The Sall Grover Question: Is the Law above the Truth?
By Paul Tyson
Last year, Sall Grover was taken to the Australian Federal Court by the transwoman Roxanne Tickle and successfully sued for illegal gender-identity discrimination. The Judge found that Grover had refused to let Tickle onto her female-only app ‘Giggle for Girls,’ and that such an action is illegal in Australian anti-discrimination law. The matter is still proceeding through the courts and will likely end up in the High Court of Australia.
I am not a lawyer, but considering the matter as a philosopher, one thing stands out. By legally erasing sex-based rights for Australian women and by enshrining and protecting the legal fiction of gender identity, Australian law has placed itself above obvious and objective scientific Truth.
What is a Woman?
The initial outcome of the Tickle v. Giggle case seems to indicate that the 2013 amendments to the Australian Sex Discrimination Act have legally replaced the physical reality of biological sex with the legal fiction of gender identity, such that persons of either sex can now be female by law. Thus, the only thing that now makes a person “female” in the Australian courts is the right paperwork, not biological reality. This has made the biological Truth as regards the obvious and real meaning of “female” meaningless in Australian law.So my question is, on what authority has the Australian Parliament determined that the law is above the Truth?
Legislators feel entitled to act above the Truth when authority and Truth are systematically replaced by mere procedural legitimacy. That is, law-making power has become so entirely procedural and legally insular that it is now only notionally linked, in the most tenuous manner possible, to the very idea of the authority of Truth. Authority itself is being denied in such a move.
The Rise of Parliamentary Sovereignty
In what follows, I will touch on the relation of Truth and authority to procedural power within the context of the Australian polity. For American readers, it is important to remember that Australia was founded as an English colony, and to this day, the Australian Head of State is the King of the British Commonwealth, such that all parliamentarians are ministers of the Crown and all Australians are subjects of the King.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 ensured that, thereafter, the English sovereign only exercised royal power through Parliament. That is, the actual sovereign (the King) was at that time pushed decisively towards becoming a ceremonial figure of authority who exercised no executive power in his person independently of Parliament. In effect, Parliament exercised the sovereign deliberative and executive directing powers of the Crown in the governing of the nation, in the name of the King, as his ministers. Over time, this evolved into the distinctive late nineteenth-century English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.
In the 1880s, the highly influential English jurist Albert Venn Dicey put forward the notion that modern representative democracy entails a complex relationship between the sovereignty of Parliament and the democratic will of the people. That is, while upholding parliamentary sovereignty, Dicey recognized that modern Parliaments should reflect the people’s will. We shall come back to this tension below, but here we will focus on Dicey’s conception of parliamentary sovereignty.
To Dicey, Parliament is a legislation-producing ‘black box’ that generates authoritative laws on any matter, as Parliament determines. Thus, Parliament displays its sovereignty simply by making laws that will be interpreted by the judiciary and enforced by the executive organs of the state. Effectively, the legitimacy of every law is collapsed by Dicey into a procedural parliamentary prerogative. Parliamentary sovereignty, thus, recognizes no higher authority whatsoever above its procedural correctness in the making of valid laws.
We see the full meaning of Dicey’s formal doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty when parliamentarians make laws that claim to override obvious and objective Truth. The case of Tickle v. Giggle reveals where this nineteenth-century doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty leads.
Legislating Falsehoods: The Tickle v. Giggle Case
The Tickle v. Giggle case illustrates that the sovereign Australian Parliament has passed laws deeming it illegal discrimination, and possibly a hate crime, to correctly identify a person’s sex who gender-identifies as a woman when they are biologically male. Thus, Parliament presumes to be its own validating authority, placing its sovereign prerogatives above Truth itself.
In civic philosophy, placing law above obvious Truths poses a grave danger to the Australian legal system. The 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act may lead ordinary Australians of goodwill to disrespect the law, viewing it as parliamentary lobbying for majority-harming minority interests. In other words, law creation in Australia has become a tool of falsehood, an arena for anti-democratic lobbyists, and an expression of manipulative power.
Australian anti-discrimination law, embedded in truth-denying queer-gender ideology, now enforces three radical social reforms. First, it denies the objective Truth of biological reality. Second, it eliminates natural Justice claims from recognizing sexual differences between women and men. Thus, the law ignores women’s distinct needs for safety, dignity, and fairness, which sex-based rights protect. Third—moving beyond Tickle v. Giggle—queer-gender ideology promotes laws requiring organizations, therapists, schools, churches, and families to “affirm” children into irreversible medical interventions, harming them against their parents’ will.
The Perils of Power Without Authority
These are not minor matters or harmless abrogations of Australians’ natural rights and dignities. The law is being used to empower a small queer minority at others’ expense. Reformist elitism manipulates democratic processes. As sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi notes in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, this reflects the broader DEI movement. DEI reforms express elitist ideology, not the democratic will of the people.
Queer theorists openly admit that the DEI legislative reform movement is not about minority rights. They oppose the cultural heteronormativity and sex-realism of the majority, aiming to impose a “queer planet” through institutional capture and legislative reform. The 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act disrupt Australian family life, overturn gender and linguistic conventions, and remove legal protections for women’s and children’s safety. These are significant issues.
The law, in this domain, has become power without authority. Obvious falsehoods gain legal protection over Truth and public safety. Parliament lends its sovereignty to an irrational, anti-science expression of misogyny. If Sall Grover does not prevail against Roxanne Tickle, if the Truth of women’s rights is denied, if “gender-affirming care” continues to harm children as the sole treatment for gender dysphoria, this will deeply affect the people Parliament represents.
This recalls Dicey’s recognition that Parliament cannot ignore the democratic will of the people. That is, parliamentary sovereignty is not merely a procedural black box. Laws must reflect the people’s will. Replacing the rights of women with the “rights” of a few queer males to “be female” may challenge Dicey’s notion of parliamentarians’ unhindered legitimacy to create laws. Our current parliamentarians should recognize that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was misled by queer advocacy lobbyists, who did not represent the people’s will, when Parliament passed the 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act.
The people will not accept power without authority. Let us see how the courts address this issue. If judges fail to recognize the risk Parliament’s Truth-defying laws pose to our Justice system, we face an unstable future. Ordinary Australians will not stand by while Parliament acts as the irrational, Truth-denying arm of minority lobbyists. If Sall Grover does not prevail, Australian law’s credibility will suffer greatly.
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