Giggle for Girls founder Sall Grover says she plans to leave Australia after the High Court refused her final bid to challenge a landmark discrimination ruling over the exclusion of transgender woman Roxanne Tickle from her women-only social networking app.

The High Court refused special leave to appeal on September 10, effectively bringing to an end years of litigation that has become one of Australia’s most closely watched legal fights over the interaction between sex and gender identity protections.

Grover has responded by saying she intends to move overseas and operate her business from outside Australia.

“I want to leave Australia because I will never forgive the government and I have no respect for the judiciary,” she told the Daily Mail.

She said she would continue campaigning for what she describes as women’s sex-based rights even if she relocated.

Grover argued that women and girls were being required to accept legal rules she considered incompatible with biological sex, pointing to disputes over bathrooms, sport and prisons as examples of a wider political conflict.

Those statements reflect Grover’s position in an intensely contested public debate.

They are not, however, a description of what the High Court itself decided.

The court did not conduct a fresh, full appeal on whether a transgender woman is a woman in every area of Australian law.

Nor did it issue a broad ruling abolishing legal protections based on sex.

Instead, the High Court was deciding whether Grover and Giggle for Girls should be granted special leave to appeal the Full Federal Court’s May judgment.

Special leave is the gateway required before most civil cases can proceed to a substantive High Court appeal.

The court refused that permission.

In its brief reasons, the High Court said there was “no reason to doubt” the Full Court’s interpretation of subsections 7D(1) and 7D(2) of the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

It said an appeal depending on showing that interpretation to be wrong had insufficient prospects of success to justify special leave.

The application was refused with costs.

That decision means the Full Federal Court judgment remains the authoritative outcome of the case.

The litigation began after Tickle joined Giggle for Girls in 2021.

The app was marketed as an online space for women and used facial-recognition software during registration.

Tickle uploaded a selfie and was initially granted access.

She had been living as a woman since 2017, had undergone gender-affirming treatment and had a Queensland birth certificate recording her sex as female, evidence before the Federal Court showed.

Her access was subsequently restricted after a manual review.

Grover maintained that Giggle was intended only for people she regarded as biologically female and that Tickle therefore did not qualify to use the platform.

Tickle complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission and later brought Federal Court proceedings alleging unlawful discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

The first major judgment came in August 2024.

Federal Court Justice Robert Bromwich found that Giggle and Grover had unlawfully indirectly discriminated against Tickle and awarded her $10,000 in compensation.

The case then went to the Full Federal Court.

Grover and Giggle appealed the discrimination finding, while Tickle cross-appealed and argued the conduct amounted to direct rather than indirect discrimination.

In May 2026, the Full Court dismissed Giggle and Grover’s appeal and allowed Tickle’s cross-appeal.

It found two instances of direct discrimination on the ground of gender identity.

The court concluded that Grover and Giggle had treated Tickle less favourably in providing the app service because of her gender identity and characteristics associated with it.

The compensation award was doubled to $20,000.

The court also left Giggle and Grover liable for Tickle’s costs, subject to caps imposed for the appeal and cross-appeal.

Those caps were $50,000 for each proceeding, creating potential exposure of up to $100,000 for those stages, in addition to the appellants’ own legal expenses.

The High Court’s latest costs order creates a further liability, although the final amount will depend on the usual costs process.

A central argument advanced by Grover throughout the litigation was that Giggle qualified as a lawful “special measure” designed to advance substantive equality between men and women.

Section 7D of the Sex Discrimination Act permits special measures for the purpose of achieving substantive equality between a range of groups.

Those include men and women, people of different sexual orientations, people of different gender identities and people of different intersex status.

Grover argued that a female-only networking service fell within the protection for measures designed to advance equality between men and women.

The Full Court rejected the way that argument was used to justify Tickle’s exclusion.

Its reasoning treated the protections added to federal law for gender identity as operating alongside the Act’s protections against sex discrimination.

That legal structure is important because the case has frequently been simplified into the slogan “What is a woman?”

The actual legislation is more complex.

The Sex Discrimination Act continues to prohibit discrimination on the ground of sex.

