Australia Leading the World

Sall Grover speaking at ARC yesterday 

Yesterday at London's Olympia, during the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) annual conference, Sall Grover, a young businesswoman from Australia, told the story of what happened to her when she was targeted by a man who used transgender ideology to demand that his rights should override those of women. The man, (who claims he is a woman), took Grover to court and, with the help of the Australian Human Rights Commission, (an independent authority within the Australian federal government’s Attorney-General’s portfolio, funded by Australian taxpayers), won two cases against her.

Grover's fight through the Australian courts continues. She is preparing a challenge to these earlier verdicts. As always where law is concerned, the process is very expensive. If you support her arguments and can spare her some money to help pay her legal costs, this is her crowdfunder

Despite being in the eye of a legal and ideological storm for several years now, Grover remains extraordinarily good humoured, while continuing to advocate and fight for reality, freedom and truth.

Here is a transcript of the speech Grover gave to an enthusiastic London audience:

“Hello, thank you so much for having me. I have flown halfway around the world to tell you that men are not women - something so obvious that, in a normal world, it would not need to be said - but we are not, apparently, living in a normal world.

For those of you who don't know me, I am the woman who had to go to court to establish what a woman is, and lost to a man - twice. In 2019, I created a social networking app called Giggle, exclusively for women. I had absolutely no idea I was doing this at the one time in human history when people have begun pretending not to know what a woman is.

In February 2020, when we were beta-testing the Giggle app on the App Store and Google Player, I woke up one day to find thousands of men on the app and thousands of one-star reviews calling us transphobic, and calling me a TERF.

I'd never heard the word before, and so I googled it - and I found that there were many women already raising the alarm: Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, to name a few. What they were saying was so insane that I had to see for myself whether it was true. I started doing my own research and discovered they were not telling a word of a lie. Not only were men claiming to be women, but people were believing them.

I still didn't know enough about transgender ideology at the time, and so I naively thought it would all blow over. But in January 2022, when I was 14 weeks pregnant, I received an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint, citing gender identity discrimination. It was from a man who claimed to be a woman and who had tried to use the Giggle app. He had gotten on it, but I had removed him. I don't remember doing it. There were many men who tried to get onto the app, and we would remove them.

The man who took Sall Glover to court for refusing to allow him to join a site set up exclusively for women.

He only became a person of note in my life when he called and texted my telephone. He was the only potential user of Giggle ever to do that. I put his telephone number into our server; I saw a picture of a man. I called my dad and said, "A man that we blocked from Giggle has called and texted my phone. I'm quite freaked out by this." My dad said, "Block his number and don't tell your mother, because she sees the threats that women receive speaking up on this issue and lives in fear."

To settle in the Australian Human Rights Commission, I was told that I would have to:

• let the complainant onto the app;
• let all men who claim to be women onto the app;
• go to sex and gender education classes, (which I knew could only be re-education);
• pay the complainant $20,000;
• apologise to the complainant - for which the best I could do was say, "I'm sorry you're a man";
• and - (and I think this is the most sinister element) - moderate all content on the app so that men who claim to be women would not be offended by what women said.

In other words, not only did this man want to be in the women's space, he wanted to control it.

I said no.

The complainant's name is Roxy Tickle, and he filed in Australia's federal court, thereby creating the world's first sex vs. gender identity discrimination case. To make this situation even stupider, the case is called Tickle v. Giggle.

This is actually my life.

In terms of legislation, what has happened in Australia is that, under the government of Julia Gillard, our first woman prime minister, (she has spent over a decade dining out on that fact), the Sex Discrimination Act was changed: the definitions of man and woman were removed and gender identity was put in. What this change has created is a completely muddled act. Whereas it once existed to protect women, it is now being used as a piece of legislation to punish us for not going along with an ideology.

The Australian Human Rights Commission intervened in the case, with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner arguing on the side of Tickle - and, by extension, all men who claim to be women. The commissioner argued that men are women - to the point where they need pregnancy protections in law, in case anybody perceives them to be pregnant! 

What they are doing is giving men who claim to be women legal protections they don't need, while taking away legal protections away from women, who do need them.

I lost in the federal court. I was told that sex is changeable. I was found to have indirectly discriminated against the complainant - and I was fined $10,000 because during cross-examination I laughed.

