"Australian woman ordered to pay $95k to ‘transgender’ men for ‘misgendering’"

Kirralie Smith, an Australian women’s rights advocate, has been ordered by a New South Wales court to pay $95,000 AUD (over $63,000 USD) to two trans-identifying men for the crime of “unlawfully vilifying” them by correctly referring to them as male.

As LifeSiteNews reported in September, Smith — the spokeswoman for the organization Binary Australia — was convicted of highlighting the fact that two men were competing in women’s soccer, stating that she “sought to evoke fear in the reader regarding the fact that (Nicholas “Stephanie”) Blanch, who is described as a man/male/bloke, is playing on a women’s team. The other plaintiff was player Justin “Riley” Dennis.

The two men also demanded an apology and stated that Binary Australia had to “develop a policy aimed at eliminating unlawful discrimination and transgender vilification in relation to any future public acts,” which would essentially halt the organization’s women’s rights activism by muzzling their ability to speak clearly about the issue of trans-identifying males in women’s spaces.

Magistrate Sharon Freund ordered Smith to pay $55,000 to Blanch and $40,000 to Dennis, with an additional $40,000 penalty if she refuses. In a contradictory ruling, Freund also demanded Smith “publish a public statement of apology” that must be pinned to the top of all of her social media pages, but simultaneously to “refrain from publishing anything that identifies the plaintiff or their football team.”

“My penalty for being guilty of ‘unlawful vilification’ has been handed down,” Smith wrote December 4 on X. “In summary, $95,000 in fines which will double if I don’t pay in 28 days. The orders also state I need to issue a public apology. I will be appealing the decision. Your support, your voice and your action is invaluable to me. Thank you!”

“It is disappointing that the word ‘woman’ has been redefined to include males and that the words ‘violence’ & ‘vilification have been applied to speaking the truth about information in the public domain,” she continued. “Australians should be very concerned about their freedoms. Women have effectively been erased from law and attempts to advocate regarding public policy are shut down for the sake of the feelings of a few. Males should never be permitted to participate in female sport.”

Smith’s “crime” was “misgendering” the two men in a January 2023 post on X in which she referred to “a bloke playing on the women’s team in Wingham,” and a January 2023 article for Binary in which she referred to Blanch as male.