An Australian male has won his case against the female founder of women’s only app Giggle for Girls after she said the male, who identifies as a woman, was not permitted on the app due to his being male. A judge has awarded the male, who goes by Roxanne Tickle, $10,000 in compensation for being kicked off the platform. Giggle founder Sall Grover has vowed to continue fighting, and the decision can be appealed.
She wasn’t surprised by the ruling, writing “Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.”
The court determined that Tickle, in the case called Tickle v. Giggle, has been “indirectly discriminated against” in being disallowed from accessing Giggle. “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,” said Justice Robert Bromwich.
He said that Giggle could not be an app for women only and had to accept men who identify as women, thought he attempted to differentiate discrimination by gender identity from discrimination based on sex. Tickle had sought $20,000, but Bromwich only awarded half of that, $10,000. Tickle had been blocked from the app in 2021 despite his birth certificate having been changed to reflect his gender identity. Tickle claimed that “Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman.”
Tickle had sought the excessive damages after claiming that Grover had been, essentially, too vocal about the case, and Tickle, on Twitter, later renamed X. In a clip posted to X, Tickle can be seen explaining the transformation from presenting as a man to presenting as a woman. On the Australian show Insight, Tickle was asked “Roxy, you’re a transgender woman from regional New South Wales. You played hockey for 10 years when you were 16-years-old, but you stopped when you 26. Why?”
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