Australia's Federal Court has done something the UK Supreme Court recently failed to do: it has affirmed, clearly and without equivocation, that trans women are women. The decision in Giggle for Girls v Tickle, handed down on 15 May 2026, is a landmark moment, and I think it deserves to be understood properly, because some politicians are already trying to misrepresent what it actually says.
The case began in 2021, when Sall Grover excluded Roxanne Tickle from her app Giggle for Girls, an online space she promoted as being for women. Roxanne is a transgender woman. Sall decided Roxanne did not belong there. That decision ended up in court, and the Federal Court has now found, unanimously, that it was direct discrimination. The damages awarded to Roxanne were doubled to $20,000, and the court added $8,000 in aggravated damages specifically because of the way Sall conducted herself throughout the case: misgendering Roxanne and, in what I find particularly telling, laughing in the witness stand when shown a demeaning caricature of her. The court saw that behaviour clearly for what it was, a deliberate attempt to demean and belittle, and it imposed a financial penalty accordingly. Sall was also ordered to pay $100,000 towards Roxanne's legal costs.
The aggravated damages are not a footnote; they signal something. Courts do not routinely award extra compensation for the manner in which a losing party behaved. When they do, they are saying: this conduct caused additional harm. Misgendering someone is not a technicality. It is a choice to deny someone's identity in public, in legal proceedings, on the record. The Federal Court recognised that it hurt Roxanne more than the original exclusion already had, and it said so in the only language a court has available to it.
What the court actually found
The Federal Court held that the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity in the provision of goods and services. Grover had argued that she was not discriminating against a trans woman but simply excluding a man, and all three justices rejected that framing entirely. They also rejected her claim that the exclusion was a lawful "special measure" aimed at achieving equality for women. The court noted that parliament removed the definitions of "man" and "woman" from the Act in 2013 precisely to ensure trans women could not be excluded from its protections, and it gave full effect to that parliamentary intention. In plain terms: Roxanne Tickle is a woman within the ordinary meaning of that word. The court said so.
Grover's "special measure" argument is worth understanding, because it is the same kind of argument used in other jurisdictions to frame exclusion as something other than discrimination. The idea is that spaces or services aimed at advancing equality for women can, by definition, legitimately exclude some people. The court had no difficulty seeing through it. A women-only space that excludes trans women is not advancing equality for all women; it is perpetuating discrimination against a group of women. The analogies provided by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner were apt: a women-only swimming class cannot lawfully exclude lesbians; a landlord helping women into the rental market cannot exclude women who are breastfeeding. The logic is consistent. You cannot use a measure designed to protect women as a mechanism to exclude some of them.
Why this matters beyond Australia
Here in the UK, we are living in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, which interpreted the Equality Act 2010 as meaning that "woman" refers to biological sex for the purposes of that Act, and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not bring a trans woman within that definition. I have written about that ruling and I remain deeply troubled by it, not least because the court's interpretation runs contrary to what parliament intended when it passed both the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010.
The Australian decision moves in the opposite direction, and consciously so. Professor Paula Gerber, writing for ABC Religion and Ethics, notes that the Federal Court's approach is consistent with how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has been interpreted under international law: the rights enshrined in CEDAW belong to all women, including trans women. Had the court found otherwise, Australia would have been in breach of its international obligations. The UK's Supreme Court ruling, by contrast, has left the UK isolated from that international consensus.
The contrast could not be sharper. Australia has contemporary anti-discrimination law that protects all women, applied by a court willing to read it in line with human rights norms. The UK has a court ruling that narrows the definition of woman in ways parliament did not intend and that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is now trying to implement through guidance that is itself still in draft. The divergence is not incidental. It reflects a genuine fork in the road about whether trans women are included in the category of women, or treated as a separate and lesser group.
Women's rights belong to all women
What I find most powerful about the Federal Court's reasoning is that it treats the inclusion of trans women not as a threat to women's rights but as essential to them. The court recognised what feminist scholars have long argued: rigid policing of who counts as a woman makes every woman more vulnerable. If Roxanne Tickle can be excluded from a women's app because an AI assessment of her photograph decided she did not look feminine enough, the same logic could be used against any woman who does not perform femininity in the expected way. Lesbians who reject feminine norms. Women who have been through chemotherapy. Women who simply do not conform. The line, once drawn around trans women, has a habit of moving.
Women are stronger together. I know that phrase can sound like a platitude, but the Federal Court has given it legal force. Discrimination against trans women is discrimination against women. Full stop.
Roxanne Tickle went through years of litigation to establish something that should never have needed establishing. She was misgendered in court. She was laughed at. She kept going. The ruling she has won is not just for her; it is for every trans woman who has been told she does not belong in spaces designed for women, and it is for every woman who understands that her own rights are not secure if other women's rights can be taken away.