A woman who was charged with a hate crime after she spraypainted a transgender symbol near a Catholic elementary school in Maryland pleaded guilty to charges of defacing the property of a religious institution and malicious destruction of property, both misdemeanors.

Sian Radaskiewicz-King was accused of spraypainting the combined male-female symbol near the Saints Peter and Paul Elementary School in Easton on September 4. She also spray-painted the symbol near some businesses in the area, according to police, including a liquor store, an Ulta Beauty, and an archway outside a shopping center.

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The symbol is associated with trans identity and is not a symbol of hatred. Parents of kids in the school claimed that it made them afraid because there was a school shooting in Minnesota in August that was allegedly carried out by a transgender person. Mass shooters are not disproportionately transgender, but many on the right claim that they are to dissuade voters from supporting gun control and to stir up anti-trans hatred.

Radaskiewicz-King, who is transgender, said she spray-painted the symbol “because she wanted people to know what the symbol meant, and to create a sense of space for herself,” court documents say. She attended the Saints Peter and Paul school when she was a kid and said that she was bullied there.

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She was arrested and charged with a hate crime. Maryland’s hate crimes statute includes the use of hate symbols and lists nooses and swastikas as examples of such symbols. She was held in jail with men without the possibility of bail and denied access to health care for two months.

She was sentenced to time served and five years’ probation.

While the school’s lawyer, Jeffrey P. Bowman, who pushed for Radaskiewicz-King to be held without bail, said that his severe response to the vandalism has “nothing… to do with the transgender identity,” Radaskiewicz-King’s attorney said that the case was discriminatory.

“This was never about danger,” her lawyer, Lawrence Greenberg, said after his client was sentenced. “It was about discrimination.”

University of Baltimore School of Law professor David Jaros said that it was “utterly ridiculous” to use the hate crimes statute in this case.

“I think it’s sadly a symptom of the public discourse over trans rights and trans issues,” he told the Baltimore Banner. “But this seems like a gross abuse of the law.”

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