Major Australian transgender rights case about to be decided will revolve around the question of ‘what is a woman’
A landmark gender identity case centers on the question of who can legally call herself a woman, after a transgender user was banned from a women-only app.
A federal court judge will rule Friday in Roxanne Tickle’s lawsuit against the app Giggle for Girls and its founder, Sall Grover.
Ms. Tickle is seeking $100,000 for alleged discrimination based on her gender identity and the same amount again for aggravated damages.
The latter is based on an online campaign Grover reportedly waged against her, primarily on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ms Tickle was blocked from the Giggle app in September 2021 based on her gender, despite her birth certificate listing her as female, the court was told during a series of often heated hearings in April.
The court was told that Ms Grover developed the Giggle app as a “safe space” where women could communicate with each other, free from male patterns of online violence.
Giggle’s lawyer Bridie Nolan argued that Ms Tickle was a man and that it was therefore lawful to exclude her from the app due to provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act.
Roxanne Tickle files complaint of alleged discrimination based on gender identity
She told Judge Robert Bromwich that the court faced the impossible task of determining whether a person was a woman based on their “psychological state” and the fact that they had undergone surgery to remove their reproductive organs.
“This case is the ‘what is a woman’ case,” said Ms. Nolan.
The court was told that Ms Grover had repeatedly misdirected Ms Tickle in media interviews and in hundreds of messages about the case to her 93,000 online followers.
Ms Tickle’s lawyer Georgina Costello said her client had faced a “huge” amount of online hate as a result of Ms Grover’s actions.
Sall Grover founded the Giggle for Girls app and is defending the claim
“The fact that she deliberately and persistently misidentifies as a woman does not change the fact that she is a woman,” Costello argued.
Ms Costello told the court that Ms Tickle had undergone gender confirmation surgery and hormone treatment, identified as female to her family, friends and at work, and used changing rooms and women’s clothing stores.
“Until now, everyone has treated me as a woman,” Tickle said.
It is the first time that the Federal Court has heard a case alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity.