A landmark gender-identity case will deal with the question of who can legally claim to be a woman after a transgender user was barred from a female-only app.

A Federal Court judge will on Friday deliver his judgment in Roxanne Tickle’s lawsuit against the Giggle for Girls app and its founder Sall Grover.

Ms Tickle has claimed $100,000 for alleged discrimination based on her gender identity and the same sum again for aggravated damages.

The latter is based on an online campaign allegedly waged against her by Ms Grover largely on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Ms Tickle was blocked from the Giggle app in September 2021 on the basis of her gender, despite a birth certificate listing her as female, the court was told during a series of often-heated hearings in April.

The court was told Ms Grover created the Giggle app as a “safe space” for women to interact with each other, free from male patterns of online violence.

Giggle’s barrister Bridie Nolan argued Ms Tickle was a man so it was lawful to exclude her from the app because of provisions in the Sex Discrimination Act.

She told Justice Robert Bromwich the court was faced with the impossible task of determining whether a person was a woman based on their “psychological state” and having undergone surgery to remove their reproductive organs.

“This case is the ‘what is a woman case’,” Ms Nolan said.

The court was told Ms Grover had persistently misgendered Ms Tickle in media interviews and across hundreds of posts about the case made to her 93,000 online followers.

Ms Tickle’s lawyer Georgina Costello said her client had received an “enormous” amount of online hate as a result of Ms Grover’s actions.

“The continued, deliberate misgendering of her cannot detract from the fact that she is a woman,” Ms Costello argued.

Ms Costello told the court Ms Tickle had undergone gender-affirming surgery and hormone treatments, identified as a woman with her family, friends and at work, and used women’s change rooms and shops in women’s clothing departments.

“Up until this instance, everybody has treated me as a woman,” Ms Tickle said.

It is the first time the Federal Court has heard a case alleging gender identity discrimination.

This post was originally published on Michael West.