Encounters with Storks Part 1

…and the occasional flamingo

Well readers, it’s been another week of a bloke dragging a woman through the courts for refusing to lie. Yes, hot on the heels of Upton & NHS Fife v Peggie we have the Tickle v Giggle rematch, except this time it’s switched around to Giggle v Tickle, indicative of the fact that this week was Giggle’s appeal against last year’s decision awarding damages for indirect discrimination to Tickle.

Tickle v Giggle, Giggle v Tickle. The whole proceedings are as laughable as the names suggest, except this is not a slapstick comedy duo we are talking about here. It’s a woman, Sall Grover (owner of the now defunct app Giggle for Girls), who was sued by a man with a Gender Identity who goes by the name of Roxanne Tickle. The case has made international news and has been discussed by at least one other Substack author in conjunction with the aforementioned Upton v Peggie case. Jean Hatchet, the author in question, has had fun framing Upton and Tickle as some sort of weird Monty Pythonesque company (electricians, landscape gardeners, estate agents—personally I would have said a law firm specialising in litigation, but too close to the truth perhaps).

You may wonder, readers, what storks and flamingos have to do with this case, ludicrous as its premises are. In fact, the stork entered the conversation via an entirely different topic, which in the kerfuffle around the current ticklish theatrics has mostly escaped public notice: the Australian government’s review of its surrogacy laws. That review will be my major focus in Part 2 of this Stork Special. Part 1 today will be short, as many others have written and will continue to write about the preposterousness of this week’s Federal Court proceedings, and I find it increasingly tiresome to give this entitled individual and his allies any airtime at all. However, I could not resist having just a wee bit of fun.

Of storks, flamingos and houses of cards

Among the absurdities we read and heard in the Giggle v Tickle appeal hearing this week, one of the more ridiculous was uttered by presiding judge Melissa Perry, who in the afternoon of Day 1, asked the following clarification question of counsel: “And when you say natal woman, what you mean is a person at the time of biological birth who was identified to be a female”.

Say what? Biological birth? As opposed to….?? being brought by the stork perhaps? Clearly Justice Perry misspoke (or did she?), for she otherwise had the genderist language pretty much down pat: cis this and assigned female that. You get the picture. But the gaffe was indicative of the linguistic knots in which so many entangle themselves in Genderland when trying to give nonsense the veneer of sense.

Yeah….nah

We were also treated (again… and again… and again) to a serve of the circular logic by which on the one hand, the idea of “woman” is not limited to a few trivial biological characteristics associated with human sexual dimorphism, or indeed any of the accompanying social realities, but on the other hand, “woman-ness” is defined unequivocally by hair and clothing. We repeatedly heard that Tickle’s apparently “feminine” hair and plunging neckline in the photo submitted to the Giggle app should provide incontrovertible proof of his woman-ness. According to that logic, every woman attending the court that day who had short hair and high round-necked t-shirts (of the “men’s cut” variety) was thus really a man. So for the last few days I have been wrestling with the conundrum of being a woman on days I wear a V-neck and a man on the days I don’t. It really does a gurrl’s head in. How on earth we manage to organise reproduction in our society (among other things) when we don’t have the right clothes on is clearly a far more arcane topic than I had imagined.

Speaking of… at one stage there was some peculiar claim made that males with a “woman” gender identity should have the same rights as pregnant women. Shades of Stan/Loretta in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In this scene, it was agreed by the little group of activists that even though he could not get pregnant, being male, Loretta should still have the right to get pregnant (because it was “his right as a man”). That film was surely more prophetic that the MP bunch imagined at the time.

In a chat group I am in, one woman commented at the end of the second day’s proceedings that “It reminded [her] of the trial from Alice in Wonderland except it made even less sense”. In the closing chapters of the book, Alice is called as a witness at a trial where the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. The trial becomes increasingly nonsensical; Alice is delivered from it just at the moment she realises they are all “nothing but a pack of cards” by awakening from what was in fact a dream. The House of Cards metaphor is more than apt in the present case. Thinking of Alice in Wonderland also led me to musing on flamingos—both their role as a symbol of love and passion (and occasionally gay abandon) and their role as croquet mallets in Alice. I then set to wondering what they, and the storks, would look like in floral V-necked t-shirts.

Girls, cos necklines, flowers and the colour pink. I almost dressed them up with wigs but then thought that might just be a tiny bit over the top.

That the highly ranked in our country’s legal profession can trip over themselves trying to describe the simple reality of being born as a sexed being is worrying enough. But that our court system can even entertain such absurdities as dress, necklines and length of hair being put forward as serious propositions to evidence “woman-ness” is gobsmacking. After hundreds of years of feminist activism against prescriptive sex roles, and most particularly after the 55-odd years of the so-called “second wave” of Western feminism, that we are still there beggars belief.

Indeed, the House of Cards trial in Alice in Wonderland did make more sense, not the least because we all accepted its surreal implausibility as a comic conceit. Alice stumbled, ever more perplexed and outraged (and ever bigger in stature), through what she knew (and we joined her in knowing) to be the illogical machinations of the trial. In the Federal Court this week, there was much that was comical and much conceit in evidence, and plenty of illogical machinations. What was lacking was the consensus that we were, in fact, dealing with a work of fiction.