Banning a transgender woman from a female-only app constituted unlawful discrimination, a judge has found in a landmark Australian gender-identity case.
The Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover were on Friday ordered to pay $A10,000 in ($NZ10,913) compensation and legal costs to a user kicked off the single-gender platform.
The decision that Roxanne Tickle suffered indirect discrimination marked the first time the Federal Court had weighed into gender identity discrimination.
"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," Justice Robert Bromwich said.
In a finding that could also have implications for other female-only spaces, Justice Bromwich found that even if considered a special measure to promote equality, the Giggle app was not allowed to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
He distinguished discrimination based on gender identity and based on sex.
The compensation amount is a sliver of the $A200,000 Ms Tickle had sought, half of which was based on aggravated damages.
The latter was based on an online campaign allegedly waged against her by Ms Grover largely on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ms Tickle was blocked from the Giggle app in September 2021 on the basis of her gender, despite a birth certificate listing her as female, the court was told during a series of often-heated hearings in April.
The court was told Ms Grover created the Giggle app as a "safe space" for women to interact with each other, free from male patterns of online violence.
Giggle's barrister Bridie Nolan argued Ms Tickle was a man so it was lawful to exclude her from the app because of provisions in the Sex Discrimination Act.
She told Justice Bromwich the court was faced with the impossible task of determining whether a person was a woman based on their "psychological state" and having undergone surgery to remove their reproductive organs.
"This case is the 'what is a woman case'," Ms Nolan said.
The court was told Ms Grover had persistently misgendered Ms Tickle in media interviews and across hundreds of posts about the case made to her 93,000 online followers.
Ms Tickle's lawyer Georgina Costello said her client had received an "enormous" amount of online hate as a result of Ms Grover's actions.
"The continued, deliberate misgendering of her cannot detract from the fact that she is a woman," Ms Costello argued.
Ms Costello told the court Ms Tickle had undergone gender-affirming surgery and hormone treatments, identified as a woman with her family, friends and at work, and used women's change rooms and shops in women's clothing departments.
"Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman," Ms Tickle said.
Friday's decision can be appealed.
