Giggle v Tickle: Here’s Everything You Need To Know About The Major Trans Discrimination Case

The highly publicised Giggle v Tickle appeal case was held this week, with a Sydney court hearing different interpretations of sex, gender, and womanhood.

Over the last three days, the Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover have been seeking to overturn a landmark 2024 finding that they discriminated against a transgender woman by removing her from the female-exclusive platform in September 2021.

The ruling was the first gender identity discrimination case in Australia to reach the federal court, and the first time the updated Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) had been tested in a court.

The woman who was barred from the app, Roxanne Tickle, won her discrimination case last year, with Justice Robert Bromwich ruling that she was indirectly discriminated against based on the fact that she is a trans woman.

However, Giggle and Grover appealed the ruling.

Giggle v Tickle: What’s Giggle’s argument?

Giggle and Grover’s legal team, led by Noel Hutley SC, told the court on Monday that Tickle wasn’t discriminated against indirectly, as Grover didn’t know Tickle was transgender when she excluded her from the app.

Their argument is based around the idea that Giggle was designed to be a “safe space” for women, and was therefore permitted a “special measure” under the SDA, which allows discrimination in the pursuit of rectifying disadvantages between men and women.

“It’s sort of, a shield, to protect yourself from from the regular operation of the Sex Discrimination Act,” Monash human rights law professor Paula Gerber told Star Observer.

“She’s trying to also use it as a sword, though. She’s trying to say… ‘Well, it’s a special measure so I can discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.’

“And that’s what we’re really looking for the court to decide. If it is a special measure under the Sex Discrimination Act, and she can have a women’s only space, can she then exclude certain groups of women? What about lesbians?”

Giggle “wilfully blind” to gender identity, Tickle says

Roxanne Tickle’s barrister, Georgina Costello KC has argued that a review of the evidence easily led to the conclusion that “for the purposes of the Sex Discrimination Act, Ms Tickle is a woman and she was a woman when the appellants excluded her from the Giggle app.”

“She presented her gender identity to the world and to the Giggle app as a woman,” she said. “Her identity is as a woman and as a transgender woman.”

Tickle was rejected from the app by Grover herself after she reviewed an onboarding selfie Tickle uploaded, in which she presented as a woman with a “low-cut top” and hair down.

Costello suggested that Grover had a “wilful blindness to gender identity”, and knew Tickle was transgender but continued to treat her as a man because she didn’t look “sufficiently female”.

“She thinks she’s dealing with a woman, then she looks at the photo and decides she is dealing with a man,” she said.

Grover has always maintained that she did not know Tickle was transgender, and that Bromwich’s previous finding that direct discrimination had not occurred was correct.

“My client looked at that and formed the view that the respondent was a male,” Hutley said, adding that Grover was looking at “thousands” of selfies a day.

Tickle’s team say that Grover’s denial is “not a defence to direct discrimination” — if it were and people were able to simply deny that they knew of a protected attribute, the Sex Discrimination Act would be useless.

Yesterday, the Lesbian Action Group and Equality Australia were given leave to intervene, a move Gerber said is “significant”.

“It’s really commendable that the court heard from people who are not direct parties in the case, and it demonstrates that they understand the wider significance of this case.”

The court heard that transgender people faced unique kinds of discrimination, and that a definition of sex based solely around biology was  a “false simplicity”.

“Sex is way of classifying people along a scale between a man at one end and woman at the other,” she said. “Sex at birth is but one conception of sex.”

Lesbian Action Group meanwhile maintained that “sex is a biological condition, not an identity”, and referred to the UK Supreme Court’s finding that “sex” and “women” related to biology.

What happens now for Giggle and Tickle?

Gerber says she’s hopeful Grover’s appeal fails.

“They’re certainly taking their their moves from the Trump playbook… just this fearmongering about, essentially, toilets and sport,” she said.

“The minute you scratch the surface of those arguments, you find all these holes in them.”

Amidst an intense and ever-growing campaign to undermine the human rights of trans people, this case is attracting international attention. If Bromwich’s ruling is upheld, it would be a significant blow to the gender-critical movement, and a refusal to validate transgender discrimination.

“We need to be on the front foot,” Gerber says. “LAG and Sall Grover and her supporters, I think are outliers. I think the vast majority of Australians don’t see this as anything they want to spend their time on. They don’t want to see trans women as political footballs.

“But we really have to be proactive to make sure that these arguments don’t take hold here.”

Tickle is seeking $30,000 in general damages, and a further $10,000 in aggravated damages, and have argued that the previously awarded damages of $10,000 did not take into account Grover’s  behaviour during the proceedings.

The result of the appeal is expected to be announced in February 2026.