Banning a transgender woman from using a women-only app constitutes illegal discrimination, a judge has ruled in a landmark case over gender identity.
The Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover were ordered on Friday to pay $10,000 in compensation and legal costs to a user banned from the single-gender platform.
The decision that Roxanne Tickle suffered indirect discrimination marked the first time the Federal Court intervened on the issue of gender identity discrimination.
“The indirect discrimination case was successful because Ms Tickle was excluded from using the Giggle app because she did not appear feminine enough to the respondents,” said Judge Robert Bromwich.
In a finding that could also have implications for other women-only spaces, Judge Bromwich concluded that even if considered a special measure to promote equality, the Giggle app was not permitted to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
He distinguished between discrimination based on gender identity and discrimination based on sex.
The compensation amount is a small fraction of the $200,000 Ms Tickle had sought, half of which was based on aggravated damages.
The latter was based on an online campaign allegedly carried out against her by Ms Grover primarily on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Roxanne Tickle won her gender identity discrimination case
Sall Grover founded the Giggle for Girls app and stands by her claim
Following the decision, Grover wrote on X: “Unfortunately, we received the verdict we expected. The fight for women’s rights continues.”
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.
She told Judge Bromwich 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.
“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.
Pictured: The Giggle app
“Up until this point, everyone has treated me like a woman,” Tickle said.
Ms Grover calls herself a “TERF,” an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” TERFs’ views on gender identity are considered hostile toward transgender people.
The result has sparked an online debate, with Grover’s supporters criticising the decision.
“What an absolute disgrace and failure on the part of the Australian courts and politicians,” Kirralie Smith said.
‘This pathetic and dangerous law is as bad as legal slavery and racism and must be repealed!
‘Restore women’s rights’.
Australian TV presenter Lucy Zelic said: ‘This isn’t over #IStandwithSallGrover’.
“It’s absolutely maddening, but this clearly shows that including gender identity in legislation leaves women with no enforceable boundaries vis-a-vis any men,” said Ro Edge, co-founder of Save Women’s Sports Australasia.
“We are with you every step of the way,” Victorian MP Moira Deeming wrote on X, sharing a photo of herself with Grover, controversial 2022 Liberal Party candidate Katherine Deves and Women’s Forum chief executive Rachel Wong.
Others applauded the ruling, arguing that it was the correct outcome.
“A spectacular result in Tickle v Giggle, and we can now cite Tickle v Giggle as a key precedent in defending and protecting women’s rights against misogyny,” one man wrote.
—Yes, in case you don’t understand the law or don’t know how to read court rulings, Roxanne Tickle is a woman.
Friday’s decision can be appealed.
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