Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"I'll never stop fighting for women" - Sall Grover
1.3k Plays2 years ago
Sall Grover was a Hollywood screenwriter for a decade before returning to Australia to start 'Giggle' - a social media app for women. After a barely believable series of events (that could only have happened in the strange times in which we live), the app is at the centre of one of the most significant legal cases in modern Australian history. The outcome will have very real repercussions for girls and women across the country.
Note: We had some minor sound issues (and a host with a nasty cold). Stick with it. It's worth it.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Support Giggle's crowdfunding campaign here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Spectator Australia
00:00:00
Speaker
The Spectator Australia is a weekly delight for anyone who loves insightful analysis, contentious opinion and hard-hitting comment. With the finest writing on current affairs, politics, the arts, books and life, you will read regular columnists who delight, provoke and amuse, and editorial features of incredible breadth and depth.
00:00:19
Speaker
There is no party line to which its writers abound. Originality of thought and elegance of expression are the sole editorial constraints. A digital subscription is just $16.99 a month and you get your first month free. Sign up today at spectator.com.au forward slash join.
Who is Sal Grover and what is Giggle?
00:00:52
Speaker
Today and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston. My guest today is Sal Grover. Sal was a successful Hollywood screenwriter for a decade before returning to Australia to found Giegel, a social media app for women.
00:01:10
Speaker
Through a barely believable series of events, the app is at the center of one of the most significant legal cases in modern Australian history. The outcome will have very real repercussions for girls and women across the country. Sal, welcome to Australiana.
00:01:24
Speaker
Thank you so much. And I will just correct you. I wouldn't say successful screenwriter. I was a screenwriter and I sold stuff, but I would never call myself successful, but thank you. I will define that very well and truly as a success. I swear from being the other side of it, just being there and surviving it is a success story, but yeah, it is what it is, yeah.
What challenges did Sal face in Hollywood?
00:01:49
Speaker
It's an interesting way of framing it, saying you survived it. Can you expand on that? Yeah. Oh, without a doubt. I mean, gosh, I went there at 24, wanted to be a writer. I mean, really my ultimate love was always writing novels, but I wanted to live in LA. I don't know why I had this pool there. And so writing movies was the sort of natural thing to do. And I loved them and I did a film degree. So all of it was very organic in that respect.
00:02:17
Speaker
And I got into the industry relatively easily in hindsight, like it took about 11, 11 or 13 months, something like that. It was really, really quick in terms of selling my first thing. I mean, you can sit there for years without selling something. So I got in really quick and that's when it all changed when I was in the industry. It was just the, you know, it was the pre-Me Too world, which it's not even pre-Me Too. It's all still there now. I mean, it was all.
00:02:46
Speaker
It seemed great at the time, but nothing really actually changed. And when you, I was this Australia, 20 something Australian female screenwriter and that's, that's not the norm. It isn't most screenplays are written by men that it just is what it is. And so, you know, you're this aberration and you're this sort of fun toy play thing. And I didn't, I didn't pick up on that for a while. I, I was quite naive. Yeah.
What led Sal to leave Hollywood?
00:03:12
Speaker
Was there a particular moment
00:03:13
Speaker
where you notice that this is actually something which is unusual? Was there a particular catalyst for that thinking? There was, there's a few that in terms of milestones of what made me go like, this really isn't cool. Yeah, there was a few. I mean, I had proper sexual assault, you know, actual like touching in professional settings, you know, really, really horrible things.
00:03:36
Speaker
And the one that just always is the final straw was when it was a management producer guy really trying to do something bad. And I got home to my apartment and I like just like walked in the door, closed it and slunk on the floor. And I just went, I can't, I just cannot do this anymore. It's not worth it. Because one of the things I used to always say,
00:04:00
Speaker
when I was screenwriting and seeing all these people in Hollywood taking it so seriously, like it was the center of the world. And I'd be like, we're just doing stuff to entertain the people who do the real things. You know, it's like, so the brain surgeon has something to watch on a Friday night kind of thing. And so I just, I suppose I couldn't take it that seriously. So I think you have to, to survive it. It has to be like this like life or death type thing. Cause it's so cutthroat and I just didn't have that in the end. And I wasn't willing to,
00:04:30
Speaker
to go through what you have to go through, apparently, to do it. No way.
How did the Me Too movement affect Sal's views?
00:04:36
Speaker
You mentioned that you were in California when the Me Too movement first kicked off. What are your reflections on that period? Also, I was in Hollywood prior to it. So I was there from 2009. And then I think, gosh, I left 2017. I went to New York.
