‘May the best woman win': JK Rowling weighs in on Giggle v Tickle discrimination case
Sall Grover was ordered to pay $10,000 in damages last August after she was found to have indirectly discriminated against transgender woman Roxanne Tickle when she removed her from her social media app, Giggles for Girls.
AI software designed to filter out men from the women-only app had cleared Ms Tickle, but Ms Grover removed her from the app herself after seeing her profile in 2021.
The landmark case resulted in Federal Court Justice Robert Bromwich ruling that Ms Tickle was excluded from the app for not looking 'sufficiently female', and therefore was indirectly discriminated against.
Ms Grover filed an appeal against Justice Bromwich's judgement in October. The first hearing of her appeal was held on Monday.
Ahead of the hearing, Rowling – who has been outspoken in her criticism of what she sees as an assault of women's rights coming from transgender activists – issued a message of public support to Ms Grover.
'Good luck, Sall,' the Harry Potter author wrote on X. 'May the best woman (haha) win x.'
Rowling also shared a post of Ms Grover's on the social media platform – a screenshot of an article by The Australian about Monday's hearing.
Ms Grover captioned the screenshot of the article – headlined 'Trans women 'should have legal protections available to pregnant women'': 'This is how insane gender ideology is.'
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane in October, Ms Grover insisted 'somebody's biological sex is immutable' and it was a 'natural human instinct for us to be able to tell this'.
'And if you are then being told that you cannot acknowledge that really basic instinct, you have lost the ability to recognise one of our most basic skills,' she said.
'If you just look to the person sitting next to you right now, you can tell if they are male or female. Now imagine if you can't do that anymore because you've got to ask, 'Do you have a gender identity?'. And if you don't acknowledge that and give meaning to that then you're breaking the law. It simply doesn't work.'
Ms Grover added 'we are told constantly that trans rights are human rights, but human rights cannot be rights that take away other people's rights'.
'That's not how it works. And it's not only that they're taking away our rights, we're actually being coerced into giving up our rights,' she claimed.
It's not the first time Rowling has weighed in on an Australian court case related to women's and transgender rights. In December, she congratulated Moira Deeming's defamation win against John Pesutto, following a ruling from Federal Court Justice David O'Callaghan that Mr Pesutto had defamed Ms Deeming as a Nazi sympathiser after she attended a rally critical of transgender beliefs.
'The 'right side of history' is racking up a hell of a lot of losses recently, isn't it?' Rowling wrote on X at the time.
'Congratulations Moira Deeming.'
She similarly celebrated Britain's Supreme Court's decision in April that a woman is defined by her sex at birth, in a major blow for transgender people in the UK.
The case came about because the Scottish Government had argued trans women with a valid gender recognition certificate (GRC) could be afforded the same rights as all women under the Equality Act. A GRC can be issued by the UK government to people who are living as a different gender to their biological sex so long as they have been doing so for at least two years, have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and medical reports from two doctors.
Campaign group For Women Scotland fought the Scottish Government's decision in the Scottish courts and lost, eventually bringing the case to Britain's Supreme Court.
That court said Edinburgh's 'interpretation is not correct'.
While someone might possess a certificate saying they live as a female and they assert that gender, that 'does not come within the definition of a 'woman' under the Equality Act 2010', the ruling said.
The Equality Act, the judges said 'makes clear that the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man'.
It means a trans woman with a GRC cannot claim she is being discriminated against if she is barred from female only spaces like, for instance, domestic violence shelters and toilets.
However, Lord Hodge said trans people were a 'vulnerable and often harassed minority', who 'struggle against discrimination and prejudice as they seek to live their lives with dignity'.
The Supreme Court also stressed that 'trans people are protected from discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment'.
Ms Rowling, who lives in Scotland and is an ardent campaigner against trans rights, lauded the outcome.
'It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they've protected the rights of women and girls across the UK,' she wrote on X.
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