Female-only app Giggle For Girls loses appeal in trans discrimination case

The High Court of Australia has blocked Giggle for Girls app founder Sall Grover from challenging the landmark ruling that found excluding a transgender woman from her app was gender identity discrimination.

After years of back-and-forth court appeals, this landmark case (dubbed Tickle v Giggle) has finally come to an end.

Giggle for Girls was marketed as a female-only space. The app allowed women to find roommates, engage in freelance work, find friendship groups and more.

The discrimination case brought by trans woman Roxanne Tickle was against Giggle for Girls and its founder, Sall Grover. Grover’s Wikipedia page describes her as a “self-identified trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

The Federal Court ruled Tickle had been discriminated against when she was excluded from a female-only app.  

Now, the High Court shut down Grover’s last attempt to overturn the ruling that she discriminated against Tickle.

Published on Thursday (10 September), the High Court declared special leave was refused with costs.

‘Insufficient prospects of success to warrant a grant of special leave to appeal’

It found there was no reason to doubt the Full Court’s construction of the relevant section of the legislation. 

“Any appeal dependent on the demonstration of error in the Full Court’s construction of those provisions has insufficient prospects of success to warrant a grant of special leave to appeal,” the judges said. 

The app first came under fire for “excluding” trans women with AI in 2022.

The Verge reported that Giggle used facial recognition to determine if new users were male or female. However, it was reported that it failed to properly recognise women of colour or trans women. 

Grover decided to shut down the app in July 2022.

In August 2024, a court determined that Grover and her app had unlawfully discriminated against Tickle under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

The court found that Tickle had been unlawfully indirectly discriminated against after she was barred from using the app in 2021 “because she did not look sufficiently female.” Grover then appealed the court’s ruling.

At the time, Tickle said of the appeal: “I shouldn’t have to spend years of my life in court to either prove I exist or to have my existing legal rights upheld.”

Tickle was awarded 10,000 AUD (£5,350) in damages and limited costs.

During the appeal in May 2026, Giggle lost its appeal to overturn the ruling. Justice Melissa Perry upheld the previous ruling and told the court that both Giggle and Grover had excluded Tickle from the app on the basis of her gender-related appearance.

The case, dubbed Tickle v Giggle, marked the first time Australia’s Federal Court had weighed in on gender identity discrimination.

The judges also ruled to reassess the damages originally awarded to Tickle and increased the amount to 20,000 AUD (£10,700).

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