A transgender woman has been awarded the equivalent of £10,000 after being banned from a female-only app.Roxanne Tickle won a landmark discrimination case after being barred from Giggle for Girls, with an Australian court ruling the decision was unlawful.The trans woman brought the case, known as Tickle v Giggle, against the women-only social platform and its founder, Sall Grover, after the app’s verification technology judged her to appear male.The 57-year-old was subsequently removed from the app in September 2021.The Federal Court dismissed Ms Grover’s appeal on Friday and upheld the trans woman’s cross-appeal, increasing her damages from AU$10,000 to AU$20,000 and ordering the app founder to pay up to AU$100,000 in legal costs.Justice Melissa Perry said the app and its founder had excluded Tickle on the basis of gender-related appearance, finding the conduct amounted to direct discrimination under Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act.She said: “This amounted to direct discrimination by reference to a characteristic that pertains to people of Tickle’s gender identity as a transgender woman, treating the 57-year-old less favourably than a woman designated female at birth.”The court acknowledged the case touched on issues that divide public opinion but stressed its role was solely to interpret and apply the existing law.Under the Sex Discrimination Act, discrimination on the grounds of gender identity, sexual orientation or intersex status is unlawful.Roxanne Tickle will be awarded $20,000 AUD (roughly £10,000) in damages | REUTERSTickle had been blocked from the platform despite holding a birth certificate listing her as female after undergoing gender-affirming surgery and hormone treatments.The trans woman’s lawyer told the court she identified as female with family, friends and colleagues, using women-assigned changing rooms and shopping in women’s clothing shops. Tickle had previously said: “Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman.”She had originally sought AU$200,000 in compensation, partly on the basis of aggravated damages following an online campaign waged by Ms Grover, who the court was told had persistently misgendered Tickle across hundreds of social media posts to her 93,000 followers. Giggle for Girls app founder Sall Grover leaving the Federal Court in Sydney today | REUTERSTickle’s legal team described how this generated an “enormous” amount of online abuse directed at the trans woman. Ms Grover’s legal team had argued the app was exempt from discrimination law because it was designed to create a safe space for women and sought to achieve substantial equality between men and women.However, lawyers for the Sex Discrimination Commissioner challenged that argument, saying such an interpretation could allow discriminatory conduct to be carried out under the guise of a protective measure.Giggle for Girls was founded in 2020 after Ms Grover experienced online abuse from men whilst she was a screenwriter in Hollywood. The ruling is expected to have significant implications for other female-only spaces and is likely to reignite the wider public debate over the legal and biological definition of a woman.Ms Grover has vowed to take the case to the High Court and has the public support of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, a prominent figure in the gender-critical movement.She said: “Women fought for generations to have spaces free from male presence – whether in crisis shelters, prisons, sports or social networks. “That right has now been stripped away by an activist legal interpretation that compels women to accept men in female-only spaces and punishes them for objecting. “That is not progress; that is oppression.”Ms Grover also called on legislators to intervene, saying the issue could be resolved quickly through parliament without the need for further costly legal proceedings.She said: “I would like there to be legislators that stepped in and actually did their job and fixed this, because they could fix this for free in a week. But if I have to go to the High Court, I will.”The case follows a broader shift in the legal landscape around gender identity in Australia, with a judge ruling in 2024 that sex was “changeable” and non-binary, arguing that the understanding of sex had evolved considerably since the Sex Discrimination Act was first enacted three decades ago.