An Australian “trans inclusive” Premier League women’s football team with five male players has secured victory in the grand final match after dominating games throughout the summer. During the 2024 season of the North West Sydney Football Women’s Premier Competition, The Flying Bats won all 17 games and scored 76 goals while only a total of 8 points were scored against them.
The Flying Bats, a football club for “self-identified women and non-binary people,” has attracted significant criticism that has escalated over the past year. The mounting outcry presumably motivated the decision by regulators to ramp up security measures during the Women’s Premier League grand final game on Sunday, which they won, 5-4, over West Pennant Hills Cherrybrook Football Club.
Earlier this year the team was awarded a $1,000 prize after winning the North West Sydney League pre-season Beryl Ackroyd Cup, following a season of winning every game they played in the Women’s Premier League matches, 10-0. The news generated significant outcry and resulted in The Flying Bats making international headlines.
Australian talk radio presenter Ben Fordham spoke with one of the attendees at yesterday’s match. According to the caller, identified only as David, security guards conducted bag checks and required all who attended to ditch their recording devices.
“There was quite a high security presence up there, and… they were actually doing bag checks to make sure no one had brought in any sort of device to film the game any bigger than a mobile phone. I was told by security that they’d had to ask one person who refused to let them into their bag to leave the premises. So they were clamping down on people there trying to take footage… because The Flying Bats are a hot topic in football circles these days,” David said.
“West Pennant had a really vocal crowd up there… At the end of the game, when the full-time whistle went, you should have heard the boos coming from the West Pennant Hills crowd section. It was deafening,” he added.
West Pennant Hills Cherrybrook Football Club shared an encouraging message to their female athletes on Facebook yesterday after the loss.
“Our Premier Leauge Womens team have left everything on Christie Park this afternoon losing 5-4 in heartbreaking fashion to the Flying Bats,” the post read. “You embodied everything it means to play for our club over an amazing 90 mins of football. We could not be prouder of you girls!”
Comments on the Facebook post were entirely supportive of the women. “Well done ladies! That team should never been allowed to compete,” read one response. “Your girls are the winners here. [You] didn’t lose, [you] were robbed. Shame on the soccer federation for letting this happen,” read another.
According to regulations put forward by the North West Sydney Football Association (NWSFA), “players may register and participate on the basis of their gender identification.” There are a total of at least nine trans-identified males playing football within the women’s leagues, though their identities have been protected and withheld by Australian media.
Guidelines issued by the Australian Human Rights Commission state that under the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984, sporting organizations are forbidden from enforcing “discrimination” on the basis of a self-declared gender identity. “An example of direct discrimination would be a sporting organization refusing a trans woman’s application for membership because she is transgender,” the guidelines state.
In response to landslide victories secured by The Flying Bats FC, six other football clubs whose women’s teams had competed against them organized an informal meeting on March 17 at the Ranch Hotel in North Ryde. The Northwest Sydney Football Association became aware of the conversation and scheduled a formal meeting. An email was sent out to the club presidents from the CEO of North West Sydney Football, Matthew Geracitano, instructing them to attend a meeting on the evening of March 20 at Christie Park.
Included in the email sent to football club presidents was a packet titled “Online Hate Speech” produced by the eSafety Commission. Above the attachment, the following sentence was highlighted in yellow: “If individuals responsible for posting seriously harmful material do not comply with a removal notice, we can seek civil penalties or fines against perpetrators (up to $111,000).”
During the meeting, which was attended by CEO of Football NSW John Tsatsimas, attendees were told that a decision to boycott participation by forfeiting matches against The Flying Bats would result in “disciplinary action” being issued.
As previously revealed by Reduxx, one of the five men on the women’s football team is trans activist Riley Dennis, who was previously accused of severely injuring women while participating on another women’s team. Dennis could be seen towering over the female players during Sunday’s game, while wearing the Flying Bats uniform decorated with colors from the Pride progress flag.
Dennis, born Justin, 32, currently plays for The Flying Bats, but last year was a member of the Inter Lions team in New South Wales. On May 21, 2023, during a game between the Inter Lions and the St. George football clubs at the Majors Bay Reserve, Dennis launched his smaller female opponent towards a metal fence using an aggressive tackle as the two chased down the ball.
Reduxx was provided footage of the match, which showed the female player laying on her side, unmoving, as the transgender player casually walked away.
The month prior, Dennis was said to have injured another female player, who reportedly had to seek hospital attention as a result of her injury. A letter-writing campaign was launched by Kirralie Smith, a spokeswoman with Binary Australia, encouraging concerned individuals to contact Football New South Wales, which reportedly then received over 12,000 submissions.
For her role in bringing awareness to the injuries sustained by female athletes, Smith was visited by New South Wales Police and handed an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) on March 30 that year requiring that she neither discuss nor approach Dennis. The AVO was withdrawn by authorities in September, but Smith continues to face ongoing legal challenges for having identified some of the men playing against women.
Earlier this year, Reduxx spoke with president of St. Patrick’s Football Club Frank Parisi, who revealed that at least 20 female players had excluded themselves from the sport, presumably due to safety concerns over serious injuries that had already occurred as a result of male participants in women’s matches.
Parisi described a range of problems that had arisen as a result of men playing in women’s football matches, as well as an incident in which a female player’s leg was broken in two places by a trans-identified male during a game. Female players have been self-excluding from the sport by the dozens, said Parisi, in order to avoid competing against the male players.
“A couple of year ago, one of The Flying Bats players broke one of our players’ legs in a game. It was a clumsy tackle from behind. Our player had her leg broken in two places and she’s no longer playing football. It was a direct result of a real bad, tall player… he didn’t get a red card,” Parisi said.
However, while the trans-identified male who caused the injury was not penalized, one female player who rushed to help the injured woman was suspended for a comment she made during the incident.
“One of our players rushed over to try to help her, she was screaming in so much pain. At that time, she made a derogatory remark to the Bats player, which we apologized for. [She was] suspended. The Bats player, nothing happened to [him].” Parisi clarified that following this incident, the player was suspended from matches for a total of eight weeks.
In 2022, the year in which a female player for St. Patrick’s FC had her leg broken by a trans-identified male associated with The Flying Bats, club president for the latter group, Jen Peden, was honored with a Fair Play award presented by the NWSFA – a fact announced to the club’s Facebook page with the comment, “We play nice.”
In March, massive public outcry ensued after news broke of the five trans-identified players on The Flying Bats team. In response, LGBTI Rights Australia, a Facebook community with over 250,000 followers, made a public statement mocking “TERF Nazis” and suggesting that “transphobes” should “train a bit harder.”
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