A GENDER critical football fan taking legal action against Newcastle United Football Club (NUFC) for belief discrimination has been warned by the club that it may seek to recover its legal costs from her if she loses the case.
Linzi Smith, a lifelong NUFC supporter and advocate for LGB rights, was banned from attending matches at St James’ Park in 2024 after the club received complaints about her posts on X (formerly Twitter). She was also subjected to a covert online investigation and target profile compiled by the Premier League, which included images of her walking her dog and details of her whereabouts.
Smith, who is being supported by the Free Speech Union (FSU), is now suing NUFC under the Equality Act 2010. Her lawyers argue that she was penalised for expressing lawful and protected gender critical beliefs – in particular, the view that biological sex is immutable, real, and important in policy and law.
Since launching a crowdfunder with the FSU’s help to pay her legal costs, Smith has received an outpouring of public support and is already nearly a third of the way towards her target.
But there’s been a deeply troubling development in her case.
In a legal letter, NUFC has accused Smith of ‘deliberate obfuscation’ and ‘misrepresentation’ in her crowdfunding campaign, claiming it is ‘fundamentally wrong and misleading’ to say she was banned and subjected to a sinister private investigation because she believes that ‘biological sex is important and real’.
‘To be unequivocally clear,’ the Premiership club writes in an adjective-laced passage that wouldn’t look out of place in a trans activist’s personal diary, ‘the reason for your client’s ban remains the three tweets that are now the very subject of her claim, one of which makes an exceptionally offensive, abhorrent and intolerable comparison with Nazism.’
But as Smith’s legal team has pointed out, the tweets reflect her gender critical beliefs, including concern about the real-world effects of gender ideology: the erosion of women’s single-sex sport; the institutional erasure of the language of ‘womanhood’, which feminists regard as essential to defending sex-based rights, and the irreversible consequences for children and adolescents subjected to an ‘affirmative’ approach to gender distress.
Take, for instance, the tweet that drew NUFC’s unnecessarily verbose ire. It was posted during a heated online exchange and referred to gender reassignment surgery, invoking Josef Mengele – the Nazi doctor notorious for experimental sterilisation procedures in concentration camps. It didn’t target any individual but was aimed squarely at gender ideology itself, specifically the belief that a person’s inner gender identity can be misaligned with their physical body, and that this misalignment should be treated through medical transition – including the removal or alteration of healthy sexual organs. From Smith’s gender-critical perspective, that ideology treats the sacrifice of healthy sexual function as a price worth paying. While the comparison was undoubtedly provocative – and no doubt, to some, deeply offensive – it falls squarely within the scope of expression protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Yes, some of her other tweets were similarly clumsy, unsophisticated and poorly worded. But so what? We can’t all be as eloquent as we’d like to be.
More importantly, these beliefs are protected in law, as the FSU’s legal team makes clear in Smith’s pre-action letter. Far from trying to mislead, Smith has been scrupulously transparent. She’s now published that letter in full so supporters can judge the matter for themselves. The document can be read here.
In a particularly vindictive move, NUFC ends its letter by suggesting it will bring this to the court’s attention on the matters of conduct and costs. Responding on her crowdfunder page, Smith says she takes this to mean ‘they will ask the court to penalise me in relation to costs should I lose’. It’s hard to disagree with that assessment. All the more reason, then, to contribute to her crowdfunder.
But this case isn’t just about Linzi Smith, important though her fight for justice undoubtedly is. What’s also at stake is the question of whether any individual should be able to express lawful, protected beliefs without facing the threat of surveillance, institutional retribution and potential financial ruin.
If you can, please consider donating to Smith’s crowdfunder – and help push back against the slow creep of thought policing across the UK’s most powerful institutions and organisations. You can find the link here.