00:04:57
Speaker
Me too actually exploded at the sort of the Harvey Weinstein moment of the story breaking and everything. I was actually in Europe at the time. So I wasn't, I would definitely wasn't like physically on the ground there, but my best friend at the time, we've lost touch now, but she's my best friend from the day sort of I arrived until not, you know, recently, whatever, just lost touch. There's no drama, but
00:05:23
Speaker
She was Harvey Weinstein's longest serving female assistant, so I knew he was horrible.
00:05:30
Speaker
But and so did she. I mean, I would hear the stories every day of how horrible he was to her and to everyone else who worked for him. And it was like everyone in the whole town knew how horrible this man was. But even like, you know, my friend who who worked very, very closely with him, she didn't know about rapes. That that was something that was kept from her. She knew he was horrible to women. And this was something she had to
00:05:58
Speaker
trying reconcile or trying to better her own career and it's all of these moral decisions that we all have to make and i don't judge for a second for it i would have taken a job with him as well but at the time you know back then but it yeah it just none of it was a shock to me or to anyone who is involved with it in one one level and then escalated to the next you go okay yeah that was even worse than i even than i even imagined.
What are Sal's theories on social attitude changes?
00:06:23
Speaker
We wouldn't be having this conversation about the trans issue specifically 15 years ago, probably not even 10 years ago. It would have been faintly ridiculous. Why do you think social attitudes have changed in such a short period of time?
00:06:39
Speaker
Oh, there's so many different theories I have on it. And so many different people have different theories. My strongest theory, just in a social element in terms of media and everything, actually does link into me too. I think that there are a lot of men in power, in media,
00:06:59
Speaker
and what have you in those sort of industries who really didn't like Me Too, because they were going to be Me Too'd. And then this movement came along where the concept of a woman doesn't even exist. And what a fantastic thing to push. And it distracted everybody. So I think that that plays a part in it, but then you can go into all the other
00:07:24
Speaker
elements of it, the pharmaceutical companies, all of these sorts of things. The one community I really don't blame for it is the LGB community. I think that they're actually one of the biggest victims of it. And when I look to the future and I think, you know, women, we're going to get our rights back and it's going to be okay. And then for a greater society, we are going to like, you know,
00:07:47
Speaker
Once again, secure free speech and freedom of belief and all of these really important fundamental human rights that gender ideology really does attack. But I, I fear that the blame will be on the LGB community because it came in, like gender ideology came in under them.
00:08:03
Speaker
And so I think that eventually we're really going to have to really get behind this community once again, in a whole new way to defend them from, from doing this. Because once you actually understand what gender ideology is, which is this concept that human beings can change sex, that you're born in the wrong body, that men can become women, women can become men. You just have to say it. Well, adults just have to say it, but children have to be sterilized for some bizarre reason and have
00:08:28
Speaker
beauty blockers and have all of this crazy surgery. But once you understand that is completely antithetical to what LGB people are, I mean, these are people who biological sex is very relevant in their lives, they're same sex attracted, then you can't unsee that
00:08:45
Speaker
that they have nothing to do with this. So I think that, you know, also like to get back to your original thing of, what was it? Why or what we are, why is this happening? We wouldn't have been talking about it. We wouldn't have because there was no, there was no reason to. I think a big push was women sort of we're getting a bit, we were getting a bit too uppity.
00:09:06
Speaker
I'll return to the relationship between the letters of the rainbow alphabet in a second, but I want to hit on an interesting insight there around power. It was a lovely article written by Edie Wyatt in The Spectator. She said, this is by no means a fair fight. Gender identity is a top-down movement and the push for sex-based rights is bottom-up.
00:09:34
Speaker
Why do you think that so many powerful people and institutions around the world have been so quick to side? It could only work as a top down movement because if you think, would any grassroots movement be able to convince a lot of people that men are women?
What legislative changes concern Sal Grover?
00:10:01
Speaker
No. I mean, these are people that you'd see on the street, you know, handing out, you know, maybe like printed flyers and just sprouting from soap boxes and you'd ignore them because you're just talking absolute nonsense. But when you when you're actually in it and you go, hang on a second, institutions and governments have actually been captured by this before the people are even aware of what's going on, there's something going on here. And a way to prove that is
00:10:31
Speaker
in Australia specifically, most of us didn't even know that the Sex Discrimination Act had been amended in 2013. I didn't know. I was in America when this happened, but women that were living here didn't know about it. And what happened was gender identity just in general was put into the Sex Discrimination Act.
00:10:57
Speaker
It completely muddles the entire act because the act is there to talk about sex and you put in gender and what this bizarre concept of gender is now. I mean, a lot of us know it as a polite way of saying sex.
