Banning a transgender woman from a female-only app constituted unlawful discrimination, a judge has found in a landmark gender-identity case.
Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from regional NSW sued the women-only social media platform Giggle for Girls and its CEO, Sall Grover, claiming she was unlawfully barred from using the app in 2021 after the firm and Grover said she was a man.
The Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover were on Friday ordered to pay $10,000 in compensation and legal costs to a user kicked off the single-gender platform.
The decision that Roxanne Tickle suffered indirect discrimination marked the first time the Federal Court had weighed into gender identity discrimination.
The indirect discrimination cases succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle app because she did not look sufficiently female according to the respondents,” Justice Robert Bromwich said.
In a finding that could also have implications for other female-only spaces, Justice Bromwich found that even if considered a special measure to promote equality, the Giggle app was not allowed to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
He distinguished discrimination based on gender identity and based on sex.
The compensation amount is a sliver of the $200,000 Ms Tickle had sought, half of which was based on aggravated damages.
The latter was based on an online campaign allegedly waged against her by Ms Grover largely on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ms Tickle was blocked from the Giggle app in September 2021 on the basis of her gender, despite a birth certificate listing her as female, the court was told during a series of often-heated hearings in April.
The court was told Ms Grover created the Giggle app as a “safe space” for women to interact with each other, free from male patterns of online violence.