Since amendments enacted in 2013, it has also expressly prohibited discrimination on the grounds of gender identity, sexual orientation and intersex status.

The question before the courts was therefore not whether sex had disappeared from Australian legislation.

It was how those overlapping protections operate when a service seeks to restrict access according to a sex-based rule that disadvantages a transgender person.

For Grover, the outcome demonstrates that the law has failed to preserve meaningful female-only spaces.

For Tickle and organisations supporting her case, it demonstrates that a business cannot avoid federal gender-identity discrimination protections simply by defining a women-only service in a way that excludes transgender women.

Equality Australia welcomed the result and said Australian law had recognised for decades that legal sex could not be reduced in every context to the sex assigned at birth.

Its legal director, Heather Corkhill, described the High Court outcome as confirming legal protections for transgender people under existing federal discrimination law.

Tickle has not issued a lengthy new public statement following the refusal of special leave.

After the Full Court judgment in May, she said she hoped the result would help transgender and gender-diverse people and their families to heal.

She said she wanted to return to ordinary life in a community that embraced “freedom and equality for all women”.

Grover has reached the opposite conclusion from the same legal history.

She says she no longer believes Australia offers adequate protection for women who want institutions or services organised exclusively around biological sex.

“Women still exist and we require legal protections,” she said after the High Court ruling.

She argued that the remaining avenue for change was political rather than judicial and called on parliamentarians to amend the law.

That point is legally significant.

With special leave refused, Grover has no further ordinary avenue of appeal in this case.

But Parliament retains the power, subject to the Constitution and Australia’s other legal obligations, to amend the Sex Discrimination Act.

Any future government could therefore attempt to redefine statutory terms, create new exemptions or alter how special measures operate.

Such changes would inevitably provoke another major political debate about the competing rights and interests involved.

Australia is not alone in confronting those questions.

Courts and legislatures across comparable democracies have taken different approaches to the legal relationship between sex and gender identity.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that “woman”, “man” and “sex” in that country’s Equality Act referred to biological sex for the purposes considered in that case.

That British ruling does not determine Australian law.

Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act contains its own wording and expressly includes a separate protected attribute of gender identity.

The different outcomes illustrate how heavily these disputes depend on the text and history of each country’s legislation.

The Giggle case has also highlighted another point frequently obscured by political argument: female-only services are not categorically unlawful in Australia.

The Sex Discrimination Act contains exemptions and special-measure provisions, while specific contexts can also be governed by other federal, state and territory laws.

The Full Court’s ruling dealt with the particular operation of Giggle for Girls and the statutory arguments advanced in this case.

It did not decide every dispute involving changing rooms, sport, prisons, schools, health care or other single-sex settings.

Those issues can involve different legislation, exemptions, safety considerations and jurisdictional rules.

Grover’s claim that “every Australian woman” has had her sex-based rights abolished therefore goes significantly further than the legal findings in Tickle v Giggle.

Women remain protected from sex discrimination under federal law.

The controversy is over how those protections coexist with protections against gender-identity discrimination and where lawmakers should draw exceptions between them.

That distinction does not diminish the political force of Grover’s argument among her supporters.

To them, the case shows that an organisation explicitly created around biological sex can be compelled to include people the founder considers male.

To Tickle’s supporters, the same facts show why gender-identity protections are necessary: without them, transgender Australians could be excluded from ordinary services precisely because they are transgender.

The High Court’s refusal of special leave leaves that legal balance where the Full Federal Court placed it.

It also closes a case that has consumed years of litigation and significant legal expense for both sides.

Grover says the personal consequence will be departure from Australia.

She has not publicly settled every detail of where she intends to relocate or when she will leave, but says she expects to establish the business overseas.

She has also made clear that leaving would not end her political campaign.

Her promise to continue fighting for changes to Australian law suggests the dispute is likely to move from the courts into a more explicitly political phase.

For Tickle, the existing judgment now stands without another ordinary avenue of appeal.

For Grover, the judicial fight is over, but the ideological one is not.

And for Australian lawmakers, the case leaves a contentious question that no two-sentence High Court disposition can make disappear: how a modern discrimination regime should protect both sex and gender identity when claims based on those attributes come into direct conflict.