Tickle v. Betsy

A worldwide Gender Borg is turning ordinary women’s lives into ideological battlefields

Photo by Sergey Vinogradov on Unsplash

I spoke with “Betsy,” a California mom, on the same day the Tickle v. Giggle verdict came down in an Australian federal court. The Tickle notification popped up on my phone right after I’d clicked out of the Zoom interview. “Uh oh,” I thought, “better postpone the piece about Betsy and write something about this important international news story.”

Then I realized the stories were the same.

On the face of it, Sall Grover and Betsy have little in common. Sall is a former Hollywood screenwriter who, having had enough of the sex-based harassment pervading the film industry, moved back to her home country and launched an app to help women connect online without the presence of men, only to be sued by a trans identifying male to whom she denied entry. Betsy is a mom of three, a longtime West Coast liberal with a master’s in education and deep knowledge of local schools and politics, whose youngest daughter suffers from ROGD. Sall’s story and face (not to mention the face of Roxanne Tickle, the man who sued her) are all over the internet; Betsy spoke to me with her camera off, needing to protect her anonymity. The two women live half a world apart.

What links Sall and Betsy is the direct, personal impact that a new state religion, call it Sex Denialism, has had on their work, their family, their friendships, and their overall wellbeing. When people ask me, “Why do you care about this stuff?” I think about the countless Salls and Betsys out there—some famous, most decidedly not—who have had their lives turned upside down, even ruined, by top-down laws, policies, and guidelines enforcing an anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-science ethos.

Betsy describes her youngest daughter, “Alyson,” as “sciencey, mathematical, artistic.” In elementary school, Alyson was GATE-identified: gifted and talented. “She liked the outdoors, swimming, and the beach. A pretty typical kid.”

Betsy had been following the gender debate since 2014. She credits organizations such as 4thWaveNow, the Pique Resilience Project, and Transgender Trend with raising her awareness of the topic, and she took heed when Kellie-Jay Keen in the UK “sounded the alarm about paying attention to what they’re teaching your children.” In January 2017, National Geographic featured a “trans kid” on its cover under the headline The Gender Revolution. “That seems to be the year things really exploded,” she says.

As Alyson entered fifth grade, Betsy was keeping tabs on the school health curriculum. “The fifth-grade sex ed class,” she says, “was normal. They separated the boys from the girls and taught the girls about periods and so on. That was all fine.” But in seventh grade, girls and boys were kept together for sex ed. More worrisome to Betsy, there was a new health curriculum, brought in to align with the California Healthy Youth Act of 2016 (which requires instruction on gender identity) and sponsored by a group called Advocates for Youth.

“The school district hired a new person as the health class coordinator,” Betsy explains. “In past years, a science teacher would teach the class, but now they wanted the health coordinator to teach it. Toward the end of the semester, my daughter brought home a handout of the Genderbread Person. She told me they’d been learning about sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. And she told me that the teacher, who presented as a woman, had announced at the end of the class that they were trans.”

Betsy called the school and left a voicemail message. “I’m an educator. I’ve had classes in child development. I know that who you want to have sex with is not developmentally appropriate material for this age group. And that teacher told the class he was transgender; in my opinion, that’s a boundary violation. That’s teaching a religious belief.

“Adolescence is a time when kids are undergoing big shifts in body growth, emotional growth, and social growth. They are insecure. Pushing the idea that ‘you might be born in the wrong body’ under the guise of ‘health’ is potentially very damaging.”

Betsy said none of this in the voicemail; she merely said she had concerns about the class and asked for a call back. “The person who called me back was the health coordinator. The number was not a school district number. I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t feel safe raising anything with him. I was afraid of being labeled transphobic.”

Later, she talked to someone in a position of authority and shared her concerns. “But it just didn’t go anywhere. At the time, we had a schoolboard member with a child who’d adopted a trans identity. I wonder if the person I spoke to felt they couldn’t push back because of that board member.”

Soon after that sex ed class, Alyson began developing body-image issues. “As puberty progressed,” says Betsy, “she took on a gender-neutral persona, trying a different name, different pronouns. She consumed a lot of LGBTQ information online, trying to make sense of it all, and nearly all that info was not about the LGB, but about the TQ.” Jazz Jennings was on TV, Caitlyn Jenner had been on the cover of Vanity Fair, and there was a sense, says Betsy, that “you must accept these ideas or you’re a bigot.” Now in her late teens, Alyson remains “confused … still in the bubble.”

I asked Betsy whether she tried discussing the situation with friends, fellow parents, or other teachers. What reactions did she get?

“Over the years, I’ve seen so many of my daughter’s peers latch on to a trans identity, and I’ve felt really uncomfortable talking about it. Whenever I reached out, my concerns seemed to fall on deaf ears. I might get someone to agree about surgery for minors, but that’s it. They won’t go any further. It’s almost like if it doesn’t affect them personally, they don’t get it.

“In some conversations with friends, it’s clear they label my views as rightwing talking points. I don’t understand how this particular issue became a wedge issue. We should all be united in preserving our humanity. What makes us human is our bodies, and our bodies are not wrong.”

As for her relationship with Alyson now: “It’s not a conversation I can readily have with her. She’s at the age where she wants to separate from parents; she has to find the nuance herself. I’m trying to just love and take care of her the best I can and hope the laws change around gender medicine. I’m hoping there are trusted adults out there who will push back.

“I feel a lot of fear, anxiety, frustration. Used to be you didn’t have to worry that your child would take hormones and destroy their endocrine system or have surgery to remove healthy body parts. Now, you do.”

Right after my conversation with Betsy, I watched Andrew Gold’s YouTube interview with Sall Grover from several months ago. Sall talked about the lawsuit: how Roxy Tickle had persecuted her, calling and texting her at all hours to complain about his expulsion from Giggle and threaten her with legal action, then delaying his court filings to the last possible moment, leaving her on sickening tenterhooks. She talked about having to raise a quarter of a million dollars to defend the case. She talked about needing to become an expert in Australian anti-discrimination law. She talked about shutting down her business in order to protect it from legal jeopardy and, worse, from the slew of men—an unsavory mix of trans activists, autogynephiles, attention seekers, and rank opportunists—demanding admittance. And she talked about how all this went down while she was pregnant with her daughter.

Last week, she lost the case. The judge in his verdict said, “By its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable and not binary.”

Angering as such nonsense is, many people have pointed out that this understanding of “sex by its ordinary meaning” reflects Australian federal law, so the proper target of our anger is not the judge—who is simply interpreting the law, not creating it—but the Australian parliament, or the attorney general, or the prime minister. When I asked Betsy whom she holds accountable for her and her daughter’s distress, she pointed to a specific set of California laws mandating “gender affirmation” in schools, family therapy, and pediatric medicine. “Also,” she says, “the social justice movements on college campuses have trickled down into high schools and now into elementary schools. It’s a top-down thing.”

Sall and Betsy know who to blame. But when I think about the multitude of Salls and Betsys, the few big names and the myriad unnamed, whose peace of mind has been wrecked by sex denialist dogma in all its pernicious forms, my own finger-pointing becomes far more hand-wavey. Out there, I see an amorphous, faceless, worldwide administrative army, equal parts liberal and conservative, hellbent on turning ordinary people’s lives—ordinary women’s lives—into ideological battlefields.

And I have to wonder: How do we fight the Gender Borg?

Solid blue takes on sex, lies, and gender-woo is an interview series written by Jocelyn Davis and brought to you by DIAG. Learn more at di-ag.org.