On Friday, the Full Court of the Federal Court – comprising Justices Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Wendy Abraham – will hand down its decision in Giggle v Tickle. Nine months in deliberation, four years in the making, the case is a landmark test of whether women and girls in this country are able to maintain female-only spaces based on biological sex, or whether these must include males who claim a 'female gender identity'.
The facts in a nutshell: Sall Grover, an Australian entrepreneur, built Giggle for Girls – a female-only social networking app – to give women and girls a digital space free from male presence. In 2021, the app excluded Roxanne Tickle, a biological male who identifies as a woman, after Grover viewed Tickle's profile picture and determined Tickle was male. In 2022, Tickle sued under the Sex Discrimination Act. In August 2024, the Federal Court found in Tickle's favour on the ground of indirect gender identity discrimination. The Australian Human Rights Commission, via Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr Anna Cody, was invited to join in the proceedings as amicus curiae to assist in clarifying the relevant provisions of the Act. However, the way it participated was more akin to an intervener in favour of Tickle and gender identity. In October 2024, Grover and Giggle appealed. In February 2025, Tickle filed a cross-appeal seeking a finding of direct discrimination and higher damages. The Lesbian Action Group intervened on Giggle's side; Equality Australia intervened on Tickle's side. The appeal was heard before the Full Court in August 2025.
It is worth noting that the 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act inserted under the Gillard government – which introduced gender identity as a protected attribute and embraced gender ideology in Australian anti-discrimination law – had never been tested in court before this case.
Stripped of legal complication, the question before the court is whether the word "woman", as used in Australian law, still means what every Australian instinctively knows it to mean – a biological female – or whether sex has been replaced, in law, by self-declared gender identity (for more in depth details about the appeal and history of the case read our previous commentary or visit Giggle’s crowdfunding page).
The arguments before the Full Court go to the foundation of the Act itself. The trial judge, Justice Robert Bromwich, accepted that "sex" under the Sex Discrimination Act is "not confined to being a biological concept" and is "changeable" in its contemporary ordinary meaning – a finding women's advocates argue defies both biology and the original purpose of the legislation, which was enacted in 1984 to give effect to Australia's obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. That Convention exists to protect women as a sex class. Giggle's case contends that sex in the Act means biological sex; that the Act's single-sex service exemptions were always intended to permit services like Giggle; and that its "special measures" provisions under section 7D exist precisely to protect women's spaces. Tickle's case, supported by the Australian Human Rights Commission and Equality Australia, argues that gender identity now sits alongside sex as a protected attribute, and that female-only services must therefore admit any male who identifies as a woman. Tickle's cross-appeal goes further, seeking a finding of direct discrimination – which would significantly increase both the damages exposure and the precedential impact of an adverse ruling.
The implications reach far beyond a single app. Depending on the legal reasoning, if the Full Court rules against Giggle, Australian women and girls face a precedent that any female-only space, service or association in this country – refuges, rape crisis services, prisons, change rooms, toilets, sporting categories, religious gatherings, lesbian organisations – may be opened to any man who declares himself a woman. And women who object, who exclude, or who simply speak out in public will do so at the risk of being dragged through the same legal machinery Grover has been dragged through for four years.
If Giggle wins – again, depending on how the decision is reached – women in Australia will retain something most assumed they had never lost: the right to associate as women, on the basis of being women. A sound decision will affirm that biology is not bigotry, that women exist as a legal sex class, and that women's sex-based rights – including rights to single-sex spaces and services – are protected in law.
Australia is not deciding this question in isolation. In April 2025, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court ruled unanimously in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers that the word "woman" in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex. The decision was met with relief by British women who had spent years being told that their right to single-sex spaces was a matter of bigotry rather than law. The Cass Review, published the year before, had already laid bare the medical scandal that uncritical adoption of gender ideology had enabled in the NHS. Across the Western world, courts, clinicians and parliaments are course-correcting. The question is whether Australia's institutions will follow, or whether we will be the last to wake up – still clinging to an ideological experiment that the rest of the world has recognised as a failure.
The case has been a long and exhausting test of Australia's institutions, and many of them have failed it. The Australian Human Rights Commission – the body charged with safeguarding women's rights, among others – chose to back a male litigant in dismantling a women's space and ultimately participated in the proceedings in a way that supported the expansion of gender identity protections at the expense of sex-based rights. Equality Australia – a well-funded lobby group with the ear of every progressive government in this country and Australia's Governor General as one of its patrons – threw its resources at the same side. The major parties, who could have clarified the law at any point in the last decade, have instead allowed a 2013 amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act to be turned against the very class of people the Act was originally written to protect.
The collateral damage has been borne by women across the country. Women and girls have been injured or experienced unfairness as a result of male athletes in their sporting categories. Female inmates have been forced to share prisons with male sex offenders – resulting in some women horrifically – but unsurprisingly – being sexually assaulted. Ordinary women have been sued, vilified and professionally sanctioned for saying that men can’t be women. And one woman in particular: Sall Grover has been sued and subjected to four years of legal proceedings. She has put her business, her finances and her public reputation on the line to defend a proposition that should never, in any sane legal order, have needed defending at all: that women exist, that sex is real, and that women are entitled to spaces of their own. Australian women owe her a debt that is difficult to describe and impossible to repay.
This case is also about freedom – the freedom to associate, the freedom to speak honestly about reality, and the freedom of citizens to organise their lives, businesses and communities according to truths the state has no authority to abolish. If we are not free to call a man a man or a woman a woman, and to act accordingly, we are not free at all.
Whatever the Full Court decides on Friday, the case has already exposed how fragile women's hard-won rights have become – and how completely some of the institutions charged with protecting them have aligned against the people they were created to serve.
If Grover wins, it will be a pivotal moment in the fight to restore sex-based rights, freedom and common sense to Australian law. If she doesn’t, the work of rebuilding what has been quietly taken from women – through gender ideology activism, institutional capture and political cowardice – will face an even longer, harder road. Either way, Friday's decision will not be the end. It will be the moment we find out how much further we have to go.
The hearing will be streamed on the Federal Court's YouTube channel.
Women’s Forum Australia is an independent think tank that undertakes research, education and public policy advocacy on issues affecting women and girls, with a particular focus on addressing behaviours and practices that are harmful and abusive to them. We are a non-partisan, non-religious, tax-deductible charity. We do not receive any government funding and rely solely on donations to make an impact. Support our work today.
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