Taxpayer-funded trans lobby can’t silence Lyle Shelton, so tries to bankrupt him with endless litigation

THE following report was posted on social media in March by Family First leader Lyle Shelton, who has been dragged through the courts for six years for expressing his opinions in blogs opposing drag queen library readings for children. Ironically, one of the legal representatives for the appellants is Greg Barnes SC, who represented Julian Assange in his fight for free speech:

I’ve been in court for the past three days charged with hate speech. Here are my reflections….

A three-day appeal hearing seeking to overturn a 2023 finding that I did not vilify two LGBTIQA+ drag queens wound up in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Brisbane today.

This is the latest in what has been a five-year legal nightmare costing more than $400,000. Judge Nicholas Loos has now reserved judgment on whether QCAT Member Jeremy Gordon’s vindication of me following a three-day trial back in 2022 will be upheld.

This all started when I was sued for “hate speech” in 2020 after I wrote a series of blogs critical of drag queen story time (DQST) – an initiative of the LGBTIQA+ global political movement designed to indoctrinate little children into harmful gender fluid ideology and radical LGBTIQA+ sexual expressionism.

In several blog posts I said that drag queens Johny Valkyrie, a woman presenting as a man, and Dwayne Hill, a homosexual man who dresses for children as a sexualised woman and is a proud recipient of an award from the porn industry, were dangerous role models for children.

I stand by my blogs and have refused their demands to apologise, pay them $20,000 and pull down my blogs. After compulsory mediation in the Queensland Human Rights Commission failed and then failed again at QCAT, they have pursued me relentlessly through the tribunal.

In a 78-page decision handed down in August 2023, Member Gordon found no vilification had occurred. I feel that in this appeal the process is the punishment for daring to criticise the agenda of DQST (drag queens story time). The drag queens have the benefit of assistance from the taxpayer-funded LGBT Legal Service.

My law firm, the Human Rights Law Alliance, receives no taxpayer funding. Freedom-loving mums and dads have crowd-funded my legal defence to the tune of more than $250,000 and HRLA donors and generous pro-bono contributions from my lawyers have met the rest, which I estimate to be $400,000+.

I cannot say how grateful I am to everyone who has chipped in because like most Australians, I do not have the resources to defend such an attack on my freedom of speech.

The LGBT Legal Service brought not one but two silks, Greg Barns SC and Holly Blattman KC, to the bar table for this week’s hearings. They were assisted by a junior counsel, Benedict Coyne, and a team of three more solicitors and paralegals from the LGBT Legal Service.

I was represented by barristers Anthony Morris KC and Simon Fisher, and HRLA solicitor Valentino Musico.

More than 18 months after the LGBT Legal Service lodged its appeal, leave was granted on 11 February 2025 for this week’s appeal to be heard with additional evidence by way of affidavits from three queer studies academics: two from Canada and one from Melbourne.

I’ll come back to the academics, but it is worth commenting on the role of Greg Barns SC. He is one of Australia’s most prominent lawyers of the left, having run the republic campaign for Malcolm Turnbull. He recently worked to have Wikileaks founder Julian Assange freed and returned to Australia.

Barns put together what he describes as a “rainbow coalition” of political figures from the left and right to fight for Assange’s human rights, including free speech, against a US government determined to have him returned to America where he would have undoubtedly spent the rest of his life in a dank CIA prison.

After listening to Barns SC spend Monday afternoon submitting to Judge Loos why I should be punished for exercising freedom of speech in Australia, I found myself becoming agitated by the obvious contrast between his involvement with Assange and myself.

I like Barns and despite the three-hour hostile cross-examination he subjected me to at my trial in 2022, I knew it wasn’t personal. But listening this week to the arguments of the man who fought so hard for Assange’s freedom of speech fighting to crush mine was too much.

My position is so bizarre if you didn’t find a moment for laughter, you would cry. Back to the so-called expert witnesses engaged by the appellants.

It’s hard to believe that taxpayers in western countries like Canada and Australia pay for academics to produce work to buttress harmful ideas like gender is fluid and that puberty blockers and mutilating surgery are perfectly acceptable medical interventions for gender confused children.

We fund the deconstruction in real time of the good, the true and beautiful of love, marriage and family. We allow these people to pull down our civilisation around us.

