Transgender woman’s ban from female-only app discriminatory, court rules
Al Jazeera
Australian judge orders trans woman be paid $6,700 in compensation over exclusion from Giggle for Girls networking app.
A transgender woman in Australia was unlawfully discriminated against when she was barred from a female-only social media community, a court has ruled.
Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from the state of New South Wales, was subjected to “indirect gender discrimination” when she was blocked from the Giggle for Girls app in 2021 on the basis that she was born a man, the Federal Court of Australia said on Friday.
Giggle for Girls creator Sall Grover had argued that women-only spaces should be allowed to limit access to “cisgender” women, or those whose birth sex aligns with their gender identity.
But Justice Robert Bromwich found that the app had discriminated against Tickle as its use was conditioned on her having the “appearance of a cisgender woman.”
“It is not denied or otherwise in doubt that the basis for the exclusion of Ms Tickle was that she was perceived to have a male appearance, that is, she was perceived to have been male at birth. Indeed, this was the very essence of the respondents’ case,” Bromwich said in his ruling.
