Australian High Court rejects founder’s appeal in sex discrimination case
A long-running Australian sex discrimination case has come to an end after the High Court rejected an appeal from Sall Grover, founder of the women-only social networking app Giggle for Girls, over her exclusion of transgender woman Roxanne Tickle. Grover had banned Tickle from the app in 2021, and courts have consistently found this amounted to unlawful discrimination against her as a transgender woman. The case had become a high-profile "what is a woman" test of Australia's Sex Discrimination Act, watched closely by both women's-rights and transgender-rights campaigners.
The Federal Court dismissed Grover's appeal in May, doubling damages owed to Tickle to $20,000 and ordering Grover to pay up to $100,000 in legal costs. On Thursday, the High Court of Australia refused Grover special leave to appeal further, finding no error in the Federal Court's interpretation of the law, and awarded costs to Tickle. Grover, who argued the app was a legitimate "safe space" exempt from discrimination law, said she was "absolutely devastated" and vowed to keep fighting, while Equality Australia and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner welcomed the ruling as confirmation that legal protections extend to transgender women.
- High Court rejects Sall Grover's appeal in Giggle app discrimination case
- Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle's $20,000 damages award upheld
- Grover ordered to pay up to $100,000 in Tickle's legal costs
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Sall Grover set up Giggle for Girls, a networking app for women, and used facial-recognition software to screen out anyone identified as male. In 2021 this led to Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman, being removed from the app, prompting her to take legal action under Australia's Sex Discrimination Act, which bans discrimination on the grounds of gender identity as well as sex.
The case turned into a closely watched test of how that law applies when a service says it exists to be a "safe space" for women. Grover argued the app should be exempt because it was created for women only, while Tickle's side argued that excluding a trans woman from a women's space was unlawful discrimination against her.
Multiple courts, including the Federal Court, sided with Tickle and ordered Grover to pay damages and costs. Grover's final attempt to overturn that outcome went to the High Court of Australia, the country's highest court, whose decisions cannot be appealed further, making this case a significant marker for how Australian law treats sex and gender identity.
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The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Advocates for the ruling argue that anti-discrimination law exists precisely to prevent the exclusion of vulnerable groups from public life, and that transgender women, having changed their legal sex, are entitled to the same protections against exclusion as any other woman. They contend that allowing services to turn away transgender women based on a narrower, self-defined notion of womanhood would create a legal loophole undermining decades of settled discrimination protections, and that the courts' consistent findings across multiple hearings reflect a careful, principled application of the Sex Discrimination Act rather than judicial overreach.
The case against
Those sympathetic to Grover's position argue that women have a legitimate interest in maintaining spaces defined by shared biological sex, particularly online platforms marketed explicitly as safety measures against male users, and that the law should recognise a narrow exemption for such genuinely single-sex services. They contend that founders of small, values-driven platforms should not face ruinous financial penalties for exercising a good-faith judgement about their service's purpose, and that this case raises a legitimate, unresolved tension between sex-based and gender-identity-based protections that deserved fuller legislative or judicial clarification rather than a ruling by omission through refusal of leave to appeal.
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Originally published by Daily Mail as “Landmark ‘what is a woman’ case ends as transgender woman who was born as a male wins long-running battle”.