Radfems (a lot like Sall Grover) enabled transactivism; about time they undid its treachery

Note: a shorter, edited version of this piece appeared in Conservative Woman in May 2026

Antagonistic-revolutionary feminists (trans-exclusionary radical feminists/TERFs) applauded the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling as a blow to “the patriarchy, men and their misogyny.” It implied there are only two, immutable sexes; tempering, if not thwarting transactivism (enforced mainstreaming of gender ideology). Their qualified applause implied, "men are the problem."

Understandably, they’re mourning the May 2026 Federal Court of Australia ruling as a victory for “the patriarchy, men and their misogyny.” Their qualified mourning implies, again, "men are the problem."

The tussle in Australia is about professed TERF Ms. Sall Grover CEO of women-only networking app Giggle for Girls, evicting transgender man Mr. Roxanne Tickle (never mind his “female” birth certificate), after he’d slunk into the app trying to pass off as a woman, then being sued for it by Tickle. Grover plans to appeal to the High Court of Australia (Australia’s Supreme Court). 

Antagonistic feminists are right, transactivism is tyranny. But unlike classical-conciliatory-gradualist feminists they insist, men, not women, are to blame, and that misogyny is only what’s done to — not also by — women. The word figures so often in Grover’s tweets, trolls call her Sall “Misogyny” Grover, as if announcing a Madison Square Garden boxer.

Legalese aside, the distraction of women-only spaces aside, are men, who’ve had “work” done to look like women, indeed women? No. Still, perverted men worldwide have long pretended otherwise. Trouble is, too many influential women played along, for decades. And millions of ordinary women and girls paid the price.

There’s the rub. Australia’s no exception. Cultural commentator Carlz J Söda says, protections for women weren't destroyed by men, but by influential women who “decided that the feelings of a few outweighed the safety of the many, then made it a federal offence to disagree.”

That needs nuance. Men with perverse interests participated, passively and actively, in this destruction. But if influential women hadn’t played along, passively and actively, none of this would’ve happened. Those who imagine otherwise are, insultingly implying that influential women have about as much agency as apps.

Unsurprisingly, on Giggle vs. Tickle, it’s an influential woman Dr. Anna Cody, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who’s been advising the court that men can become women and must be treated as women.

Two of the three judges who ruled in May 2026 are women; their judgement references ‘Ms’ Tickle over 450 times. 

But this isn’t about judges, even ones who pretend to be merely serving rather than shaping the law. It’s about how lunacy became law in the first place. 

The Sex Discrimination Amendment 2013 (SDA) violated the spirit of Australia’s own Sex Discrimination Act 1984, destroying sex-based protections, including newer protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, gravely undermining what a woman is. It was so far-reaching, as many as 58 federal laws had to accommodate its notorious provisions. 

How did Australia get here?

The SDA resulted from sustained lobbying by radfems and intersectional feminists. But vulnerability of sexual orientation rather than of sex or womanhood weighed more heavily on their minds. So, they aimed for quick wins, embracing a coalition comprising men: gays. And, yes, transgenders.

Talk of letting the fox into the henhouse. As the Aesop’s fable about farmer and snake suggests: Never nurse a viper in your bosom.

You needn’t agree with everything commentator John Macgowan says, but he’s right to recall the havoc wrought by the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Inspired by the world’s antagonistic feminists, Australia’s feminists were instrumental in cementing the affixing of T to LGB in the Australian Capital Territory: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Amendment Act 2003, the Sexuality Discrimination Legislation Amendment Act 2004. These laws and their clones wouldn’t have materialised without groundwork by feminist senator Susan Ryan.

For years, the likes of Grover were so busy being radical they forgot that as feminists, their overarching allegiance was to women, not lesbianism.

So, part of this cheery coalition, antagonistic feminists coaxed the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) into what produced the 2006-07 National Inquiry into Discrimination against Same-Sex Relationships: Same-Sex Entitlements report.

But here’s the thing…. 

All ten people on the Inquiry Team were women. 

Eight of the nine on its Legal Team were women. 

Two of its three Consultants were women. 

Over half of nearly 700 written submissions were from women.

Over half of those at public hearings across Australia, were women.

Since 1984, ten out of eleven of the AHRC’s Sex Discrimination Commissioners, and four of its eight Presidents have been women. 

The shrillest pro-SDA voices? Influential women senators: Penny Wong, Nicola Roxon (Australia’s first woman Attorney General), Penny Wright, Sue Boyce, Louise Pratt, Sarah Hanson-Young, Christine Milne, Larissa Waters. Topping it all, was transactivist-in-chief Julia Gillard, first woman to be Australia’s PM. Does it matter who was radical, who intersectional, and who TERF? What matters is that they were influential women who could’ve, should’ve protected ordinary women but did the opposite.

Against that (radicalised) feminist backdrop, the SDA was a foregone conclusion.

