Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle has won a novel gender identity case brought against a women’s-only social media app and its owner after she was excluded from the platform. Federal Court Justice Robert Bromwich found Giggle for Girls and its owner Sall Grover had “indirectly discriminated” against Ms Tickle and ordered her to pay the applicant $10,000 and her legal costs. “I have found that Ms Tickle’s claim of direct gender identity discrimination fails but that her claim on indirect gender identity discrimination succeeds. I will make a declaration of contravention by way of unlawful indirect gender identity discrimination respondents subject to input from the parties as to the form of that declaration,” Justice Bromwich said. He also found that “sex is changeable” after Ms Grover argued it was not. Ms Tickle, who underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019 and is now designated as female on her birth certificate, argues she was discriminated against on the grounds of gender identity by Giggle for Girls and Ms Grover when she was excluded from the women’s networking app.
The transgender woman claims she was initially accepted into the app in February 2021 after she submitted a “selfie” through Giggle’s third-party artificial intelligence tool but was later blocked when Ms Grover surveyed the image herself. It is the first time a case alleging gender identity discrimination has been heard by the Federal Court following changes to the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013, which made it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status. “In relation to the direct discrimination claim, the evidence did not establish that Ms Tickle was excluded from the Giggle app by reason of her gender identity, although it remains possible that this was the real but unproven reason,” Justice Bromwich said, adding that the alleged discriminator would have needed to be aware of the person’s gender identity. “The evidence goes no further than establishing that Ms Tickle’s exclusion was likely to have been a by-product of excluding those perceived of being men by the use of visual criteria that failed to discriminate between cisgender men and transgender women.
“The same evidence, did however, support the conclusion that indirect gender identity discrimination did take place … because Ms Tickle was excluded from the Giggle app because she did not look sufficiently female according to the respondents.” Ms Grover previously told the court she does not accept that a person who transitions from male to female surgically, socially, and legally is a woman, and removed her from the app as she does with “all males”. She also argued that sex was “unchangeable”. But on Friday, Justice Bromwich said “these arguments failed because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those court cases established that on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable”. Ms Grover also failed in two constitutional arguments, with Justice Bromwich rejecting the suggestion that the Federal Government did not have the power to enact the Sex Discrimination Act. She took to X following the judgment: “Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.”
Source: Compiled by APN from media sources
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