January the 20th: On This Day
2 x penis-vetoing of women's things, 1 x public debate on interfering with natural puberty and 1 x Presidential Action that defines woman as an adult human female.
I like to think about when this is all over. When people will go: “Oh hey, yeah, remember when all the policymakers got brainwashed into believing sex didn’t exist and it was a colonial construct, and they reckoned putting males who cause 98% of sexual violence into enclosed female spaces was compassionate, and chopping off breasts helped girls be authentic? Well, that was weird as fuck. How the hell did that happen?”
I think about the textbooks that will be written. I think about the timelines thoughtful historians will draw and puzzle over, trying to understand it all. It will show first a slow drip of seemingly innocuous crucial decisions and turning points. Then the timeline will become cluttered and frenzied with tiny writing. It will transform into a constant deluge of policy and law changes, court cases and social actions. The timeline will show how attempts to tear the fabric of reality instead tore apart bodies, friendships, families and hard-won rights.
On Monday, after Sall Grover noted on X her own anniversary of a sharp awakening to gender identity madness, more historic things kept being announced. It felt like 20 January was one of those days. Here are the four things I know about.
20 January 2022: Tickle v Giggle, Australia
On this day in 2022, Australian Sall Grover received a complaint via the Australian Human Rights Campaign from a male, Roxy Tickle, who believed he was discriminated against because Sal wouldn’t let him on to her all female app Giggle. Eventually, that led to a court case in the Federal Court of Australia in August of last year. The judge ruled that Grover had indirectly discriminated against Tickle because of his gender identity and that that breached the Sex Discrimination Act. Tickle was supported by the Australian Human Rights Commission. Grover is appealing.
20 January 2025: Women denied freedom of association and assembly, Australia
Australia’s Lesbian Action Group (LAG) wanted an exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act to allow a public event exclusively for females. The Australian Human Rights Commission turned down the request. LAG appealed the ruling through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in September. On this day in 2025, the ruling was announced. The answer is no. Women can’t meet without men. This is sexism at least as much as it is homophobia. When a gay male bar made a similar request it was accepted as a legitimate way to help gay people achieve equality. The lesbians were denied because the purpose of their request was considered to be discrimination against transwomen. The penis-veto, near constant in all but recent history, rules again. Females may not do stuff by themselves.
20 January 2025: Puberty blocker submissions close, Aotearoa / New Zealand
After spending months delaying (I suspect desperately trying to find some evidence that supported their use) NZ’s Ministry of Health finally released its Evidence Brief on puberty blockers. Like Cass they found no good evidence to justify their use in treating gender dysphoria.
Rather than stopping prescriptions altogether, the Ministry opened up a consultation to public submissions about whether there should be further safeguards in their prescription. Cue, giant campaign from organisations whose livelihoods depend on gender-affirmation and related ideology. Supporting the giant campaign numerous my kid knew they were trans when they were in the womb-type stories in the media. The compelling evidence of transness (and thus requiring quack medicine) amounting to a girl who doesn’t like frilly pink things, and boy who does. Anyway, on this day in 2025, submissions closed.
20 January 2025: Reinstatement of biological definitions of sex, United States
On this day in 2025, Donald Trump enters his second stint as president of the United States. Among his day-one Executive Orders was one called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.
So a Republican, a billionaire, a convicted felon, a gross, sexually abusive man who openly crows about being able to say and do anything because of his popularity, who doesn’t care about truth or morality, who advocates grabbing women “by the pussy’, is the one to sign an executive order that is feminist, rational and humane. Such a dramatic rollback on the excesses of gender ideology could have been horrible. It could have tried to reassert sexist ideas about how males and females should behave, dress or express themselves. It could have, by association, rolled back rights for gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Instead, it attacked only the state adoption and propagation of gender ideology while rightfully leaving everything else alone.
The Executive Order starts: “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
I don’t think Trump actually cares about women. He’s a populist hell-bent on power. He’ll do everything he can to get it. He knows how to exploit the failings of his opposition and the Democrats failed spectacularly on this one. In their haste to be compassionate to males who identify as females, they abandoned compassion for women and abandoned their traditional defence of women’s rights, safety and protections.
Apparently, this quite astonishing Executive Order was authored by May Mailman, previously director of the Independent Women’s Law Centre and who represented the University of Wyoming women who were trying to remove a voyeuristic male (who identified as a woman) from their sorority house. (Shout out to Reduxx.info for this information and all their reporting). For his own ends Trump exploited the glaring hole left when the Democratics abandoned women. In turn, May Mailman was poised to exploit the opportunity to beautifully reassert the rights of women and girls.
Yeah tricky. So many vile things he's doing. Horrible to have this sane important thing shipped with them.
Love your writing. I am always uplifted by your verve and clarity. I hope you are widely read.