00:11:14
Speaker
That's how I thought of it, I suppose prior to 2019 even, but I knew that there was this faint discussion of it being just sort of the gender expression or performance or whatnot, but I didn't know that it had become this entirely new entity, which is what it is under gender ideology and gender identity. So it was put in and that happened without a vote.
00:11:42
Speaker
You know, where's democracy?
Why does Sal criticize the inclusion of gender identity in law?
00:11:44
Speaker
You know, no matter what you think about it right now with The Voice in Australia specifically, what if you're on yes or no, it at least is going to a vote. That's democratic like process. And with gay marriage, like, you know, gay people had to absolutely beg
00:12:02
Speaker
to be able to get married in this country. And finally, they put it to a plebiscite, which by that point, it was, the approval ratings were so high, you wouldn't have even needed to do a vote on it. But it still went to a vote because that is democratic process. But gender has just gone straight into law prior to gay marriage in Australia, even. It's one of the things that amazes me the most, like gay marriage came in late 2016 or 17, whichever one it was.
00:12:32
Speaker
gender identity had been in there since 2013. And so you go like, how were they squaring away gender identity and same sex attraction then? Because they must have been able to work out a way legally to do it. But now when they're not allowing
00:12:49
Speaker
lesbian only events on the basis of gender identity, somehow it's become a complete confusion. So I don't believe that these are the most marginalized people in the world because they got to change laws with people not knowing about it.
00:13:06
Speaker
And I don't know any demographic of people who's ever been able to do that. Other than, you know, the stereotypical, like the straight white man. Yeah. Like we're talking like decades ago when there was no opposition, but like now this is insane. Hmm. Well, some people would dismiss what you're saying as being a fringe culture wars issue, probably imported from America. Many in the medium have taken that line.
00:13:36
Speaker
Why should people care about this?
How is the gender identity debate viewed by Sal?
00:13:39
Speaker
So it's a great question. Personally, I don't actually think you need to give a shit about women's rights to care about this issue. It doesn't matter because it's not just women's rights or gay rights that are under attack right now or children's and all three of those are. But you can say like the demographic left out just there is obviously just straight men.
00:14:00
Speaker
You can be a straight man and care about this. And the reason that you should is because it's actually a freedom of speech and freedom of belief that are under attack. Now, I firmly believe that any person, whether you're just man, woman, child, trans, whatever, you should be able to be allowed to acknowledge what you see with your own eyes, just basic reality. And that's what all people just do. But gender identity tells us we have to ignore what we see with our own eyes.
00:14:31
Speaker
So if you're okay with there being laws in place for you to, to, to legislate against that. Okay. That's what you're for, but I'm not because this is the first thing. And I mean, literally legislating that you can't say that the man you see is a man. What's, what's the next thing they legislate against? I can make it creeps me out. It terrifies me. And I just think that it is so authoritarian in nature that
00:15:00
Speaker
It is time for everybody to sort of sit up and take notice and go, you know, I don't know where I sit on many different maybe issues within it, but the overriding thing is so authoritarian, I have to take a stance. It's interesting you say that. We had a conversation yesterday with Brendan O'Neill, the British journalist, and he was initially, he's fantastic.
00:15:24
Speaker
He was initially against the dead naming of trans men or trans women, people who don't know dead naming is choosing not to use their preferred pronoun when engaging with them. And he's been turned to the point where he now thinks
00:15:39
Speaker
their naming is almost a form of standing up against this kind of cultural authoritarianism that says you have to say certain things and think in certain ways. And it was an interesting way of framing it. How much of this is just well-meaning people trying to be polite and trying not to hurt anyone's feelings and therefore some of these things just seem to get a pass.
00:16:05
Speaker
A huge, a huge percentage of people would just be really well-meaning polite people. That's what happens when you piggyback off the LGB community, which did spend decades getting the goodwill of people and, and warranted like they, they, it's, I think, I mean, as a supporter of gay rights, I think it's horrible that they had to go to the lengths that they did to, to get everybody on board, but they put in the work and they got society on board.
00:16:33
Speaker
that because everyone has a sexual orientation. It's just there's three different kinds. There's heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. Everyone got to realize that there's a few people who still aren't that fine about it, but who cares what people think in their own head? In society, in law, it's fine. Gay people have equal rights, and that's fantastic. But what has happened with
00:17:00
Speaker
the next part of it, the QTI alphabet, rest of it, is that they are undermining all of it. I mean, not just the LGB.
How did Sal respond to being labeled transphobic?