I was punished for laughing, in a case called Tickle v. Giggle. It's so stupid

So I appealed - and I genuinely thought that we were going to win. I thought that the full Federal Court was going to be the barrier preventing this ideology from infiltrating all Australian institutions.

We should have won. We are right. Men are not women, and there is absolutely no evidence that there was an intention to have one amendment change the legislation to the point of excluding women from it.

But unfortunately the full Federal Court went even further. They said there was direct discrimination.

They also said that looking like a man is a protected characteristic of being a trans woman. Yet trans women are women.

The court increased the damages to $20,000, because not only did I laugh, I also called Roxy Tickle a man in court.

Tickle's side, his legal team, said that I had called him a man in 50 interviews. That's not true - it's hundreds. I've never called him a woman, and I never will.

Now we have to go to the High Court. This is the highest court in Australia. If I lose, beyond the devastation of women being excluded from Australian law, I will have to pay one million dollars for Tickle’s legal costs. This case has already cost $AUD 1.2-1.3 million, all of it crowdfunded by people all around the world generously supporting the case.

Why is this important? What am I here to tell you? I'm here to say that, if a state can force you to accept men as women, they can force you to accept anything. Freedom of speech, belief and association are the bedrock of a free society - but they are in direct conflict with transgender ideology.

I believe that this is among the most important issues facing us at the moment. If we don't eradicate transgender ideology from law and society, we're going to lose reality, because transgenderism is forcing us to ignore reality and our instincts, and it's imposing an ideology upon us. Women's rights are just the canary in the coal mine. This impacts everyone.

Gender identity, gender ideology, transgenderism, whatever you want to call it, isn't true. It's not real. Every aspect of it is a lie. In fact if you look at each claim it makes, you find that in every single case the exact opposite is true:

• Men are not women.
• Women are not men.
• No one is born in the wrong body.
• Sex is not changeable.
• Gender identity isn't real.

We are told to be kind and inclusive, but people's empathy is being attacked to force them to be cruel to themselves. Why do I have to be kind and inclusive to a man who claims to be a woman, at the expense of my perception of reality and my own rights? How is that kind?

People ask me, "What can we do?" Speak. At every opportunity, every time it's needed, say, "Men are not women and I will not be forced to accept transgender ideology."

Silence is being mistaken for consensus. I'm often asked if I regret taking this stance and giving up years of my life, having to raise and spend millions of dollars in legal fees, getting called a bigot, basically derailing my career. Wouldn't it have been easier to just pay this man $20,000, let him on the app, and accept that the word "woman" has evolved?

No. It is not easier to submit to an ideology that isn't true, to give up your rights and to watch society crumble under the weight of nonsense.

When I was pregnant, having to decide whether or not to fight, I knew that I was having a daughter. And I knew that I would have to teach her to stand up for herself - and I couldn't do that if I backed down the first time it really mattered.

The Australian government - the Albanese government - could do their job and fix this, free, in a week, but they won't. They'll let me do it for them instead. And, while it may not be coming from the government itself, finally, after years of inaction, some political pushback is emerging.

I know that I will eventually win, one way or another, because the truth always does. I will be able to relaunch my company and provide women with an online platform to connect with each other all around the world, I'll be able to sleep soundly knowing that my free daughter has rights - and Roxy Tickle will never be a woman.

Thank you.”

I Would Prefer Not To

Having listened to almost the whole of Europe 2031 ai - https://europe2031.ai/ - (it is an imaginative speculation about the near future in a world with very rapidly improving ai capabilities) - I would love to know the reaction to it of others who understand the issues it deals with better than I do - & are generally better informed than me on the topic (basically almost everyone, I suspect).

One thing that struck me about the piece is that vast areas of the world, with huge populations & economies, (India, Southern America, Africa) don't seem to get a mention - will the populations in those areas sit idly by as things spiral? 

Leaving that question aside, for me perhaps the most striking thing about the scenario Europe 2031 ai paints is the assumption it is based upon - the idea that this new, ever more powerful tool will be allowed to just hurtle on unchecked, bringing the majority of people no spiritual or financial enrichment, while causing almost unimaginable disruption. 

A very few will become very wealthy and some medical breakthroughs may, (or may not), be made: will that be enough to keep the bulk of humanity onside as ai takes over? Will societies really allow meaning to be removed from the lives of many, almost entirely in order to profit a few? 

Already the West is in political turmoil because too many people feel that nobody in power listens to them or acts on their behalf. Will an ever enlarging ai presence be accepted in our restless contemporary world?

