Sex exists on a scale and the definition of \u201cwoman\u201d is not limited to the pages of a dictionary, a court has heard in an appeal hearing to overturn a landmark gender identity discrimination finding made against a women-only social media app.<\/p>\n
Giggle for Girls and its CEO, Sall Grover, are challenging Justice Robert Bromwich\u2019s August 2024 federal court judgment<\/a> that found Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman, was indirectly discriminated against when she was barred from the platform in September 2021. The case was the first gender identity discrimination case to reach the federal court.<\/p>\n Much of the proceedings, which concluded on Wednesday, centred on the definition of sex, woman and what it means to be a woman.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, Celia Winnett, the barrister for the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who acted as a friend of the court, said the definition of \u201cwomen does include transgender women\u201d.<\/p>\n The full court of the federal court heard Giggle for Girls and Grover argue that the Sex Discrimination Act bears the \u201cordinary\u201d meaning of men and women.<\/p>\n But Winnett said that \u201c\u2018woman\u2019 does now have a broader ordinary meaning \u2026 informed by its use\u201d and that the meaning was \u201cbroad enough to include trans women\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no need for ordinary meaning to hinge or rely on dictionary meanings,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n On Monday, Grover\u2019s barrister, Noel Hutley SC, told the court that \u201ceven today, the Macquarie dictionary defines the word \u2018women\u2019 by reference to what I have called \u2018natal\u2019 woman\u201d. A natal woman is a term used to describe a person who was assigned female at birth.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n Giggle for Girls and Grover argue the app was allowed to discriminate against men because it was a special measure that redressed historical disadvantage between men and women. Grover has persistently misgendered Tickle and claims she did not know Tickle was a trans woman when she barred her from the app.<\/p>\n The words \u201copposite sex\u201d were replaced with \u201cdifferent sex\u201d in the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013, when amendments made it unlawful under federal law to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status. Man, woman and sex are not defined in the act.<\/p>\n Ruth Higgins SC, acting for Equality Australia, on Wednesday told the court that transgender people experienced unique forms of identity discrimination and that \u201csex\u201d included social recognition and personal identification.<\/p>\n \u201cSex is way of classifying people along a scale between a man at one end and woman at the other,\u201d she said. \u201cSex at birth is but one conception of sex.\u201d<\/p>\n A purely biological definition relied on a \u201cfalse simplicity\u201d, she said, questioning whether biological meant anatomical, chromosomal, hormonal or a balance thereof.<\/p>\n The Lesbian Action Group was also given leave to intervene in the appeal. Its barrister, Leigh Howard, referred to the For Women Scotland case, when the UK supreme court in April issued a historic and definitive ruling<\/a> that the terms \u201cwoman\u201d and \u201csex\u201d in the UK\u2019s Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex.<\/p>\n He said \u201csex is a biological condition, not an identity\u201d and urged for the word \u201cwoman\u201d to be given the same meaning throughout the act.<\/p>\n Georgina Costello KC, Tickle\u2019s barrister, said Giggle for Girls\u2019 policy to exclude transgender women from the app disadvantaged transgender women \u2013 and that those women could face gender identity discrimination because of a discordance between their appearance and their identity.<\/p>\n Because Giggle for Girls required users to have a gender identity that appeared consistent with their gender identity at birth, direct discrimination \u2013 rather than indirect discrimination as Bromwich found \u2013 was a \u201cbetter fit\u201d, she argued.<\/p>\n But her opposition said it could not have been parliament\u2019s intention, when writing the Sex Discrimination Act, for protected measures \u2013 such as gender identity \u2013 to prejudice special measures for women.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be an extraordinary by-blow of this exercise that expanding protection in effect undermines the ability to set up measures to achieve substantive equality,\u201d Hutley said.<\/p>\n Over the two-and-half-day appeal, the court heard Tickle was seeking $40,000 in damages<\/a> and that she was treated as a \u201chostile invader\u201d<\/a> when joining the app.<\/p>\n A finding is expected by February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sex exists on a scale and the definition of \u201cwoman\u201d is not limited to the pages of a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":124067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-124066","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114982831114054988","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}