- In short: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle is suing social media platform Giggle for Girls after she was excluded from the women-only app.
- She is alleging unlawful discrimination on the basis of gender identity while the app’s founder has denied she is a woman.
- What’s next? The hearing is expected to run for four days.
A transgender woman who was excluded from a women-only social media app should be awarded damages because the app’s founder has persistently denied she is a woman, a Sydney court has heard.
In February 2021, Roxanne Tickle downloaded the Giggle for Girls social networking app, which was marketed as a platform exclusively for women to share experiences and speak freely.
Users needed to provide a selfie, which was assessed by artificial intelligence software to determine if they were a woman or man.
Ms Tickle’s photograph was determined to be a woman and she used the app’s full features until September that year, when the account became restricted because the AI decision was manually overridden.
A waste of everyone’s time. Sounds like entitlement.
This is funny when you just look at your profile’s first page and see you’ve made comments like these:
So you deny “unproblematic” women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you’re also denying people’s gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman’s fight for her right to access women’s spaces? So you’re hateful towards people you perceive to be “men” while complaining about “man haters” elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.
That is some fancy mental gymnastics you came up with there. My comment before has absolutely nothing to do with this article. The fact that you went through my comment history to find a marginal strawman just goes to show you are trying to be argumentative. You can disagree with me all you want, it doesn’t mean you’re correct. In fact, nobody’s opinion can be correct.
It’s entitled to exclude.
It absolutely is.
If it’s okay to exclude men, then it it should be okay to exclude trans women.
Or, we can recognize all the reasons that women (cis and trans) want and need women’s-only spaces. This site was claiming to be a space for women — not just cis women. According to the article, the site restricted Tickle’s account after some person there reviewed Tickle’s photo and determined that — because she didn’t look feminine enough — that she was not a woman. That, as well as using AI to determine gender or sex, are both deeply sexist and unacceptable.
Not letting someone be part of a women’s space because they don’t meet someone’s standards of what a woman should look like? That’s bad. That’s wrong. That’s illegally discriminatory. That ends up hurting both cis and trans women, just like bathroom bills do.
Under what law? I’m not familiar with Australia, but here the the US, transfolk are just piggybacking off of legal protections against gender discrimination; which were never actually intended to protect trans people.
In most cases, that actually works out fine. If you discriminate against a transwomen, it’s because you think they are a man presenting as a women. However, you have no problem with a women presenting as a women, so you are running afoul of gender discrimination laws. Legally speaking, your problem was discriminating against her for being a man.
In instances like this though, that argument doesn’t apply. Once you get to the “you are discriminating against her for being a man” stage of the analysis, the response is simply “yes, and I’m allowed to discriminate against men”.
It seems like Australia would need to have a law that specifically protects trans people for her to prevail here.