Australian Trans-Woman Wins Landmark Case Against Female-Only App

An Australian court ruled on Friday that removing a transgender woman from the female-only social networking platform Giggle for Girls constituted discrimination, in a landmark decision on gender identity for the country.

Roxanne Tickle, the transgender woman from the state of New South Wales, was subjected to indirect gender biases when she was allegedly blocked from the app in 2021 on the basis that she was born a man, the Federal Court of Australia said on August 23, Friday.

Known as “Tickle vs Giggle”, the case is the first time alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by the federal court in Australia.

Tickle vs Giggle: Case Details 

Giggle for Girls app's creator Sall Grover had argued that women-only spaces should be allowed to limit access to “cisgender” women, or those whose birth sex aligns with their gender identity. But Justice Robert Bromwich found that the app had discriminated against Tickle as its use was conditioned on her having the “appearance of a cisgender woman.”

“It is not denied or otherwise in doubt that the basis for the exclusion of Ms Tickle was that she was perceived to have a male appearance, that is, she was perceived to have been male at birth. Indeed, this was the very essence of the respondents’ case,” Bromwich said in his ruling.

Bromwich said Giggle for Girls considered only sex at birth as being a valid basis on which a person may claim to be a man or woman. Tickle was of male sex at the time of birth but underwent gender-affirming surgery and Tickle's birth certificate was updated, he said.

He said that Tickle was considered female under the law, as reflected in her updated birth certificate, and that it was outside his purview to consider, or to far less determine, the general nature of biological sex.

“The science behind that evidence is not, as far as it goes, in dispute. It is just that the issues in this case involve wider issues than biology,” he said.

Bromwich ordered that Tickle shall be paid 10,000 Australian dollars ($6,700) in compensation, plus costs. He declined Tickle’s claim for an apology, finding that it would be “futile and inappropriate to require an inevitably insincere apology to be made”. Meanwhile, Tickle, who underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019, told Australia’s national broadcaster outside court that she hoped the outcome would promote “healing."

Tickle received support from the Grata Fund, while a crowdfunding campaign set up to cover Giggle for Girls’ legal costs raised more than $520,000.

Grover, who has said she created the app after facing social media abuse from men while working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, said in a post on social media that she had “anticipated” the ruling. “The fight for women’s rights continues,” she added on X.

LGBTQ activists have argued that trans women should be treated the same as other women when it comes to traditionally segregated areas of life, such as changing rooms and sports.