- 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.
I mean it’d be like barring someone for having only one kidney, or barring people who have an extra toe, or barring people who are a certain skin color. It’s a seemingly random thought pattern and generally makes you a dick. Discrimination based on organs/body parts is wrong. What if they decide that having a big nose makes you not a woman? What if they decide having big ears or short legs or being too tall makes you not a woman? Better yet, what if a trans woman gets a uterus transplant and now has a uterus? Is that when they change the rules to still somehow exclude trans women? Because that’s what usually happens.
Trans women still face the discrimination that women face, many of the same problems that many women face, and identify as women, so they shouldn’t be excluded from a safe space for their group on the basis of one of their organs not being typical. When you get to the point of going out of your way to remove trans women who have already been accepted into the community, established themselves in the community, and fit in with the community, where other members of the community interacted with them like they would any other woman and viewed and accepted them as women, you’re not concerned about “women”, you’re concerned about your own personal insecurities and taking it out on others. That’s the point where you’re just trying to pick the specific criteria that excludes the group that you don’t like.
Plus many cis women have no uterus, some weren’t even born with a uterus, so you’re excluding a large portion of the people you’re claiming to provide a safe space for.