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Sall Grover’s appeal in Giggle v Tickle has failed, with the Full Federal Court doubling damages to $20,000 and ruling that sex is mutable under Australian law — a decision Grover says she will challenge in the High Court.

Australia’s Full Federal Court has dismissed Sall Grover’s appeal in Giggle v Tickle, ruling that her women-only app Giggle for Girls unlawfully discriminated against Roxanne Tickle, and doubling the damages awarded against Grover.

Justices Melissa Perry, Wendy Abraham and Geoffrey Kennett handed down their judgment on Friday, dismissing Grover’s appeal and partially upholding a cross-appeal by Tickle, who brought the original complaint.

The court reclassified the discrimination as direct rather than indirect and increased damages from $10,000 to $20,000, “taking into account aggravating conduct” by Grover.

“I am absolutely devastated,” Grover said on Friday after the verdict. “Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia.”

“It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us.”

In addition to the $20,000 damages award, Grover was ordered to pay Tickle’s appeal costs up to a capped maximum of $50,000, on top of her own legal bills accumulated over two years of proceedings.

Grover has indicated that she plans to take her case to the High Court.

Throughout Friday’s proceedings, Tickle was referred to as “Ms Tickle” and addressed with female pronouns — the court treating as settled the question it was set to adjudicate: what constitutes a woman under Australian law.

His biological sex was not mentioned throughout the proceedings.

The Court’s Reasoning

The Full Court upheld the 2024 finding by Justice Robert Bromwich that sex is mutable under the Sex Discrimination Act, affirming that gender identity is a protected characteristic that can override biological sex.

It rejected Grover’s arguments that her assessment of users’ onboarding selfies constituted a sex-based rather than gender-identity-based exclusion, and that Giggle for Girls qualified as a lawful “special measure” for women’s substantive equality.

“Gender identity is defined as meaning gender-related identity and gender-related characteristics, including appearance,” the court said in its summary.

The Full Court found that both the initial exclusion of Tickle and the subsequent refusal to readmit him amounted to direct discrimination “by reference to a characteristic that pertains to people of Ms Tickle’s gender identity being transgender women”.

The ruling is the first federal court judgment to test gender identity discrimination under the Act’s 2013 amendments, which were introduced under the Gillard Labor government.

Those amendments added gender identity as a protected attribute, without reinstating definitions of “man” or “woman”.

Lawyer and women’s rights advocate Stephanie Bastiaan commented on X that the outcome was “a verdict on the law, not on Sall” — the Act as amended leaving the judges with “no other conclusion”.

Political Response

Senator Pauline Hanson condemned the judgment. “I’m disgusted at the decision that’s just been handed down by the Federal Court in the Tickle vs Giggle case,” she wrote on Friday.

“It flies in the face of biological reality, and strips rights from women. Women’s spaces are not being protected and are no longer safe. I will back Sall Grover in Parliament.”

Hanson vowed that her party would continue in its efforts “to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to remove identity politics and reflect biological reality” in order to “protect women’s rights in Australia”.

What Comes Next

Grover’s intention to appeal to the High Court would offer the country’s highest bench an opportunity to rule definitively on whether “sex” under the Sex Discrimination Act carries biological or mutable meaning — a question with consequences for women-only spaces across every jurisdiction in Australia, from shelters and prisons to sport and online platforms.

Giggle v Tickle has drawn sustained attention since it first reached the Federal Court in 2024, with Grover supported throughout by women’s groups and gay and lesbian organisations, and Tickle backed by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody — a commissioner who, as The Daily Declaration reported at the time, could not define the word “sex” when questioned during Senate Estimates.

Of today’s outcome, Grover summarised via X: “In a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow and men will still not be women.”