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By ANGELA SHANAHAN

11:00PM APRIL 1, 2022

Sally Grover is an ambitious young businesswoman, a former scriptwriter who escaped Hollywood and recently started an app called Giggle. The app was designed for girls and women to connect with other girls, to find friends, flatmates, travelling companions and perhaps exchange tips on fashion, whatever, “girly” sort of things, as the name Giggle would imply. What man would possibly be interested? Think again.

Grover has found herself the subject of a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission by a person who claims discrimination on the basis of gender identity because Grover does not want anyone who is not biologically female on the app.

According to Grover, to resolve the complaint she must submit to “sex and gender re-education” and to allow all males who identify as women on the app. In other words, the AHRC’s “conciliation” process has to begin at the point where she gives in to the complaint.

Grover found shortly after beginning her business there were a lot of men trying to get on to the app. Why is debatable. Some might have been trying to hit on girls. So to prevent men from accessing her app, Grover uses an AI facial identification program to weed out male inter­lopers.

Mostly it works. After all, men and women are different – different life experiences, different health needs and, naturally, different physiognomy.

However, initially Grover did not count on trans women wanting to use her app. After all, they too have different life experiences from biological females, different medical needs and physiology, and, sometimes, even more pressing safety needs. Grover claims she does not want to discriminate against the trans community, but it should be obvious that an app called Giggle might not be aimed at the complex milieu of trans people; rather, it is aimed at women and girls who have come to maturity as biological females and consequently have their own different complexities.

However, the complainant, a transgender woman, managed to get on to the app and was removed. As Grover explained: the person “was removed from the Giggle app because they are male, no other reason. The removal was manual. I looked at the onboarding selfie and saw a man. The AI software had let them through, thereby making a mistake that I rectified.”

Grover has found herself in a dilemma that is the direct result of the phony notion of gender identity being defined as sexual reality. This came about in 2013 during the Gillard government, when the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984, originally put into place to protect women from unfair workplace and education discrimination, was modified. They removed the definition of man and woman as biological realities to allow gender identity, without regard to the person’s sex at birth. Births, deaths and mar­riages in most states have also been changed. The confusion and ambiguity are obvious. Consequently, what was originally designed to protect women is being used against them.

Nowhere is this loss of definition of sex to gender identity to the detriment of women more obvious than in sport – witness the furore over Lia Thomas, the American trans woman swimmer who recently won a prestigious college championship.

In 2020, senator Claire Chandler was subject to a complaint to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission for writing: “Women’s sports, women’s toilets and women’s changerooms are designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way.”

She, too, would have been required to agree to sex and gender “re-education” and required to sign a confidentiality agreement if she wished to participate in conciliation.

Chandler’s Save Women’s Sport Bill gives Australian women and girls the right to single-sex sport and prevents sports clubs and associations having legal action taken against them for offering single-sex sport.

However, Chandler has been the subject of bullying and vilification by activists working together “to try to compel our speech and limit what we can say”.

She makes the valid point that “the Sex Discrimination Act, designed to provide protections for women on the basis of sex, now requires organisations and individuals to prioritise self-affirmed gender identity above sex”.

Hence the Australian Human Rights Commission’s support of gender identity over sex in the case against Grover and Giggle.

Gender theory is no longer just a fixation of the political left, although it is true that the proselytising left has infiltrated the mindset of a young generation on gender orthodoxy, as on many other things.

How else to explain the truly Orwellian concept of sex and gender re-education? Even the term sounds like something from a communist playbook. However, the breakdown of sexual identity was not just political. It began in the promiscuity of the early post-war sexual revolution that divorced sex from child-bearing and fertility and ­encouraged fluidity in sexual orientation, and has culminated in the attempt to eradicate sexual identity.

Members of the general public are blithely unaware of this as they go about their lives because most people are not so confused.

Women in sport might be the first salvo in destroying this falsehood, or perhaps some brave woman like Grover, six months pregnant, might expose this emperor for his nakedness by recourse to the bleeding obvious: “If I have to confront that person, pregnant as I am, then I think we know who is a woman and who is a man!”