00:17:13
Speaker
I mean, if you're saying that biological sex doesn't exist, you're undermining that first part of your community. I mean, you're seeing people redefine homosexuality as gender attracted people. It's just every part of this
00:17:29
Speaker
is
00:17:31
Speaker
It's utter nonsense, but it is appealing to what people think is good and what we've been told for a long time is good. So I understand why people are there going, oh, I'll just go along with it. It's the next thing. I mean, if I think back to sort of 2019 before I knew what was going on, that's very much where I was with it. I just heard there was this other new issues that we had to fix. Okay, cool. I trust you. I trust this community.
00:18:00
Speaker
And then I woke up in early 2020 and was being called a turf and a transphobe and a bigot. And I literally, from my knowledge, done nothing. I mean, I'd just gone to sleep the night before. I had never spoken out about anything. No one knew who I was. And you're getting thousands and thousands of messages about it. You have to go and research why that is. And I just found very, very quickly.
00:18:26
Speaker
through research that everything that the women speaking out against it was saying were right. And I'm so pleased I did that research because it made me, it made me confident to speak out, but it also made me go, okay, hang on. There's something actually sinister going on here and we should pay attention to it. We'll get to why people decided to attack you in a moment, but let's take a
Why was Giggle founded?
00:18:54
Speaker
step back. Why did you found Giggle?
00:18:56
Speaker
So, I mean, it goes back to what I was just saying, you know, when we first started talking, I'd basically, I had been in Hollywood for all these years, blah, blah, blah, moved to New York. And I moved to New York because I needed to get away from Hollywood. It was that moment where I was like, I can't cope here, but I wasn't willing to give up on what I was doing. And so I went to New York where there was still sort of industry like Hollywood industry.
00:19:20
Speaker
But I was away from that environment. So, you know, I'd been in L.A., I'd had an apartment, like a proper life. And I was moving to New York with hardly any money. I mean, next to nothing. I mean, most people would never, ever get on a plane without little money I had. And I had to rent a room. And so I had to go on to like the roommate dot com and blah, blah, blah. And I would get the messages of like, oh, you can live here rent free if you want, if
00:19:49
Speaker
You walk around naked or do you want a boyfriend as well? Just like really just, you know, just shitty sexual harassing type things that you can obviously ignore. But I was very much like, you know, what, in terms of what I was escaping, I was like, can there be one area of a woman's life where we don't have to deal with this? And so then when I came home and my mom and I were talking about it and I was in therapy, just dealing with it all and recovering from everything that had happened.
00:20:16
Speaker
It was my mum that said, well, why don't we just start a woman only roommate app? And I was like, what a fantastic idea. I would have used that in a heartbeat. Cause I ended up, and it was through like a Facebook group that I found the place, but it was a, um, I ended up living with four other girls in New York and it was just the most therapeutic, brilliant house I've ever lived in.
00:20:36
Speaker
So we started developing this female only roommate app and then we were like, you know, creating an app is very, very expensive. You have to raise money for it. So you have to have some sort of scalability. So it was like, okay, what else can you do with this bar blind? So we were looking into that and we're like, Oh, what about a freelancing element? Like, you know, women get harassed when they're, when they're going for freelance work, whether it's like, you know, graphic design, writing, cleaning, you know, all different sorts of things. Like, why don't we do it?
00:21:03
Speaker
That is well what about just a general support thing we just sort of grew it off like all the different things we could offer like oh yeah like why stop at one thing we'll just. Offer it to all and it was sort of essentially the same price to put them all in you know what i mean but it was so expensive to to.
00:21:20
Speaker
create the app. And so yeah, so we were just like having creating this place where just women could just be on the internet because, you know, I was, I was very much in this me too world at the time where, you know, it was like sexual assault and harassment were a big thing. We want to be able to escape from it. We want to refuse from it, which that hasn't changed.
00:21:42
Speaker
It still exists like it has for centuries, but it was also just, it wasn't even for the negative reasons. Like it's like sometimes that you just want to hang out with other women. It's like how like sometimes like you have guys nights that you just want to hang out with the guys. Like I wouldn't have a problem if there was just like a guys only internet place and it's, I can't go there and men just talk about whatever stuff men talk about. Okay. I just don't care.
00:22:06
Speaker
And so we put it all together and when we were planning to launch it, we knew that there would be pushback just because there is when women do anything just for women or just women do things in general. And I will say that I got
00:22:21
Speaker
it completely wrong of who the pushback would be from. I thought that we would get like the anger in which like the eye rolls from like the more conservative sort of commentators and news and then like the more left wing who, which is where I got my news from, where I was aligned with.
00:22:39
Speaker
that they would embrace us, something like, yay, this post me too world. No, that did not happen at all.
What unexpected criticism did Giggle face?
00:22:46
Speaker
I was called transphobic from all of those places. And I now talk to Andrew Bolt frequently on Sky News. And if you had told me five years ago that I would be talking to Andrew Bolt, I would not have believed you. But this guy, like, I don't have to agree with anything else. He says this guy gives me a platform to say what I want to say.