What are we ushering in exactly - and do we have a choice? Is ai, like the atomic bomb, a double-edged sword we might one day wish we had rejected? Is it too late to take the Bartleby approach?

Contemporary Vandalism

I have been looking forward to the reopening of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which I was lucky enough to visit in 2019  before it closed for a long, long time. I had understood that the local government  had shut the museum because it couldn't afford to run it, but I think I was being naive in believing that.

In any case, I was sad it was inaccessible and hoped I would be able to return eventually. The place had remained in my mind, largely because, alone in the Birmingham city centre, it provided evidence that there was a time when there were people who felt an intense pride in their city and a desire to create enduring loveliness there. There was a poignance to this, as all around the museum itself - a wonderful, solidly ornate Victorian building, opened by Queen Victoria herself in 1885 - the only other architectural trend on display was one that seemed to blend greed and short-termism. The newer buildings in the area appear to be made to last as long as an Ikea chest of drawers (and, while Ikea at least aims for a measure of elegance in the visual design of the objects it sells, a similar interest in aesthetics is not conveyed to the bystander by the buildings that have risen up during Birmingham's post-war years).

Anyway, today I read this, and my heart sank:

Why do these things happen? How did Britain come under the care of those who hate its culture?

Sometimes I tell myself I ought not to take photographs, that I am spoiling my experience of reality as I snap away. After discovering what has happened at Birmingham, I am kicking myself for having had such a lousy camera when we went there and for taking so few shots. Here are the things I did take pictures of - it seems that, unless things change, you will only see them here:

Corporation Street, Birmingham, in March 1914, Joseph Southall, fresco. The dating of the painting to before the outbreak of the First World War is significant as it was actually commissioned and painted during the war. However, Southall was a Quaker and opposed to the war and preferred to depict a time before it began and European life changed forever. 

Vase and cover, Terracotta, gilding and enamels, England, Devon, St Mary Church, Watcombe Pottery Company, 1875-1880 (The Watcombe Pottery was Devon's first pottery, which began production in 1869. The vase dates from the pottery's early years. The Victorians were interested in the natural world. Very few Victorians would have seen a real cockatoo.)

William Logsdall, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1883 

JMW Turner, The Pass of St Gothard, Switzerland, 1803-4

The museum staircase with a window I particularly loved

A Saint Holding a Book by Simone Martini, circa 1320-30, tempera on panel. Martini was one of the leading artists in Siena in the 14th century but few of his panel paintings have survived. This must originally have formed part of a predella. The saint is shown weeping as he gazes to his left towards a missing central panel which probably showed the dead Jesus Christ.

The Nativity by a Master of the Prado 'Adoration of the Magi, c.1475-1500. The imagery of this painting derives from the writings of St Bridget of Sweden, a 14th century nun. She had a vision of the Virgin Mary kneeling in a. white robe and with loosened hair, adoring her new born son. In the vision, the candle held by Joseph was dim beside the radiance of the child Jesus. We don't know the name of the Dutch artist who painted this work He is identified by a nickname taken from a painting in the Prado museum in Madrid, one of several pictures which seem to have been painted by the same artist.

Tryptych: The Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, by Adrien Isenbrandt, 1510-12, Oil on panel. 

The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter and Mark and a Donor, 1505, oil on panel. The arrangement of the figures in this painting is called a 'sacred conversation'. Saitns Peter and Mark contemplate the virtues of the Virgin who sits between them holding the infant Christ. On the right side, the man who commissioned the painting kneels in prayer. Bellini was a leading Venetian painter and Saint Mark is patron saint of Venice, so this commission would have demonstrated loyalty to the Venetian republic.

The Hon Edward Sackville West by Graham Sutherland, 1953-4. Sackville-West was a good friend of Sutherland. He was also music critic for the New Statesman during the 1940s. This is a study for a full-length portrait. I did some research in the Patrick Leigh Fermor archive in Edinburgh years ago and I have an idea there were some funny incidents involving Sackville-West in there. I will have to go back one day as I need to do further research, so I will have a look and see if my memory is right.

Set in Stone

A few years ago in the Museum of Picardie in Amiens, I noticed these idiosyncratic carvings:

They were labelled variously as fragments of an altarpiece depicting Christ’s passion, found in 1837 in the ruins of the Church of Conty in the Somme, and depictions of various biblical scenes that seem to have come from 19th century private collections. They were said to date from the 15th century.

