No joke: trans woman wants $40k because female-only app founder giggled at caricature
Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wants Sall Grover to pay her $40,000 because the female-only app creator laughed in court when shown a caricature of Tickle during cross-examination.
Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wants Giggle app founder Sall Grover to pay her at least $40,000 because the female-only platform creator laughed in court when shown a caricature of Tickle during cross-examination in a sex discrimination hearing last year.
Grover and her Giggle platform are appealing a Federal Court ruling last year that they indirectly discriminated against Ms Tickle when they rejected her from the app because she did not appear to be female.
Tickle is also appealing parts of that decision, arguing judge Robert Bromwich should have found she was the victim of direct, rather than indirect, discrimination.
Justice Bromwich awarded Tickle $10,000, in part because Grover had briefly laughed in court at “an offensive caricature” of Tickle that she had been asked to look at during cross-examination, a moment the judge found “offensive and belittling”.
“Her explanation, that it was funny in the context of the courtroom, was obviously disingenuous,” he said.
Grover told The Australian: “It was just this moment of such ridiculousness that I was in this high stakes, incredibly stressful time, when you’re sitting in the witness box in Federal Court and they turn to a cartoon meme, and I just burst out laughing.
“It wouldn’t have even been three seconds, it was just a complete involuntary human response to something and the judge said that that caused Tickle harm. It’s just ridiculous.”
Justice Bromwich declined to award aggravated damages over the incident because he accepted that Grover was “expressing a genuine, if (as I accept) hurtful belief that Ms Tickle is a man”.
In a cross-appeal submission obtained by The Australian, Tickle claims the $10,000 general damages award was “manifestly inadequate” and she should be awarded at least $30,000 in general damages, and at least $10,000 in aggravated damages.
Tickle says the hurt caused was more than “slight” and came on top of “disparaging and hurtful comments by Ms Grover in public forums about transgender women”.
Tickle claims she should have been awarded aggravated damages because Grover “engaged in a sustained attack on Ms Tickle’s integrity and gender identity, infused with innuendo that Ms Tickle, and indeed transgender women more generally, pose a threat or danger to cisgender women”.
Tickle also complains about “the constant and continual misgendering of Ms Tickle by Ms Grover and Giggle throughout the earlier proceedings” as well as Grover’s “campaign” based on gender identity.
Grover’s refusal to provide Tickle with access to the app “because she did not appear to be a cisgender woman” was direct and unlawful discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act, Tickle’s submission argues.
According to the submission prepared by silk Georgina Costello, the trial judge wrongly concluded that to find discrimination by reason of a person’s gender identity, the discriminator must first be aware of the person’s gender identity.
The legislation’s deliberately broad definition of “gender identity” was intended to confer broad protection from discrimination, the submission argues, so it didn’t matter whether Grover was aware that Tickle identified as a woman.
In any event, the submission argues, Grover and Giggle clearly had a policy of excluding both men and transgender women from the Giggle App.
Their exclusion of Tickle from the app, followed by a refusal to re-admit, “demonstrated a pattern of delegitimising Ms Tickle’s gender identity”.
Tickle gave evidence in the earlier trial that the rejection from Giggle had “a significant impact on my life … has upset me greatly and has resulted in me having to go to great lengths to provide (sic) that I am a woman. It has been exhausting and draining to do so.”
The fact that Tickle had not produced any independent medical or third-party corroborative evidence “does not diminish Ms Tickle’s suffering”, the submission states.
“The impact on Ms Tickle was significant, upsetting, exhausting and draining.”
In a separate submission, responding to Giggle’s appeal, lawyers for Tickle argue that Justice Bromwich was correct to find that Grover discriminated against their client by blocking her access to the app.
Grover and Giggle’s defence to the discrimination claim (that they did not know Tickle was a transgender woman and blocked her access to the app simply because they perceived her to be a man) was “inextricable from their nihilistic and legally false distinction that a person who had the designated male sex at birth could never be a woman”.
The requirement that applicants “need to appear to be a cisgender female in photos submitted to the Giggle App” had a disadvantageous effect on transgender women, including Tickle, the submission says.
Grover’s appeal team will claim that Justice Bromwich failed to consider the broader context of the Sex Discrimination Act, arguing that the app’s female-only policy was a special measure intended to address the unique disadvantages faced by women in digital spaces, and thus should not be considered discriminatory.
But Tickle argues in her submission that there was no evidence presented that women experienced “persistent sex-based disadvantage in digital environments … The evidence sought to be relied upon rises no higher than a collection of self–serving affidavits of some women who gave evidence in vague and overly generalised terms of their varied online experiences”.
The appeal and cross-appeal will be heard over four days from August 4 in the Full Court of the Federal Court, before judges Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Wendy Abraham.