00:23:07
Speaker
And it's never once told me what to say. You just let me speak how I want to speak. And I have all respect for that. You know, the left wing Australian places like say the project, they won't speak to me. So yeah, I have respect for anyone who will let me speak. And yeah, I mean, so that's basically the journey of it and why we did it. And just that's like a roundup of the craziness that we came into it with.
00:23:33
Speaker
Now I've reflected on this myself and I've had a little quiet chuckle at times thinking that kind of the traditional feminist left has now kind of through a weird series of events actually found itself on a unity ticket with kind of members of the socialist of the conservative right.
00:23:49
Speaker
in the West. Ultimately, to be honest, I never knew that we couldn't listen to people who had different opinions or engage. I just always did. I came of age in the early 2000s and was very influenced by the Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Dawkins, and Hersey Ali era. I am atheist and I
00:24:18
Speaker
I'm sort of gold star atheist, but I knew I, I was, I was, they're political parties, I suppose, never played into it. It was just these rational, great arguments. And I had no idea if they were left or I didn't, I never occurred to me. And then around 2016, we had to, and I remember seeing something where it was like I was supposed to hate
00:24:41
Speaker
I am Hersey Ali and I was like, hmm, why? I don't know why I should hate this woman. She's brilliant. She's one of the most brilliant women I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. And then even, I remember putting it for a second through,
00:24:58
Speaker
my brain. I just dismissed it. I'm so angry that I did, but I put it through my brain in their identity politics checklist. And I was like, she's a woman of color. She's an immigrant. She's self male. She's done everything. She's got all the boxes that are supposed to
00:25:14
Speaker
tick in the identity politics and they hated her. And I was like, why? And I just, but I didn't, I didn't ask enough. I ignored it. I was very much in a Trump hating bubble because I do. I think he's a dickhead, but I agree with him on this particular gender issue, but I don't think he particularly agrees with it. I think he just knows what to say to win, but
00:25:33
Speaker
I, I was, I was just, I just wasn't, I was doing what they, what they ask of you, which is not think of anything. And it was the first time in my life I'd ever been doing that. I'd always questioned everything. And I don't know if I was just tired or what, but there was like an 18 month period where I just didn't question as much as I would usually do. And then, so when it hit me of your tour, if you're a transphobe and I went and went to look into it, I was like, what the hell have I been missing? And it scared the hell out of me.
00:26:02
Speaker
And it has now been about three and a half years. There's another element to this, which has come up a lot in this podcast actually, and it is how we are just conditioned to treat politics and political issues as sport. And if you don't support your team in inverted commas on every issue, then you get marginalised. And this is another very good example of that, I think really worrying phenomenon.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I suppose I just wasn't raised in a house where that happened or a family. I mean, I've got extended family members who are like staunch labor voters. I mean, labor could like start killing small kittens for fun and they'd still vote for them. I've got liberal family members who the liberal party could do the exact same thing and they'd vote for them. I just, it was just like, and everyone got along. It was this.
00:26:45
Speaker
It was like, you know, sometimes they'd be like not heated debates, but like, you know, just fun debates around the family dinner table or we're all having fish and chips or whatever. But it was all good fun. I just always thought that that's how it was. And you just, some people like different opinions. I just, I just didn't know that it was such a bad thing to talk to anyone. And so I've held onto that very firmly. Like I, I will talk to anyone.
00:27:15
Speaker
I will talk to the devil himself. If I can speak freely and say what I want to say to the people who listen to the devil, I don't care. It doesn't mean I agree with him. It just means that I will be willing to speak to him. Maybe I'd learn something. Maybe he'll learn something like it's one of the things, especially with women in this movement that we're so punished. If we talk to somebody who say,
00:27:41
Speaker
Some people deem from the right, which apparently we're never allowed to talk to. And they fear that we're going to come out of it as right wingers. And I'm like, how fucking misogynistic are you? Maybe he'll come out of it as a feminist. Like, you know, it's like, do you not think we're persuasive at all? Like how little faith do you have in our arguments? My argument is just that human beings can't change sex and that we should all be able to have free speech.
00:28:08
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, if that's a right wing argument, I think that's a really big own goal from left wing people. And they make me really sad. Many people in Australia would be aware of Giggle v Tickle at the same time. Many people would not. Can you give us a background to the case?
What legal challenges is Giggle facing?
00:28:26
Speaker
OK, so I got a human rights complaint in January 2021 saying that I was basically the complaint was gender identity discrimination.