Some months later I went to Mass at the Eglise de Notre Dame de Croaz Batz in Brittany, (about which I will post in my section called “Mass Tourism” at some later date), and recognised, in an altarpiece in the church, works that looked as if they came from the same hand as those I’d seen in Amiens:

Finally, last year in Naples, in the Capo di Monte (what a gallery, what a collection), I spotted similar figures in an alabaster tryptych of the Passion of Christ, also from the 15th century:

Each time I spotted them, what caught my attention about the carvings was the faces of the little figures depicted in them. They are faintly comic, although I don’t think this was the artist’s intention - and the fact that it was probably not his intention is what endears these works to me. Their lack of genius is attractive. Their slight naivety makes the sculptor seem human, rather than so extraordinary he no longer appears to be a fellow creature existing on the same plane as the rest of us - which is how I imagine Michelangelo whenever I see his works. Looking at these little scenes, by contrast, I catch a glimpse across the centuries of a moderately talented person who had the impulse to be creative, while being less than brilliant, a person who engaged in a struggle with mediocrity and didn’t entirely come out on top - a person, therefore, with whom I can identify.

And after the initial moment of interest, something else caught my attention, when I read the wall notes to these works. According to the curators at both the Museum of Picardy and the Capo di Monte, the person who made these things came from Nottingham.

Nottingham? That didn’t just catch my attention; it surprised me. We're talking about the fifteenth century - how did a bloke from Nottingham manage to get around to all these places in Europe before the invention of Ryanair?

But then I remembered one of the best detective stories I’ve ever read - The Leaves of Southwell - in which Nicolas Pevsner devotes himself to trying to understand who might have created “the leaves which adorn the capitals of the columns of Southwell Chapter House...eight miles west of Newark and fourteen miles north-east of Nottingham.”

To my astonishment when I read it, Pevsner explains that, in the thirteenth century, masons wandered Europe, plying their trade. He notes clear signs that whoever designed Bamberg Cathedral had seen and been impressed by Laon. He refers to a thirteenth century manuscript in the National Library in Paris written by Villard de Honnecourt in which the author explains “that he came from the north of France, looked round and drew at Rheims (aisle windows of the cathedral, ‘because I liked them best’) and Chartres, and even went as far from home as Lausanne and Hungary”. Pevsner also tells us that “the architect of Canterbury Cathedral choir, William of Sens, came from France specially to get the job as master mason to the cathedral” and that “the east parts of Westminster Abbey are so evidently influenced by Reims, that the name of the first master mason, Henry de Reyns, may very well be an anglicised form of Henry of Reims”.

So it was not in fact unusual for a Nottingham man to be making work in far flung places. The thirteenth century was not, as I’d imagined, a time when people were utterly tied to place - and presumably nor was the fifteenth century. However, as Pevsner points out, writing in 1945, whereas “personality and genius are what have interested the West for the last hundred and fifty years, more than all else in the contemplation of works of art”, at the time the Southwell leaves were made - and also at the time that my Nottingham friend was working - the names of individual carvers were not recorded. This prompts Pevsner to ask “Was there such a thing as an artist, as a sculptor in the thirteenth century”, given how “surprisingly few names of artists and architects of the Middle Ages have come down to us...Perhaps their work was but regarded as competent craft.”

And so the great paradox: we do not know the names of many of the individuals involved in stonemasonry in the Middle Ages and yet their works - above all every aspect of European cathedrals - are generally regarded as among the greatest treasures of European civilisation. 

And, of course, as Simon Winder points out at the start of his book Germania, the only reason the work of artists involved in the creation of cathedrals has survived to be admired, where so much other artistic product has vanished, is the fact that they worked in stone:

“What survives from the real Middle Ages” says Winder, “is a range of, in practice, quite arbitrary objects, based on luck and the durability of their materials...Clothing, even precious clothing, has rotted, tapestries have faded, paint has worn away. Much of the texture and visual meaning of the Middle Ages is therefore lost...The massive exception to this decay and disappearance is stone, the stone which gives each cathedral or Schloss such seeming solidity.”

Alabaster isn’t the most enduring variety of stone, but it is enduring enough to have allowed the hardworking aspirant from Nottingham to be thought about six centuries later; and his works are wondrous, in their own modest way - or, at the very least, charming.