Professor Corinne Mason lectures in Women’s and Gender Studies Mount Royal University in Canada. Dr Cameron Crookston lectures in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

He is an expert on the global phenomenon of DQST, although he dialled that back to “international phenomenon” after my counsel put it to him that few nations outside the Anglo-sphere were on board: I don’t think DQST is held in Gaza or the West Bank.

Associate Professor Timothy Jones lectures in history, specialising in religion and sexuality, at Latrobe University Melbourne (at least he’s Australian) and he has contributed to such publications as “A History of LGBTIQA+ Victoria in 100 Places and Objects”.

Jones has made a major contribution to the public discourse leading to so-called anti-conversion therapy laws being passed.

In Victoria it is illegal to pray for a gay person who asks for prayer for unwanted same-sex attraction and if a parent tries to dissuade their 15-year-old girl from having a double mastectomy so she can appear as a boy, that parent can be jailed for 10 years.

So successful has Jones’ advocacy for these laws been that the Liberals even supported this as part of the platform they took to the 2022 Victorian election. Mason, also an advocate for the idea that children can be born in the wrong body, asked to be called “she”. From then on, everyone simply called her “Professor”.

Crookston freely admitted part of DQST was to influence children into accepting “queer” and “camp” culture by way of homosexual men dressed as women. He seemed to think there was nothing unremarkable about this.

But I would posit that most normal mums and dads would not agree that their pre-pubescent children should be inducted into queer and camp culture by role models whose persona is deliberately sexualised.

Jones admitted under affirmation (he was never going to swear an oath on the Bible) that I had never referred to Hill and Valkyrie as paedophiles, a key contention of the appellant’s legal team.

Mason admitted under cross examination that she had provided no academic evidence of relevance about the Australian context.

Holly Blattman KC sought to prove that I was inciting hate against drag queens by publishing a confronting photo of a drag queen groping the crotch of another male whose bare buttocks faced the camera.

My counsel, Anthony Morris KC, was able to point out that the groper was Dean Arcuri, who reads to little children in Victoria as part of DQST under the name “Frock Hudson”. Arcuri was recently invited by the then Victorian Premier Dan Andrews to participate in a DQST event for little children in Parliament House.

The then Liberal leader John Pesutto bitterly complained that he was not invited. The LGBTIQA+ agenda to indoctrinate children has bi-partisan support.

If the exposure of the conduct of DQST children’s role models such as Arcuri’s is incitement to hatred that contravenes the Anti-Discrimination Act, then free speech truly is dead in Australia.

For the past five years Hill and Valkyrie have fought me through the courts to have Arcuri’s image and several blogs permanently deleted from www.lyleshelton.com.au. I have and will continue to refuse to do so.

The LGBT Legal Service’s attacks on my good faith defence criticised my use of the phrase “slice off her breasts” to refer to Valkyrie’s attempt to look like a man.

Morris KC was able to point out that the use of such provocative language actually proved my good faith as it was my sincere attempt to warn the public of the consequences of what is euphemistically referred to as “gender affirming medical treatment”.

With my legal ordeal now in its sixth year it is hard for me to not feel what I trust is a righteous contempt for our politicians who preside over flawed anti-discrimination legislation and our archipelago of anti-human rights human rights commissions.

The longer this saga goes on, it is clear to me the LGBT Legal Service, on behalf of political activists, is engaged in strategic litigation against me.

They cannot allow criticism of DQST to stand and must send a message to anyone else who dares question its agenda for children.

Politicians will solemnly attend ANZAC Day dawn services next month where fine words will be spoken about the men who paid the ultimate price for our freedoms.

The ANZACs would be appalled if they knew that the country’s freedoms they fought and died for no longer included freedom of speech.

They would be appalled that speech to protect children from the harms of gender fluid ideology and the induction of children by drag queens into queer and “camp” culture was now the subject of potentially indefinite litigation.

Liberals claim to be devotees of Menzies, their party founder and our greatest Prime Minister. He would not have tolerated this nonsense.

Yet I can’t get one Liberal or National to fight to overturn these anti-free speech laws so that no Australian is ever again subject to this sort of vexatious litigation.

If we don’t have free speech, are we really a free nation? How did Australia come to this?

Did the ANZACs die in vain?