A landmark case on gender identity will address the question of who can legally claim to be a woman after a transgender user was banned from a women-only app.
A Federal Court judge is set to rule on Friday in Roxanne Tickle’s lawsuit against the Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover.
Ms Tickle has claimed $100,000 for alleged discrimination based on her gender identity and the same sum in aggravated damages.
The latter is based on an online campaign allegedly carried out against her by Ms Grover primarily on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ms Tickle was blocked from the Giggle app in September 2021 because of her gender, despite a birth certificate listing her as female, the court was told during a series of often heated hearings in April.
The court was told Ms Grover created the Giggle app as a “safe space” for women to interact with each other, free from male patterns of online violence.
Giggle’s lawyer, Bridie Nolan, argued that Ms Tickle was a man and so it was legal to exclude her from the app due to provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act.
Roxanne Tickle files complaint alleging discrimination based on gender identity
She told Judge Robert Bromwich that the court was faced with the impossible task of determining whether a person was a woman based on her “psychological state” and whether she had undergone surgery to remove her reproductive organs.
“This case is a case of ‘what is a woman’,” Ms. Nolan said.
The court was told Ms Grover had persistently misgendered Ms Tickle in media interviews and in hundreds of posts about the case to her 93,000 online followers.
Ms Tickle’s lawyer, Georgina Costello, said her client had received a “massive” amount of hate online as a result of Ms Grover’s actions.
Sall Grover founded the Giggle for Girls app and stands by her claim
“The continued and deliberate attempt to confuse her with her gender cannot detract from the fact that she is a woman,” Costello argued.
Ms Costello told the court that Ms Tickle had undergone gender affirmation surgery and hormone treatments, identified as female to family, friends and at work, and used women’s changing rooms and clothing stores.
“Up until this point, everyone has treated me like a woman,” Tickle said.
It is the first time the Federal Court has heard a case alleging discrimination based on gender identity.