The Australian High Court has rejected an appeal by Sall Grover, chief executive of the now-defunct women-only social media app Giggle, to review a Federal Court landmark ruling that her company had discriminated against a transgender user. Grover announced following the decision that she intends to leave Australia, stating that she refused to live under what she called an “authoritarian nonsense ideology”.
The Federal court had awarded A$10,000 to former user Roxanne Tickle, who is transgender. After both parties appealed the ruling, the court then ruled that Tickle would be awarded A$20,000 in damages as well as ordering Grover to pay Tickle’s legal fees, which amount to more than A$100,000.
Giggle, which was intended to be a “safe, online space exclusively for women”, used facial recognition software to determine whether users were male or female. Tickle used the software from February 2021 until September that year when the account became restricted. The case was the first to be heard by the court alleging gender identity discrimination since changes to the Sex Discrimination Act that occurred in 2013.
Grover, who founded Giggle in 2020, told the Daily Mail on September 11 that she wanted to leave Australia because she would “never forgive the government” and had “no respect for the judiciary”. “I won’t live under an authoritarian nonsense ideology,” she said.
“But I am lucky that I have the potential to leave. The girls in school with boys in their bathrooms and sports competitions, the women in prison with male rapists, and every Australian woman who has had her sex-based rights abolished can’t leave,” she said. “I will fight with every Australian woman until our rights are restored.”
She continued: “'Women still exist and we require legal protections. Currently, we don't have them. The high court is fine with that. The only option left is for politicians to do their jobs and put women's sex based rights back into law.”
Grover had argued in her appeal that sex was “binary and immutable” and that the women-only policy of the app addressed disadvantages experienced by women online. However, the High Court said in a statement that any appeal “dependent on the demonstration of error in the Full Court’s construction of those provisions has insufficient prospects of success to warrant a grant of special leave to appeal.”
Tickle’s case had been supported by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody as well as the LGBT group Equality Australia.
In May, Australian Shadow Minister for Women Melissa McIntosh stated that the issue in question was the Sex Discrimination Act, calling for a review into the legislation. She said that the country’s laws “should be working for Australian women, not against them”.
Following the ruling by the federal court, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said she would support Grover in parliament and that she was “disgusted” by the decision.