00:28:38
Speaker
Because so Giggle is a female only app and, you know, I've been in this space for a long time of being called transphobic and whatnot. And we would get attacked quite often. Like it wasn't, I mean, every day there'd be at least, at least one, but I mean, some days I'm talking thousands of men trying to get on.
00:28:58
Speaker
And a lot of the time, like just like gamer boys, like would obviously just sort of go viral on Twitch or whatever. And because we could tell she had to do an onboarding selfie and they'd do it. And they'd all be wearing like the gamer headsets. So we knew where it was coming from. And that's how, that's how you would determine whether or not someone was biologically male or female. Yeah. And because to back up just a little bit, when we were developing it and we were like, how do you create an online woman only space?
00:29:25
Speaker
which obviously in real life, a woman in this space, you can just tell who's coming in or who's going out by what they look like. Like it's the most human instinct. That's how they've always been policed. It's just, everyone looks at what the other person looks like. And if it was a man walking in, you'd call security or whatever. So when it was established that we could do that on a digital space, it's like fantastic, this will actually work. And I didn't think that that was that actually
00:29:51
Speaker
controversial at the time because i just thought that we all just look at the other person and know what their biological sex is it's like the most
00:29:57
Speaker
One of the most basic skills human beings have, we've always used it. So I was like, Oh yeah, that'll be fine. And so I got a human rights complaint in January, 2020, 20, what are we in? No, to January, 2022. Sorry. God, it's already 2023. Um, God, it's just going to take up such a large portion of my life that this, that guy that I had had removed, um, was doing it as an Australian man.
00:30:26
Speaker
who calls himself a woman. And because of that, I went through and researched who the person was. Through doing that, I found out that this guy, he had, it was the only person who has ever done it. In October, 2021, a guy had texted and called my phone saying like, hi, I'm trying to get on to Giggle and I can't get on. We had like 20,000 users. No one had ever texted my phone before. And
00:30:55
Speaker
It was such an odd thing, but the anchor of the app, like the identifier was your phone number. That was the only piece of information you needed to anchor yourself to the app because we didn't take data of names or anything like that. So I searched the guy's, or this particular phone number at the time. I didn't know it was just, I just had a name and I searched it on the server and was like,
00:31:20
Speaker
The picture of a man came up and I was like, oh, that's it. That's a man. No, I stand by that. And then at the same time, I was like, this person's just texting called my phone. Like, you're not coming on the app. Even if you were actually a woman, like, no, you've, you've just gone, you've just done a pasta barrier. This is really uncomfortable. And I was, I was scared, but more so because it was a man.
00:31:41
Speaker
Which, you know, fair to say. Anyway, cause I was like, well, you know, what's next? He's going to turn up at my house. I just didn't know. Anyway, then. So when the human rights came in and I was like looking through all this and I was like, Oh God, it's this person. Okay. Then.
00:31:58
Speaker
You had to go back and forth with it. I was 15 weeks pregnant when we got the complaint. To be able to settle it in conciliation, which is basically how the Human Rights Commission works. You go to conciliation and if you can just settle it there, then nothing else happens and all cool. But the conditions for conciliation were that I would have to go to sex and gender education classes, which could only be reeducation. I'd have to let him on the app and all men who say they're women on the app.
00:32:28
Speaker
I would have to moderate how women speak on the app so not to offend men who claim to be women. And I think it was a written apology as well. I was like, no, to all of this. And on top of this, I was pregnant. And by this point, I think when we were getting into the negotiations of this, I was like 30 weeks pregnant or something. It just went forever. And I just said, no, I'm not going.
00:32:53
Speaker
I think about now in hindsight, because it has become an issue in a sense in the court case to jump ahead a bit, but I was like, at the time I was like, I'm not putting myself through the stress. Now, when I look back on it in hindsight, had I not been pregnant, I might have attended conciliation out of curiosity. I wouldn't have agreed to anything. So that's why I knew it was a waste of time. I wasn't going to agree with a single thing.
00:33:17
Speaker
But I probably would have at least sat there, but being pregnant, no, never going to happen. So, so yeah, so I didn't go to conciliation. What happens when you don't do that, when you don't settle it in the Australian Human Rights Commission, they can then advise the applicant of what to do?
00:33:34
Speaker
and they can go into federal court. And so it's just, it's just so happens that this complaint was made in the Australian human rights commission, not the Queensland human rights commission. And so it becomes an immediately a federal court case, not like a state court case. And it means that then it's the actual federal sex discrimination act that, that is on the table. So in that way,
00:34:00
Speaker
Great. That's the thing that all of us women have been really trying to change for the last few years. So basically the case now, while he did, he found when he was supposed to last year with Drew because apparently he was fearful of how the costs would work out.
