Giggle for Girls and Sall Grover have begun their appeal to overturn a landmark court decision that found the women-only social media app and its CEO had unlawfully discriminated against Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman.
On Monday, the full court of the federal court heard that Grover’s team believes the app – designed as a “women-only safe space” – constituted a “special measure” under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA), which allows discrimination with the aim of redressing historical disadvantage between men and women.
In an unexpected move, an application for a new amended notice of appeal with an entirely new ground of appeal was lodged by Giggle and Grover’s team on Monday morning with only one hour’s notice for Tickle’s legal team. The application was refused.
Grover is challenging justice Robert Bromwich’s milestone August decision in the first gender identity discrimination case to reach the federal court.
Tickle, from regional New South Wales, sued the women-only social media app for gender discrimination, claiming she was unlawfully barred from using Giggle for Girls in September 2021 after the firm and Grover said she was a man.
Tickle was initially allowed to join the app, which shut down in 2022, but was then later removed from the platform. She contacted Grover on multiple occasions seeking readmission.
Tickle was awarded $10,000 plus costs after Bromwich found she had been indirectly discriminated against, in the decision that tested the meaning and scope of the SDA.
The appeal is being heard over four days by justice Melissa Perry, justice Geoffrey Kennett and justice Wendy Abraham in Sydney.
Giggle and Grover’s legal team is being led by Noel Hutley SC. The team has dropped its constitutional challenge argument and is appealing against paying $10,000 damages, claiming Tickle was not discriminated against indirectly, on the basis Grover did not know Tickle was transgender when she barred her from the app.

Grover previously said that the ruling erred in its interpretation of sex under the SDA, had not considered critical evidence and did not recognise that the app was a “special measure” fostering substantive equality between women and men.
Grover has persistently referred to Tickle as male and during last year’s hearing, said she would not address her as “Ms” Tickle.
On Monday, Hutley said a woman was a “natal” woman – or assigned female at birth. He told the court the SDA was a “compromise” and that its special measures were “ephemeral”, claiming that “just about any special measures targeted at a group” would, through the act’s other legal carve-outs, probably involve discrimination of another group. He said special measures should be protective and enabling, not restrictive.
Tickle’s legal team is expected to argue that every special measure needs to work for all groups protected by the act simultaneously.
Tickle’s barrister, Georgina Costello KC told the court “a real review of the evidence leads to the easily drawn 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.”
Costello said: “She presented her gender identity to the world and to the Giggle app as a woman. Her identity is as a woman and as a transgender woman.”
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She said Bromwich had made the correct conclusion “that Ms Tickle was a woman” and that her sex as a woman was “legally unimpeachable”.
Tickle’s team is expected to argue also that the judge did not fully consider all of the evidence and that Tickle’s barring from the app and failure in her appeals to Grover to rejoin the app both amounted to direct, not indirect, discrimination.
Tickle is seeking a total of $40,000: $30,000 in general damages, and $10,000 in aggravated damages. Her team will argue previously awarded damages of $10,000 are inappropriate and did not take into account Grover’s conduct around the proceedings.
During the three-day trial in April 2024, the court heard Tickle had lived as a woman since 2017, has a birth certificate stating her gender is female, had gender affirmation surgery and “feels in her mind that psychologically she is a woman”.
The respondents claimed that biological sex was immutable and that the app had been intended as an online refuge for women.
The court has granted leave to the sex discrimination commissioner, Equality Australia and the Lesbian Action Group – which unsuccessfully attempted to exclude transgender and bisexual women from its public events – to intervene, or participate, in the appeal.
Changes to the SDA in 2013 made it unlawful under federal law to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status.
In April 2025, the UK supreme court issued a historic and definitive ruling that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the UK’s Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex.