A trans woman has won a discrimination case after she was booted off a women-only social media platform.
A court in Australia found that Roxanne Tickle had been discriminated against and ordered the owner of the social media app, “Giggle for Girls,” to pay 10 000 Australian dollars to Tickle, as well as costs.
The platform had been set up to allow women to interact online without the presence of men. Users had to upload a selfie which used gender recognition software to filter out people who weren’t women.
Tickle joined the app, but was kicked off seven months later.
Tickle said that as someone who identifies as a woman, she was discriminated against on the basis of her gender identity. Giggle for Girls argued that Tickle had been discriminated against, but on the basis of the fact that she is male, not because of her gender identity.
However, Justice Robert Bromwich said that Australian case law had found that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”.
Giggle for Girls’s founder, Sall Grover, said: “It is a legal fiction that Tickle is a woman. His birth certificate has been altered from male to female, but he is a biological man, and always will be. We are taking a stand for the safety of all women’s-only spaces, but also for basic reality and truth, which the law should reflect.”
[Image: Sall Grover, Puck1234, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147103644]