Transgender woman wins landmark case against ‘female-only’ app
A transgender woman has won a discrimination case in the federal court after she was banned from a female-only social networking app. Roxanne tickle sued the founder and CEO of the "giggle" app claiming she'd been discriminated against based on gender identity. Today a judge ordered she be paid 10 thousand in compensation.
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00:00Sure. Well, Roxanne Tickle downloaded this app called Giggle back in February 2021. Now,
00:06this is an app that was marketed as a female-only digital space. It was meant to be sort of
00:12like an online refuge for women. Now, to get on there, users had to provide a selfie, which
00:17was assessed by AI software to determine whether they were a man or a woman. Roxanne Tickle
00:22did that and her photo was accepted. But later in the year, that decision was manually overridden.
00:27So she took this case to the federal court and claimed that that exclusion constituted
00:31gender identity discrimination. That set the stage for the court to really contemplate
00:36the scope and meaning of some 2013 changes to the Sex Discrimination Act. Now, Roxanne
00:42Tickle, the court heard, has a birth certificate, which reflects her gender as female, and she's
00:47also had gender-affirming surgery. But lawyers for the app's founder, Sal Grover, relied
00:53on a biological definition of what sex is. They believed that it was what a person is
00:57assigned at birth, and it was their opinion that that is an unchangeable thing. Now, they
01:03denied that there had been prohibited discrimination here, and to do that, they invoked a carve-out
01:09of sex discrimination law, which has measures in it where you're allowed to discriminate
01:15if the intention of whatever you're doing is substantial equality between men and women.
01:21Their defence argument was that this app and its intentions fit squarely into that
01:25category, which should have given them an exemption in their argument.
01:28Yeah, okay, it's fascinating, isn't it? So what did the court rule today?
01:32Well, Justice Robert Bromwich has found in favour of Roxanne Tickle. He has decided that
01:37there was indirect gender identity discrimination against Ms Tickle, and he's ordered that she
01:43be paid $10,000 in compensation plus costs. The judge today, in a summary of his decision,
01:49has said that the indirect discrimination case has succeeded because Roxanne Tickle
01:54was excluded from the use of this app because she did not look sufficiently female, according
02:00to the app's staff and the respondents in this case. The judge has also said in this
02:04judgment that the arguments about sex being a reference to a person's sex at birth have
02:09failed because there is something like 30 years or more of cases that have looked at
02:14this question, and Justice Bromwich said those cases established that in its ordinary
02:19meaning sex is changeable. So that's a significant thing to come out of this judgment. Roxanne
02:24Tickle had also wanted a written apology from the respondents, but the judge declined to
02:29make that order because he believed that any apology would not be sincere, given that Sal
02:34Grover is someone who holds her beliefs very firmly.
02:37Okay, so what was the reaction like outside the court?
02:40We spoke to Roxanne Tickle and she is very pleased with this outcome, but she did speak
02:45as well about this being a three-year fight that has really stolen years of her life.
02:50She said she's been exposed to hateful online commentary, and she said that's not just something
02:55that has affected her, but she said it really hurts the community of trans and gender-diverse
03:00people more broadly. But outside court she told us that the ruling shows that all women
03:04are protected from discrimination under the current laws.
03:08I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave, and that you can stand up
03:13for yourself. I know that I can now get on with the rest of my life, have coffee down
03:19the road with my friends, play hockey with my hockey team, and now put all of this horribleness
03:24behind me.
03:25Now we also heard briefly outside court from Sal Grover herself, and when she spoke to
03:30the media she didn't seem that surprised about this decision.
03:34Unfortunately it is the judgement we anticipated, and the fight for women's rights in Australia
03:39continues.
03:40Now, another thing that Roxanne Tickle was requesting here was the reinstatement of her
03:46Giggle account, but that's not possible for the court to order at the moment, because
03:50the app is offline and nobody is using it at the moment.