00:34:19
Speaker
refiled in December last year. It spent the first six months of this year and $155,000. I shit you not. I have recently paid the bill.
00:34:31
Speaker
to get to this point where it is now going ahead. But that cost me $155,000 of legal fees. So now we're, he was afraid of cost last year. So now we're at the point where it is going ahead. So it's going to trial next year. 9th of April is the date. And yeah, we're doing a constitutional challenge in response to it of saying that gender identity should not be in the Sex Discrimination Act at all.
00:34:59
Speaker
I didn't do gender identity discrimination. I discriminated on the basis of sex. This is a male person and under the sex discrimination act, that's fine. What are the practical ramifications? If the other side gets up, if they win, they win. Yeah. If they win. I mean, if they win, gosh, I mean, if they win, if you go, well, you just have to, we have to keep fighting, don't we? But so it makes it.
00:35:27
Speaker
The morale to keep going is hard. I would keep going, definitely. Because the legal consequence, right, is that that effectively spells the end of single-sex spaces in Australia. Is that fair to say? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, they win and it's just
00:35:44
Speaker
The precedent is there at the moment. There's no case history of this. So, you know, gender identity has existed in the Sex Discrimination Act for 10 years. It was there in 2013. This is not to say that there's been no problems in the last 10 years. There's been countless issues.
00:36:03
Speaker
It's just that most people have shied away from it. Of course you would. It's cost $155,000 for me to get to this point. It's going to cost a million dollars by the time this is done. Like end change, like if there is any, you know what I mean? Like this, we're dealing with lawyers. Love them, but also they're expensive. And so it just, I mean, that just is what it is. But a lot of individual businesses have just
00:36:31
Speaker
given into it or different organizations, whether it's, you know, just especially like nonprofit organizations or whatever, knowing what would happen. And I understand why they would have for me. I suppose it just, yeah, my, my question, everything thing kicked back in. I learned everything.
00:36:51
Speaker
And it was like, well, either we fight this or we close down. And that's still my position. I mean, this guy will never get on the app. I'd close the damn thing down before I let him on. So it's a complete and utter waste of his time. And I'll- Aside from the matter of principle.
00:37:10
Speaker
It actually completely undermines the value proposition of the app, which is a female only app. Yeah. I mean, the thing is also, it's really important point is that, so back when I didn't know who this person was, and I'm, I'm quite a liberal blocker on Twitter. I block maybe sometimes 10 a day, sometimes a hundred. It depends on what I've said, but I block basically every trans activist I come into contact with. Sometimes I will respond and my response will be there for other people to see.
00:37:40
Speaker
But then I'll block them because I'm not interested in the response or I'll have like.
00:37:44
Speaker
you know, two or three exchanges back and forward. And then I block. Cause I'm just like, no, especially in the pre-Elon days when we could get removed or whatever quite easily. I was just very conscious of that. And so I'd get rid of them as quickly as possible. Um, also because, you know, yeah, I just, I just curated. I mean, I'm, I'm all for female only spaces. I try and curate my Twitter space to be what I want it to be. I think that that's a right that people have.
00:38:10
Speaker
So I didn't realize who I was speaking to at the time, but in February, 2021, yeah, in February, 2021, this person who's done the federal court case, interacted with me on Twitter about female-only spaces. And I said something along the lines of like, you know, I respect anyone to be who they want to be, whatever, but female-only spaces are female-only spaces. And that's just my thing. And I blocked them not knowing who the hell they were. They tweeted, Sal, CEO of Giggle has blocked me.
00:38:39
Speaker
And then they joined the app and now we're in federal court. So they knew exactly what they were getting into. They knew it was a female only app. They knew my stance on it. I mean, you know, and it's costing me a lot of money to defend that. I think that highlights what this situation actually is, what gender ideology actually is, the actual misogyny of the whole thing, which is try and destroy women, whether it's destroy our lives, destroy our businesses, destroy our psyches, because
00:39:06
Speaker
Hell, I cheat you not some days, finding the mental strength to go like, I live in this country where, you know, it can be upheld that a man is a woman is really hard to get your head around, but it is where we are. And so, yeah, I've just keep fighting it. And I would rather, honestly, I would rather move country or set, like just set up the app somewhere else. I will, I will leave. I will do anything it takes.
00:39:35
Speaker
But I will stay here at the same time and I will fight for female-only spaces here because I'm not gonna leave and go and set up a female-only space somewhere else and leave Australian women with none. I'll fight.
What is Sal's commitment to female-only spaces?
00:39:47
Speaker
This opportunity has presented itself to fight and I'll do it. But yeah, it's damn hard. I've been frantically Googling because I wanted to actually get one of the example of those Twitter interactions that you mentioned. And there's a really powerful line here and I'm going to read it out.
