> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Have We Undermined 175 Years of Progress for Women? - URL: https://goodoil.news/have-we-undermined-175-years-of-progress-for-women/ - Published: 2026-09-15T22:30:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T22:30:25.000Z - Description: The high price of appearing ‘compassionate’. - Author: Reproduced with permission - Tags: History, Gender, Law [**Ashley Church**](https://ashleychurch.com/have-we-undermined-175-years-of-progress-for-women/?ref=goodoil.news) *Digital creator* This image was inspired by a photograph of Sall Grover and me, taken at last weekend’s Focus on the Family conference in Auckland. (I’m the one on the right.) If you haven’t heard of Sall, she’s an extraordinary Australian woman who history will remember as one of the most important women’s rights champions of the early 21st century. That might sound like a big claim, but by the time you get to the end of this article you’ll understand why I make it. However, before I get to Sall’s story – let me start with a summary of the 175 years of progress upon which she was building. For most of human history, and certainly throughout much of the Western legal tradition, a woman’s sex placed real limits on what she could own, where she could work, what positions she could hold and what political power she could exercise. For example, under the old common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s legal and economic identity was substantially absorbed into that of her husband. Then, around the middle of the 19th century, things started to change. Women started to progressively dismantle barriers that previous generations had simply accepted as part of the natural order. Consider some of the landmarks. **1848 United States:** New York passed its Married Women’s Property Act, protecting married women’s ownership of property separately from their husbands and becoming an influential model for later reform. **1893 New Zealand:** women won the vote, making New Zealand the first self-governing country in the world to give women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. **1906 Finland:** Finland became the first parliament in the world to establish full and equal political rights for women to both vote and stand for election. A year later, 19 women were elected to the new Finnish parliament, making them the first women in the world elected to a national parliament under universal and equal suffrage. **1919 Britain:** the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act removed sex as an automatic bar to many public functions, civil and judicial offices, professions and jury service. **1960 Ceylon (now Sri Lanka):** Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world’s first woman prime minister, an achievement that would have been almost unimaginable only a few generations earlier. **1979 United Nations:** the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted, creating an international framework for eliminating discrimination against women. And of course those dates tell only part of the story. Across the Western world, women entered universities and professions that had once been closed to them. They became doctors, lawyers, judges, company directors, cabinet ministers and prime ministers. Laws prohibiting sex discrimination were enacted. Equal-pay protections developed. Women increasingly occupied places in public life that their great-grandmothers could scarcely have imagined. It was one of the great social achievements of the modern era – and it was all based on a universal reality which didn’t need to be questioned because it was patently obvious. We knew what a woman was. Women’s rights were won because women were a sex. Women had historically been excluded because they were female, and the laws which followed were intended to dismantle disadvantages imposed upon females because they were female. Which brings us to Sall Grover. Sall’s speech to the Family First Conference was extraordinary and received a standing ovation. She told the story of how, in 2020 she founded Giggle for Girls, an Australian social networking app intended to provide a women-only online space where women could communicate and interact away from men. Anyone seeking to use the app had to upload a photograph as part of the registration process. She then recounted how, in 2021, Roxanne Tickle, a biological man, gained access to Giggle. Sall subsequently reviewed Tickle’s photograph, recognised that Tickle was a man pretending to be a woman and removed Tickle from the app. She told us that this had led to a complaint, by Tickle, to the Australian Human Rights Commission and that, after conciliation failed, Tickle had taken her and Giggle to the Federal Court where Justice Robert Bromwich found that Sall and Giggle had unlawfully discriminated against Tickle. He awarded Tickle $10,000 in compensation, although his judgment described the demonstrated loss as relatively slight, referring to a modest degree of hurt feelings and limited evidence of lasting harm. Sall and Giggle appealed and Tickle cross-appealed, challenging aspects of the original discrimination finding and the damages award. In May this year the Full Court of the Federal Court dismissed Sall and Giggle’s appeal but allowed parts of Tickle’s cross-appeal. In fact, it went further than the original judge, holding that there had actually been **direct** gender-identity discrimination on two occasions, first when Tickle was excluded from the app and then when access was not restored. The Full Court also set aside the original $10,000 award and replaced it with a $20,000 award. Sall told us that she had then sought special leave to take the matter to Australia’s High Court – however, on 10 September the High Court refused this, bringing the appeal process to an end. The practical consequence of this is that the Full Federal Court judgment stands. So think about the historical symmetry of that for a moment. For centuries, laws created largely by men told women what they were permitted to do because they were women. Women then spent almost two centuries dismantling those restrictions and establishing their right to participate equally in society as women – and now we’ve arrived at the point where the law is increasingly being asked to determine something even more fundamental: **who is entitled to be treated as a woman in the first place.