‘What is a woman?’: court asked to rule on definition in transgender woman’s case against Giggle for Girls platform

A court has been asked to define what a woman is as a landmark gender identity discrimination case comes to a close in front of a packed gallery of trans and women’s rights campaigners in Sydney.

Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from regional New South Wales, is suing the women-only social media platform Giggle for Girls and its CEO, Sall Grover, for alleged unlawful discrimination after being blocked from using the networking app.

Justice Robert Bromwich also heard that the Sex Discrimination Act was intended to protect individuals such as Tickle, who has received an “enormous” amount of online hate.

Her team claims discrimination took place when Grover and Giggle – represented by the former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves – did not respond to her request for access and reinstatement to the app.

Tickle found Grover’s subsequent public statements about her “distressing, demoralising, embarrassing, draining and hurtful” and “led to the scale of online hate towards [her] being enormous”.

Giggle’s legal team claims Tickle was discriminated against on the grounds of sex rather than gender identity, and that, under the act, the app counts as a “special measure” that helps “achieve substantive equality” between men and women.