Female-only app founder appealing court ruling in favor of transgender woman: ‘Taking away our human rights’

The founder of a female-only app who lost a landmark court case against a transgender woman has claimed “trans rights” are “taking away our human rights.”

Sall Grover now says she is ready for “round two” after last week filing an appeal against August’s federal court judgment, a major gender identity ruling that declared that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary.”

Grover was ordered to pay $6,763 in damages after she was found to have indirectly discriminated against Roxanne Tickle when she removed her from her app, Giggles for Girls, in 2021.

AI software designed to filter out men had cleared Tickle, but Grover removed her from the app herself after seeing her profile.

Justice Robert Bromwich came to the conclusion that Tickle was excluded from the app for not looking “sufficiently female,” and therefore was indirectly discriminated against.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane on Sunday, Grover insisted “somebody’s biological sex is immutable” and it was a “natural human instinct for us to be able to tell this.”

“And if you are then being told by the law that you cannot acknowledge that really basic instinct, you have lost the ability to recognize one of our most basic skills,” she said.

“If you just look to the person sitting next to you right now, you can tell if they are male or female. Now imagine if you can’t do that anymore because you’ve got to ask, ‘Do you have a gender identity?’ And if you don’t acknowledge that and give meaning to that then you’re breaking the law. It simply doesn’t work.”

Grover added “we are told constantly that trans rights are human rights, but human rights cannot be rights that take way other people’s rights.”

“That’s not how it works,” she said.

“And it’s not only that they’re taking away our rights, we’re actually being coerced into giving up our rights.”

She recalled first receiving an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint in January 2022, citing gender identity discrimination.

“He had onboarded the app at some point, I don’t remember, but I would have seen a picture of a man and gone ‘that’s a man,’ and I blocked him,” she said.

“And I was right. In a normal world we would have lived happily ever after.”

Tickle has been living as a woman since 2017, when she began taking “testosterone blockers, estrogen and progesterone with the effect, as she described, of inducing a second puberty, and changing most parts of her body,” the federal court ruling noted.

“She began to use female changing rooms and started playing in a local women’s hockey team. She began shopping from the women’s side of clothing stores and began a process of removing her facial hair.”

Tickle underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019, and her birth certificate was reissued by Queensland in 2020 to list her as female.

In court, she sought more than $135,261 in damages for direct discrimination.

She also wanted a published written apology and the same access to the app as other female users.

She said that “persistent misgendering” by Grover had prompted “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts.”

Grover and the Giggle app argued there was no discrimination with claims Tickle was a man.

In the end, the judge did not agree that Tickle had been directly discriminated against but ruled that she had been a victim of indirect discrimination through “imposing a condition on the use of [the app] that users have the appearance of cisgender women, which had the effect of disadvantaging women with a transgender gender identity relative to women with a cisgender gender identity.”

Speaking outside the federal court after the decision, Tickle spoke of the fallout from the “unlawful and discriminatory exclusion from the Giggle app.”

Tickle opened up about her emotional wait for a decision on the case that she said had “stolen the last three years of my life.”

“I’ve been bursting into tears at different moments because I knew soon this would all be over,” she said.

“I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave and that you can stand up for yourself. I know that I can now get on with the rest of my life.”

Tickle said the ruling showed that “all women are protected from discrimination.”

Grover was not ordered to apologize, with Justice Bromwich concluding any apology given would “be through clenched teeth and utterly devoid of sincerity.”

Justice Bromwich also noted the app had already been shut down by Grover, who “has expressed a clear intention not to reinstate it unless it is legal to exclude transgender women,” but were it still in operation “I could well have ordered reinstatement” of Tickle.

Grover told CPAC she always felt the Australian Human Rights Commission “(was) never on my side” and was “all in on gender identity.”

“They were never considering that I or by extension any other Australians had human rights, it was just solely about you have done a discrimination and you have to pay for that,” she said.

“To settle it I would have had to let him on the app, let all men who claim to be women on the app, attend sex and gender education, and moderate the content of the app so men who claim to be women weren’t offended. So not only did they want to come in, they wanted to control the environment. I said no to it all, so it escalated to federal court.”

— with NCA NewsWire