Australia used to be the most masculine place on Earth. Cheerful men wrestling crocodiles, spiders the size of plates, big knives. Then the country seemed to catch sight of itself and flinch. It overcorrected so hard, for so long, that it’s landed somewhere worse than where it started, a place that isn’t masculine at all, and isn’t especially fond of women either.
It has now produced the single most prissy, censorious legal document I’ve read all year, and the crime it punishes is a woman calling a man a man.
Kirralie Smith runs Binary Australia, a campaign group that argues, among other things, that women’s football should involve women. In early 2023 she noticed that a men’s league footballer called Nicholas Blanch was playing on a women’s team in Wingham, and that another player, Justin Dennis, was doing the same in Sydney. She said so. She called Blanch “a bloke in a frock.” She asked, in her own words, why parents should be “put in the terrible situation of having to deal with an adult man in their daughter’s bathroom.”
For this, the NSW Local Court found her guilty of “unlawful vilification.” Last week the Supreme Court of New South Wales upheld the finding on appeal. Smith and Binary Australia now owe Blanch and Dennis a combined $95,000, due within 28 days, doubling if she’s late. Blanch also got an Apprehended Violence Order against her. Dennis tried for one too, despite the two of them living over 200 miles apart and having never met, evidently confident the system would take his word for it. For months, it did. Police served the order and the case was set down for a hearing, and it was only withdrawn on the morning it was due to be heard.
Remember, these are two cheating, abusive men. Not confused, not misunderstood, not on some brave personal journey, just grown men who worked out that women’s football has weaker tackles and smaller goalkeepers and turned up accordingly.
None of that is the funny part. The funny part is Annexure A.
Annexure A is the statement the court has ordered Smith to publish, pinned to the top of every social media account she controls, and featured on the Binary Australia homepage, for three months. In it, she must announce to the world that she has “contravened section 38S of the Anti-Discrimination Act” and “incited hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of” two footballers, by means of calling them men. She’s also banned from doing it again. The ruling doesn’t specify what word she’s meant to use instead. That’s the fun part she has to work out on her own, like the rest of us. Perhaps when the full text of the statement is released, we’ll find out what word we are supposed to use for people with dicks who insist on playing women’s sports.
Justice Belinda Rigg, who wrote the ruling, insists the point isn’t to stigmatise or shame Smith. Then in the next breath, she explains that she wants the statement seen by “a meaningful number of [Smith’s] followers, including those who recall the impugned posts,” so they can witness what she calls the “announcement of guilt.”
That’s not a legal remedy. That’s the village square. That’s the stocks. Australia has reintroduced the stocks as a punishment for uppity women.
Meanwhile Dennis, the goal-scorer who injured two female opponents in a single match (a separate double leg fracture in the same league was down to a different Flying Bats player), got a new alias. After the complaints piled up, Football NSW simply stopped printing his name on the match stats and started calling him “Inter Player.” His new club, the Flying Bats, won every one of their 17 matches last season, scoring 76 goals and conceding 8, which is a cricket score, not a football score.
This is what the country looks like now. A woman gets a $95,000 fine and a compelled confession for saying a man is a man. A man who hurt women on a pitch gets a pseudonym and a trophy. Club presidents who floated boycotting matches against sides with male players were threatened with “disciplinary action” by the two men running the competition, Matthew Geracitano and John Tsatsimas. A few months earlier, the Full Federal Court had already found Sall Grover guilty of direct discrimination for keeping a man off her woman-only app, Giggle for Girls, and doubled her damages to $20,000 with costs capped at $100,000 for good measure. She’s now seeking leave to appeal to the High Court. Somewhere in between, the eSafety Commissioner quietly leaned on Facebook to remove Smith’s page, 47,000 followers gone, no ruling required.
Australia can no longer be called the most masculine place on Earth, but it didn’t drift from macho to metropolitan. It skipped straight past and rebuilt the stocks for a new medieval age. In the Australia Julia Gillard created, when a woman rings the alarm, the country’s institutions rush in, not to help her, but to cut off the sound. Smith’s punishment is so every other woman knows what happens if she rings one too.
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