00:40:04
Speaker
Tickle insisted that Sal Grover should not refer to herself as female. Tickle said, you keep on using the word female, but I think you mean cis-female.
00:40:14
Speaker
With an F on my birth certificate, I am legally female in Australia. All of my cis girlfriends treat me the same as them. Grover replied, for me, being treated as female is getting death threats. This goes to my final question, Sal, and it's a question which I asked or initially was asked to ask Kelly J. Keene when she was on this podcast earlier in the year from a female listener.
00:40:40
Speaker
She said, what advice would you give to a woman who agrees with you, but is not as strong as you? How would you answer that question? So if you agree with the women who are speaking up, but you don't feel that you can, I completely understand it. Just support the women who do, because then together we're fighting against it.
00:41:01
Speaker
So whether that is amplifying our voices, if it's financial support, sharing what we're saying with people, even if you're doing it quite anonymously, it all counts, every little thing. But I would also say to women, find the strength, it's there.
00:41:18
Speaker
The absolute like I say this is the worst thing that's happening. I'm getting taken to federal court and it's costing like an insane amount of money. So I'm saying this is someone with the worst case scenario happening. You might lose like some things in your life if it's your job at this very moment in time. Well, first of all, we need a mayor for started case in this country. So no one should be able to fire you because you think that men are men and women are women. I mean, that's absurd.
00:41:48
Speaker
So challenge them on it, but find the strength. To me, the most liberating thing I've ever done is go, hang on a second. This is absolute nonsense. And I'm going to say so. I don't regret for a second that I've spoken out about this, not for one, because if I, and I have a daughter now, and if I was sitting here now in a year, five years, whenever it is, and I have to pretend that the man sitting across from me is a woman or that
00:42:16
Speaker
And if, say, wherever we are and that's happening, or that I'm in a change room with my little girl and there's a guy there and I've got to pretend he's a woman, I would, it would.
00:42:27
Speaker
destroy me that I'd done nothing to stop that from happening. So every part of it is worth it. And, you know, one of the weird things about gender identity and the people, the trans activists on their side, it's like they're so desperate for this big civil rights movement, you know, that they can be
00:42:49
Speaker
You know, the the person of their era, but it's I think it's the opposite, like with everything with gender identity. The opposite is true. It's us. We're the ones with the civil rights fight of our era. You know, and yes, some women are on their side. I no doubt about it. I experience it all the time.
00:43:08
Speaker
Yeah cool there were women against women getting the right to vote and against the right to divorce and the right to credit cards and bank accounts and whatnot there's always been women who have been against the rights of women because they.
00:43:23
Speaker
probably I would assume they're just scared of them and very, very wedded to the status quo. But if you are a woman who can just see what's going on, speak up. I don't think at the end of the day, when you're at the end of your life, you're going to look back and regret doing that. No matter what, it might cost you some, I hesitate to say superficial things, but you know what I mean.
00:43:49
Speaker
Not that a job is superficial. I mean, jobs are hard to come by and we all work really, really hard. But what you get might be so much more and what it might lead you to and how you'll feel within yourself. These are all really valuable things as well. So I would just say weigh up the fear and also the more people who speak up, the quicker this will be over. If every person who was against this nonsense spoke up,
00:44:15
Speaker
would be done. It's the people who don't speak up that are keeping it going, unfortunately. So yeah, just speak up loud and proud or support us silently and we'll speak up and we'll help you get there. How can people support you silently?
00:44:28
Speaker
So we have a website, gigglecrowdfund.com. It is where we're raising the money and you can find updates and all information about the case and we'll update them as quickly as possible when anything happens of note. I don't write it. It's my legal team that writes it. So I am a little bit
00:44:49
Speaker
on their mercy. Sometimes there has been times where it's been a little bit slow, but we do get it out there as quickly as possible. They're very busy people. And we built our own because women fighting this fight in the US and the UK have been kicked off like the established crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, whatnot.
00:45:06
Speaker
I was kicked off Kickstarter a few years ago, accused of bigotry. So we built our own cause we didn't want the extra stress. So yeah, it's Google crowd fund where we've got to raise at the moment, the target is $500,000. Cause definitely for federal court, that's what it's going to cost us. If it goes to high court, it's going to be a million. So yeah, we're in this, we're in this for a long time and a long game.
00:45:29
Speaker
Well, so all I can say is that there are thousands and thousands of people who are behind you. I think you're a wonderful role model for young women and young men everywhere. Please keep that fight up. I know that you will. The link to healcrowdfund.com is in the show notes for anyone who wants to support. Thank you very much for coming on, Australiana.
00:45:51
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.