAN IS NOW A WOMAN IF HE SAYS HE IS.
It is no longer a claim.
It is the legal position in Australia.
The ruling fills a few sentences. That is the first thing you notice. The country's highest court had the question before it - whether a woman who built a space for women may keep a man out of it - and the answer came on Thursday, and it is shorter than this introduction.
There is no reason to doubt the earlier interpretation, the court writes. Leave to appeal denied. With costs.
Notice what did not happen. The High Court did not uphold the judgment after weighing the arguments against each other. It refused to hear them. The question of what a woman is - that question, which an entire legal system has spent four years answering wrongly - was assessed by the country's highest judges as too uninteresting to deserve a hearing.
For those who come late to the case -
Sall Grover built an app where women could speak with women. A man who claims to be a woman was removed from it. It cost her a complaint from the human rights commission, while she was pregnant, four years of litigation, millions in costs, a judgment for direct discrimination and compensation at precisely the amount she could have paid in 2022 to bend.
I wrote about it in the summer, and the text ended with a fact and a hope in the same sentence - she is now going to the High Court.
That door is now closed. Not slammed - that would have required someone to take hold of it. Just quietly pushed shut, with a remark that she must pay for having knocked.
And here is what should remain standing, when the dust has settled.
The paragraph the case fell on concerns special measures - the law's possibility of protecting a vulnerable group by giving it its own space. It was written for women. To secure their rights and safety. It is now, with the country's highest court's stamp of approval, interpreted such that a space for women may not keep a man out if the man says the right word. The protection applies until someone claims it from outside. Then it applies to him.
A law written as a shield for women has become a weapon against the first woman who lifted it.
And it reaches further than law, because something is being touched here that lies beneath the law.
To distinguish is the first thing Man does. Before the child can speak, it can see difference - between mother and father, between inside and outside, between what is me and what is not. Language begins there. Every word we possess exists only because something could be distinguished from something else. And the oldest distinction of them all, the one that stands on the first page of every creation account and in the first line of every census, is that between man and woman.
That is what is now called *discrimination*.
And here one must pause a moment, because the word reveals more than it knows. Discrimination comes from Latin, discriminare - to separate, to distinguish. It was once the name for an ability. Now it is the name for a crime. We have taken the very word for being able to see difference and made it the charge against those who still can.
A human being who must not distinguish on the most primary thing loses not only one word. It loses trust in its own gaze. For if the eyes are wrong here - where the difference is greatest, oldest and most obvious - where would they be right? That is how a human being is made compliant. Not by forbidding it to speak, but by teaching it that it cannot trust what it sees. Truth does not fall with a crash. It falls when no one longer dares count their own sight as witness.
Sall Grover has lost everything that can be lost in a legal system. First instance, appeal, counter-appeal, compensation, costs, and now the right to be heard at all. What remains is the one thing no court can grant or take away - she said the same thing on Thursday as she said in 2022.
Men are not women.
Five words that have cost her everything that can be counted in money - and nothing of what cannot.
The case is over. That is what a dismissal means. No instance left, no next court date, no date to wait for. Australia has finished speaking.
But notice the form, because it is the message itself. She did not get a judgment against her this time. She was told there was nothing to talk about.
A court can close a case.
But it cannot close a question.
What is a Woman?
A Man?
Nothing?
What do you think?
...
Video of the man Roxanne Tickle, who won the case - and thereby received the court's word that in the eyes of the law he is a woman and has the right to access where it is reserved for women.
