A high-profile anti-trans campaigner who signed a letter last week calling for a federal inquiry into trans healthcare for children and a pause on gender affirming treatment until the inquiry is complete has had an apprehended violence order taken out against her by a trans woman.
In a December appeal ruling published last week, the NSW district court granted an AVO against Kirralie Smith, the spokesperson for anti-trans group Binary. The court ordered her not to assault, threaten, stalk, harass, intimidate, approach or contact the woman until December 2026. Smith also must not approach two mid-north coast football clubs for the same period.
Smith has not been charged with any offence.
The court heard that the woman had been targeted by attacks since December 2022, when her football club posted photos on Facebook of their awards night.
In January 2023, Smith posted a tweet calling for men to help her with “the bloke playing on the women’s team”, the court heard. Smith then posted a picture of the woman on Twitter to her 14,000 followers, calling her a “bloke in a frock”. She made a similar post on her Facebook page with 48,000 followers, and her organisation’s Facebook page, with 78,000 followers.
In February 2023, Smith travelled to the mid-north coast with a group of men impersonating trans women and filmed the event, including the impersonators playing soccer.
The woman told the court she feared for her safety and the safety of her friends and community, and Smith wasn’t going to stop. The court reviewed more than a dozen posts related to the conduct.
The decision said the AVO applicant was aware of Smith’s views that trans women should not be allowed into women’s changerooms, and Smith was sharing her image “to incite harm and violence”.
The woman’s AVO application was rejected by the Taree local court in February last year, but was granted on appeal.
Court of appeal Justice Penelope Wass found Smith’s conduct involved “ongoing behaviours which were objectively threatening.”
“In addition, they were ‘disturbing’,” she said.
“They interrupted her quiet and peaceful life, playing soccer on the mid- north coast for her club, in a team that accepted her and celebrated her for her commitment to the sport.
“She is not a transgender activist, simply a transgender woman who feared that her quiet life would be interrupted, hindered, or interfered with.”
Wass said the woman’s life was thrown into commotion and disorder, and disarranged and unsettled by Smith’s conduct.
Smith had argued to the court the conduct was not harassment or intimidation. Smith claimed it was political speech, and was “trivial conduct”.
Wass rejected that assertion, stating it was “a sustained campaign of belittling, harassment and intimidation”.
A spokesperson for Binary said the organisation couldn’t comment due to the restrictions but said Smith intended to appeal the ruling.
The football club was approached for comment.
Smith is the spokesperson for Binary, an anti-trans activist organisation that was renamed from the anti-marriage equality group Marriage Alliance in 2018 after same-sex marriage became law.
Smith was one of over 100 signatories to a letter to the prime minister published in the Australian last week calling for the federal government to hold an inquiry into transgender healthcare for children and pause the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Other signatories to the letter include doctors, medical experts and women’s rights groups.
Guardian Australia is not suggesting the other signatories were aware of the AVO taken out against Smith.
On Friday, the health minister, Mark Butler, announced a review of the Australian standards of care and treatment guidelines for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents, to be conducted by the National Health and Medical Research Council to report back to government in mid-2026.
The Queensland health minister, Tim Nicholls, has announced a ban on puberty blockers for all new patients of the state’s only gender clinic, at the Royal Brisbane hospital, and for other patients in the public health system, until the government considers the outcome of an independent review into the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.
The move has been criticised as “discriminatory”, with Rachel Hines, the chief executive of the Open Doors Youth Service, saying she thought it went against the Human Rights Act.