Australian screenwriter Sall Grover was found by a judge to be guilty of discrimination for disallowing a trans woman from using her app, Giggle for Girls.
Roxanne Tickle, an Australian trans woman, won a settlement of ten thousand dollars (six thousand eight hundred in USD) after suing the application for alleged gender identity discrimination in 2022. The app, now defunct, was branded as being exclusively for girls, and thus it requires photograph uploads to weed out men who may attempt to join — it does so by screening for supposed “male bone structure”. Tickle’s photo was approved in 2021, but she was banned several months later without reason, which led her to filing both a human rights complaint and a lawsuit against the app, and in turn, it’s creator.
Grover was found to be displaying discriminatory and openly hurtful behavior towards Tickle in court, laughing at an offensive caricature of her that was printed on a candle sold in Grover’s online store, and refused to address Tickle with female pronouns during the trial. She wrote online following the trial that Tickle’s legally-acknowledged womanhood is a lie and that she was going to attempt to “right” her “illegitimate” loss in court.
Although Tickle was unable to file enough evidence for a direct discrimination indictment, Justice Robert Bromwich found Giggle guilty of indirect discrimination, as their “male bone structure” screening tended to be exclusionary towards trans women. This is a direct violation of Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act ofo 2013, which prohibits any “unreasonable rule or policy” that harms or excludes a certain group based on their gender. The app (and its creator) were instructed to pay Tickle her ten thousand dollar settlement over the period of the next sixty days, in addition to reimbursing her legal fees.
This is not the first time that TERFism has reared its ugly head in Australia — just shy of a year ago, the country’s Lesbian Action Group tried to exclude trans women from participation in the organization. The bright side in this case, despite the cause being bleak, is that there is now a legal precedent set against treating trans women differently than cis women, in person as well as in the digital space.
Although Grover has described herself as a TERF before, she said in 2020 that she did welcome trans women onto the app, and that trans women had been consulted in the creation of it to avoid any indirectly offensive language or barriers. While some may say that this shows her attitude has shifted in the two years between then and the incident, Grover did show discriminatory tendencies when she felt the need to clarify in 2020 that only “transitioned” trans women were allowed on the app, not people who self-identify as trans — one could assume this alludes to medical transition, or being ‘passing’, both of which are harmful stereotypes set for trans women that aren’t enforced on cisgender women.