It is antagonistic feminists who ensured that the AHRC and senators took seriously the mischief of sex-therapist-led Sex & Gender Education (SAGE) and its “brother” sex-diverse organisations. Why mischief? While spotlighting some genuine victims who were transgender men, they managed to spotlight many villains, as victims too. 

Antagonistic feminisms of “sexuality, gender” had by then replaced classical feminisms of “sex, woman, womanhood.” The tyranny of pronouns was inevitable. Is it surprising that Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies all but replaced Women’s Studies? And academia and civil society became preoccupied with sex diversity, sexual orientation, and gender-affirmation or non-conformity, depending on the day of the week. 

As classical feminist Christina Sommers says, radical feminism rejects its cultural inheritance as “irredeemably patriarchal” then seeks to “revolutionize and destroy it,” while classical feminism seeks to use its unique, womanly understanding to “join men on equal terms in the making of a new and richer culture.”

It’s nice for radfems like Grover to have afterthoughts on the lines of “sex, not gender,” but having enforced Judith Butlerian “gender, not sex” thought policing on industrial-scale, they can’t wish away decades of antagonistic propaganda by their peers and predecessors simply by claiming to be TERF.

The real world doesn’t work like that; the stickiness of radicalism won’t allow it. It’s as if being TERF and protective of sex as a binary, gives them licence to engender in women followers their proudly-sported loathing of men, heterosexual marriage and motherhood, and fondness for abortion.

Sensibly, lawyer Helen Dale clarifies, Australian feminists neutered male-only spaces in ways British feminists couldn’t. So, in the absence of physical risk to women (Giggle isn’t explicitly a dating app) it’s harder for them to now secure women-only exceptions claiming that anything short of it is misogyny, because feminists once denied men their men-only exemptions, even if nobody then called that misandry.

Now, sensing the shifting sands and surging sympathy for Grover, some political parties may change tack and try to undo the SDA’s damage, as radfems like Grover are trying to shrug off predecessor and peer solidarity with transactivism. 

But what of the humiliation, shame, fear and assault that ordinary women and girls endured for 13 years in bathrooms, locker-rooms, sports fields, gyms, prisons, shelters since the SDA became law? 

Cowardly antagonistic feminists surrendered rights that courageous classical feminists had, over decades, fought for, and won for women. Clawing back some of those rights isn’t exactly heroism; it’s the least Grover & Co. can do, stained as they are with a heritage of self-loathing ideologies.

Neither Grover nor her radfem colleagues have been honest or courageous in admitting that the double-standards of antagonistic feminists misdirected decades of taxpayer time, money and effort toward propping up transactivists, who’d be nowhere today had it not been for sanctifying alliances offered them by Grover’s ilk. 

Perhaps it’s conspiratorial to imagine that a women-only app, run by a radfem, whose pet curse word is “misogyny,” has nothing but “peace and goodwill to all men” on the agenda.

Does anyone care? All anyone seems to care about now is solidarity with Sall; see, my feminism is bigger than yours.

If Grover had devoted even half her time, money and effort then to tearing down the SDA she might be more of the feminist heroine she’s being made out to be now.

Cannily, she’s transformed her private tussle into a public battle, hoovering up public money, counting on the very performative empathy that powered antagonistic feminisms. After all, there’s more sympathy for the platformed, glamorous Grover and her for-profit app in weeks than there’s ever been for millions of voiceless, unglamorous women and girls lobotomised by the SDA over a decade.

The least that gung-ho donors ought to demand is that donations be used to dismantle antagonistic feminisms that brainwashed so many women and girls into self-loathing. But how likely is that if, knowing that Australia drinks from America’s poisoned chalice of gender ideology, Grover idolizes America’s transactivists-in-chief, the Obamas? 

The Obama Foundation, powered in no small measure by Michelle, patronises organisations serving adolescent girls of “all” gender expressions and identities; code for boys too, as long as they “feel” like they’re girls. 

In the stampede for solidarity with Grover, it’s tempting to overlook the fact that radical feminism is at root rapacious indoctrination, as diabolically divisive as gender ideology, just differently.

Antagonistic new-age feminisms are, in Rob Henderson’s language, luxury beliefs. 

Privileged antagonistic feminists, drunk on freedoms won by classical feminists, played fast and loose with those freedoms, only to have them backfire, most horrifyingly on underprivileged women, feminists or not. That they’re having to pick up the pieces shouldn’t shock. 

Judges? They should throw this lunacy back at legislators and refuse to hear (let alone deliver verdicts on) cases concerning laws with no basis in reality. That they don’t, demonstrates how misandry can so easily come back to bite as misogyny and vice versa. 

Classical feminism is, justly, about women’s rights alongside men’s rights. But antagonistic feminism breathes loathing. It stems from and breeds among women self-loathing, or to use a pet Grover term, misogyny. 

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on culture and society.