(LifeSiteNews) — A Sydney court has sided with trans activists once again – this time, doubling the discrimination payout owed to Roxanne Tickle, a trans-identifying man who sued Sall Grover after being removed from the “Giggle for Girls” app that served females only before shutting down.
The bizarre case – Tickle v. Giggle – turned into a landmark victory for LGBT activists. Tickle (who began “transitioning” around 2017 and was previously named Jason) joined the Giggle for Girls social networking app in 2021. Grover had created the app in 2020 as a female-only “safe space.” After Tickle’s profile was reviewed, he was removed.
Tickle sued both Giggle and Grover in 2022 for “unlawful discrimination” on the grounds of “gender identity” under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. In 2024, Justice Bromwich issued a Federal Court ruling that found indirect discrimination, stating that sex is “changeable” and not strictly biological or binary. Grover was ordered to pay Tickle $10,000 AUD and legal costs.
The ruling also stated that trans-identifying men were protected under the Sex Discrimination Act and that female-only policies cannot exclude them. Grover appealed, and Tickle cross-appealed, seeking a ruling that would find direct rather than indirect discrimination. Grover’s appeal was dismissed; Tickle’s was accepted.
On May 15, the Federal Court ruled that there were two instances of direct discrimination – the initial exclusion of Tickle, and Grover’s refusal to readmit him to the app. The “damages” awarded to Tickle were upped to 20,000 AUD in recognition of public “misgendering.”
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The court stated that Grover had treated Tickle, “who is a transgender woman, less favorably than a person designated female at birth seeking access to the Giggle App.”
LGBT activists are triumphant; the case now affirms that trans-identifying men can access female-only services under Australian federal discrimination law and formally rejects the very concept of biological sex in favor of “gender identity” claims. Grover has said she may appeal to Australia’s High Court; the social networking app Giggle has been shut down. Grover’s team had argued that sex is biological, an argument that was successful at the U.K.’s high court.
The BBC noted that Grover had founded the app “in response to online abuse by men during her time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. ‘I wanted to create a safe, women-only space in the palm of your hand,’ she said earlier.”
“I am absolutely devastated,” Grover wrote on X. “Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia. It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us. But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow & men will still not be women.”
“A law written to protect women has been used to punish a woman for creating a space for women. That is what today’s judgment means in practice,” stated Robert Clarke, director of advocacy for ADF International.
“The addition of ‘gender identity’ to the Sex Discrimination Act has been used to undermine the most basic conception of what a woman is,” Clarke continued. “The need for single-sex spaces is recognized in international human rights law. It must be recognized in Australian law too, and if the courts will not say so, then Parliament must.”
