A transgender woman in Australia was unlawfully discriminated against when she was barred from a female-only social media community, a court has ruled.
Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from the state of New South Wales, was subjected to “indirect gender discrimination” when she was blocked from the Giggle for Girls app in 2021 on the basis that she was born a man, the Federal Court of Australia said on Friday.
Giggle for Girls 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.
“Nor do the respondents deny in this proceeding that the effect of this condition was that it would not just exclude men who were male sex at birth, but also transgender women too, including transgender women who are legally regarded as female.”
Bromwich 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, 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 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”.
Tickle, who underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019, told Australia’s national broadcaster outside court that she hoped the outcome would promote “healing”.
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 said on X.
The case, dubbed Tickle v Giggle, had generated significant attention outside Australia amid an ongoing culture war over how to define sex and gender.
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.
So-called gender-critical feminists and other critics of trans activists have argued that women need female-only spaces in light of the biological differences between the sexes.
