Sall Grover vs the Gender Lobby: The Women’s App That Sparked a Legal War (#40)
25 September 2025
With Sall Grover
Global
The Tickle v Giggle case from Australia asks whether a women-only digital service may define its membership by biological sex. Sall Grover, creator of the app Giggle, spent five years in court defending that principle after removing a trans-identified male from the platform. The episode places her story alongside UK developments — including the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling that "woman" in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex — and examines what the proceedings reveal about judicial reasoning, harassment of dissenters, and the personal cost of refusing to concede.
In 2019, Australian businesswoman and former screenwriter Sall Grover launched Giggle, an app built exclusively for women. Drawing on years of harassment she experienced while working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, Grover designed the platform to offer women a verified, safe space for services including shared accommodation, freelance work, and lesbian dating. Verification relied on facial-recognition technology, and both Apple and Google approved every build without question. That changed in February 2020. After removing a trans-identified male from the platform, Grover found herself the defendant in what became known as Tickle v Giggle — a discrimination claim brought under Australian federal legislation. The case turned on a question that is equally live in UK law: whether a women-only service may define its membership by biological sex, or whether excluding someone who identifies as a woman but was born male constitutes unlawful discrimination. The litigation stretched across five years and inflicted serious personal costs on Grover, including significant effects on her health and a sustained campaign of harassment. A Federal Court judge initially found in favour of the claimant, awarding ten thousand dollars in damages. Grover contested the verdict and the case proceeded to appeal. In the episode she discusses courtroom proceedings she found difficult to credit, and the broader questions the appeal raises about judicial reasoning, interpretive method, and how far free-speech protections extend to those who publicly defend sex-based definitions of womanhood. From a UK standpoint, the case maps closely onto disputes that domestic courts and legislators have also confronted. In April 2025 the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers that the words "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, not to certificated gender. That judgment confirmed that organisations running single-sex services may lawfully exclude trans-identified males. The Equality and Human Rights Commission subsequently issued updated guidance reinforcing that position. Australian courts have so far reached different conclusions, and the Giggle appeal will test whether that divergence endures. The episode also examines what resistance costs individuals. Grover recounts encountering gender-critical ideas for the first time after the complaint was filed, having been drawn into an ideological dispute she had not sought. She describes a specific phone call that preceded the formal legal action and the harassment that accompanied her public defence of the app. Her account joins a documented pattern in which private individuals — business owners, clinicians, academics — face disproportionate legal and social pressure for applying sex-based definitions that in the UK are now confirmed as lawful. The question the Giggle case crystallises is not marginal. Whether women may organise, associate, and operate services on the basis of biological sex has consequences for domestic violence shelters, medical practice, prison policy, and the digital spaces women create for themselves. Grover's decision not to settle or retract keeps that question before the courts and in public view.
