• 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.

    • fiercekitten@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • homura1650@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        That’s illegally discriminatory.

        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.

      • Cypher@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        So you would see no issue if they had simply labeled the site as exclusive for cis women?