** That’s why Sall Grover and Giggle matter. This story isn’t ultimately about an app – it’s about whether women can maintain rights, spaces, services and opportunities based specifically upon sex if men pretending to be women are legally entitled to claim access to them – and this is where I particularly want younger women to think beyond what’s happening today. I understand why younger women may feel empathy for men wishing to assume an alternate gender identity. Right now, the numbers are comparatively small so, when you see a man pretending to be a woman it’s easy to think ‘there’s no harm in accommodating him’. That can feel compassionate. But what happens when the numbers aren’t comparatively small? Laws and principles aren’t designed for the exceptional case – they establish a foundation for all cases. Think about what that means. What happens when you try out for a women’s sports team and discover that most of the available places have been taken by biological men pretending to be women? What happens when that happens to your daughter? What happens when she spends 10 years training for a sport, sacrifices weekends, social events and countless hours to become one of the best female athletes in the country, only to discover that the podium place, scholarship or representative position she’s worked for has gone to somebody who experienced male puberty? What happens when you walk into a female changing room and discover that half the people using it are biologically male? What happens when a women’s refuge, established specifically because vulnerable women sometimes need physical separation from men, decides that biological sex can’t determine who enters? What happens when a women’s professional organisation can no longer decide that membership is restricted to biological women? What happens when scholarships established because women were historically disadvantaged are opened to men pretending to be women? And what happens in employment? For decades, major organisations have deliberately tried to improve the representation of women in leadership because they recognised both the historic disadvantage women had suffered and the value that women bring to decision-making. So what happens when your daughter graduates from university and applies for one of those opportunities, only to discover that a corporate diversity policy counts men pretending to be women toward the same female representation targets? What happens when she misses out on the job because the organisation she applied to has a ‘diversity policy’ that specifically favours men pretending to be women over biological women? What happens when a policy created specifically to overcome the historic exclusion of women starts satisfying its objectives by employing males? What happens when women’s awards, women’s leadership programmes, women’s board targets, women’s scholarships and women’s political representation measures stop being based upon sex? And what happens when the numbers are no longer tiny? If your answer is that you’re comfortable when there’s one man pretending to be a woman – but uncomfortable when there are 50 – then I think you’ve already recognised something important. There **is** a boundary. And that means that the real question was never whether you were willing to be kind to one person. The real question was whether the principle you were accepting could survive being applied universally. That’s the conversation that I don’t think society has properly had. We’ve behaved as though the only competing values are compassion on one side and intolerance on the other, when there’s another party standing in the room whose interests deserve consideration. Women. Because every female-only category exists for a reason. Women’s sport exists because male and female bodies are different. Women’s refuges exist because there are circumstances in which vulnerable women need separation from men. Female scholarships and development programmes exist because women were historically excluded from opportunities available to men. Women’s professional networks exist because women sometimes have interests and experiences that arise precisely because they are women. None of that requires hostility toward anybody – but it does require us to retain the ability to say that men and women are different, that biological sex exists, and that there are some circumstances in which those differences matter. Which brings me back to Sall Grover. Sall could have avoided years of litigation, enormous expense and extraordinary personal pressure by simply giving way. She didn’t. Instead, she drew a line around the word *woman* and refused to surrender it, knowing exactly what it might cost her. Young women have inherited rights that generations before them fought extraordinarily hard to win. Sall Grover’s fight is about making sure that they still know who those rights were won for. Because the cruellest irony of all this is that, after 175 years spent wresting rights from men, women have finally reached the summit only to find men pretending to be women waiting there to claim those rights for themselves. This article was originally published by [ashleychurch.com](https://ashleychurch.com/have-we-undermined-175-years-of-progress-for-women/?ref=goodoil.news).