Trans woman wins landmark victory in discrimination case against ‘Giggle for Girls’ social media app

The Federal Court of Australia ruled on Friday that a women-only social media platform unlawfully discriminated against a transgender woman by banning her from the app and doubled the damages awarded to her.

The court said Roxanne Tickle’s exclusion from Giggle for Girls amounted to unlawful discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and increased the damages awarded to her from £5,361 to £10,722. It also ordered the platform to pay legal costs amounting to £26,805, according to the Guardian.

The case, originally filed in December 2022, is believed to be the first gender-identity discrimination matter to reach the federal court since protections relating to gender identity were added to the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013.

Giggle for Girls was launched in 2020 by Australian writer and app developer Sall Grover as a women-only social networking platform and digital “safe space” for women. The app allowed users to connect for friendship, professional networking, housing, support groups and activism, and used selfie-based facial recognition software to determine whether applicants appeared female before granting access.

Judges Melissa Perry, Wendy Abraham and Geoffrey Kennett upheld a 2024 decision by Justice Robert Bromwich, who had found the app and its founder indirectly discriminated against Tickle by blocking her access to the platform in 2021 after determining that she appeared to be male.

In its ruling, the federal court underscored two instances of direct discrimination. First, when Tickle was excluded from the platform because of her “gender-related appearance”. Second, when she was refused readmission.

“This amounted to direct discrimination by reference to a characteristic that pertains to people of Ms Tickle’s gender identity, being a transgender woman,” Justice Perry said, according to Reuters. “Ms Tickle has been successful in her cross appeal under the act, gender identity is defined as meaning gender-related identity and gender-related characteristics, including appearance.”

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Tickle joined the app in 2021 after uploading a selfie as part of the registration process, which used AI to assess whether users appeared female. Her account was soon restricted following a manual review by Grover.

The court heard Tickle had lived as a woman since 2017, undergone gender-affirming surgery and held an updated birth certificate that listed her sex as female.

In his ruling last year, Justice Bromwich observed that the app had imposed a condition requiring users to appear “cisgendered female”, disadvantaging transgender women. He rejected Grover’s argument that sex assigned at birth was immutable, writing that Australian court decisions over three decades had established that “sex is changeable”, according to the ABC.

Grover appealed the ruling, arguing that the app had been created as a “women-only safe space” and qualified as a “special measure” under Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, which permitted some discriminatory measures intended to address historical disadvantage between men and women.

The federal court rejected the argument and upheld Justice Bromwich’s finding that the exemption did not apply.

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The judges also criticised aspects of Grover’s conduct during the proceedings, saying her use of male pronouns for Tickle was unnecessary.

“Some of her conduct was gratuitous, disrespectful, and unnecessary to the conduct of her case,” the judges wrote. “It did not advance her defence.”

Tickle had argued in her cross-appeal that the original damages awarded did not reflect the emotional impact of the discrimination and the effect of Grover’s public comments and conduct. Outside the court in Sydney on Friday, Tickle said she hoped the ruling would help “trans and gender diverse people and their loved ones to heal”.

“I’ve brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave and that you can stand up for yourself. In the process, I surprised myself at how brave I could be.”

Tickle said she had not anticipated the hostility she would face after beginning gender affirmation in 2017. “I had no idea that a small minority of people who had never met me would invest an incredible amount of their own precious time and effort into ridiculing, degrading, threatening and mocking me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that most Australians are kind and believe in allowing everyone to be free to live their life in dignity and be free to be who they truly are.”

Grover wrote on social media that she was “absolutely devastated” by the decision and that she would be taking the case to the High Court.

“Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia. It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us. But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow and men will still not be women,” she posted on X.

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