Is it really such a sin ‘Cause if it is then I’ll give in
So, has the BBC been “attacking trans people”? Has the BBC “quite consciously set out to demean and belittle trans people”? Well, yes it has, according to Jolyon Maugham KC and his never knowingly understated Good Lie Project.
On 14 November, Jolyon and the GLP launched a new campaign, in which supporters are urged to “hold the BBC to account” by using the GLP’s data harvesting tool to send an email to Jonathan Munro, deputy chief executive of BBC News, demanding that the BBC “stop its attacks [sic] on trans people”. And, to date, more than 3,800 midwits have done so. Their emails to Mr Munro state:
When trans people are under attack as never before, the BBC’s attack on the trans community amplifies hate, supports misinformation, and helps fuel discrimination.
The BBC is failing in the duty set out by your Charter to “provide impartial news”. I demand an urgent and open review of your editorial guidelines on trans issues.
But, where is the evidence of the BBC’s “morally contemptible” attack – or “attacks” – on trans people? I don’t watch much television, myself, but I’ve certainly not seen much evidence of the BBC “demeaning and belittling trans people”. Have you?
The more than 3,800 emails sent to Jonathan Munro assert that “the evidence is clear”. But it turns out the only evidence of the BBC’s attack – or attacks – on trans people and the trans community is that the BBC declined the GLP’s offer of an ‘exclusive’ on a poll of ‘trans people’, commissioned by the GLP from pollsters YouGov, supposedly showing “how trans people in Britain are living in fear and have lost faith in key public institutions”.
The GLP first published (some of) the findings of the YouGov poll, conducted earlier this year, on 23 October, the last day of the Labour Party’s deputy leadership election. That GLP news item revealed that 91% of those surveyed by YouGov for the GLP said they “trust Labour with trans rights either ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’, putting the party only five points ahead of the Tories at 96%”.
The GLP news item also revealed the YouGov poll’s findings that “just 25% of trans adults trust the police, and only 31% trust judges and the legal system”, but did not mention the poll’s similar finding that ‘only’ 33% of those surveyed by YouGov trust the BBC. Jolyon himself simply noted that:
Labour knows the jeopardy trans people endure. Before the election it promised to ‘remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance’. But in government it has lined up alongside the Tories and Reform UK at the cruelty Olympics.
Four days later, on 27 October, the GLP published a second news item on the YouGov poll, claiming that the poll findings reveal “a devastating humanitarian crisis” in the UK, with trans people living in “abject terror”of being “harassed, outed, and discriminated against”. The news item reiterated the poll’s findings that “just 25% of trans people trust the police, and only 31% trust judges and the legal system”, but again made no mention of the BBC.
However, early the following morning, Jolyon took to social media to complain that:
We tried to place this story – very expensive polling, the first of its kind, strong quantitative data about what trans people feel about Britain: bluntly there is no better way to tell the story – with the BBC, but it said it was ‘too weak’. But it will pick up any old piece of trans-hating garbage.
In short, the only ‘evidence’ offered by the GLP in support of their bold assertion that the BBC has “quite consciously set out to demean and belittle trans people” is that the BBC – which Jolyon has accused of being “racist” as well as transphobic – declined the GLP’s offer of an exclusive on the poll that the GLP expensively commissioned from YouGov. And, in those 3,800 emails to Jonathan Munro, the proportion of survey respondents who said they trust the BBC has magically shrunk from 33% to 30%:
The evidence is clear. A recent YouGov survey shows 70% of trans people feel BBC News takes a hostile stance when reporting on trans issues.
However, none of those surveyed by YouGov were asked whether they ‘feel’ that BBC News “takes a hostile stance when reporting on trans issues”. The (surprisingly leading) question asked by YouGov in their survey was simply: “How much, if at all, do you trust the BBC?”
Quite why the GLP chose to offer an ‘exclusive’ to a media outlet that Jolyon has long considered to be transphobic, as well as racist, is a bit of a mystery. Maybe Jolyon thought the ‘racist and transphobic’ BBC would be keen to headline the YouGov finding that only 33% of ‘trans people’ trust the BBC. But the BBC was certainly right to reject the YouGov survey as “too weak” – because the survey’s methodology was not just very weak, but fundamentally flawed, for three reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, the sampling used to create the unweighted sample group of 457 people was rubbish. YouGov have confirmed to me that the survey was conducted online among members of their existing ‘proprietary panel’ who had “previously indicated they were transgender or non-binary”. However, of the 457 members of the panel who responded, 338 (74%) are not actually trans as such – they simply “identify” as non-binary (whatever that means), have a Difference of Sexual Development (DSD), which YouGov wrongly label as “intersex”, or are somehow ‘Other’.
Extract from GLP/YouGov survey results document, showing numbers of survey respondents in the unweighted and weighted samples
YouGov were unable to provide me with any examples of a ‘gender identity’ they would classify as ‘other than trans, non-binary, or having a DSD’. Whatever, there is simply no good reason why someone who merely identifies as ‘non-binary’, or who has a DSD, or who identifies as, say, caelgender should particularly mistrust the police, judges and the BBC, let alone be living in “abject terror”. Arguably, there has never been a better time in human history to label yourself ‘non-binary’, because some people will actually take you seriously, rather than laughing and telling you to ‘get over yourself’.
But then, if you ask a self-selecting group “How much, if at all, do you trust the police/judges/the BBC?”, you are telling them how you expect them to answer. That ‘if at all’ is completely unnecessary, when the respondents had to select their answer from a limited list of fixed options ranging from ‘a lot’ to ‘not at all’. As one might expect (expensive) pollsters like YouGov to know, they were asking a leading question. And, to see that, all you have to do is wonder whether YouGov would have asked “How much, if at all, do you distrust the police/judges/the BBC?”.
Finally, when I asked YouGov to clarify the statistical or other basis on which they assigned near equal weight (151/153/153) to “Trans woman”, “Trans man” and “Non-binary, Intersex, Other” in the weighted sample (see image above), they told me “the proportions were based on those providing write-in answers in the 2021 Census”.
But, again as one might expect (expensive) pollsters to know, in September 2024 those answers in the 2021 Census were stripped of their accredited status, after an investigation by the Office of National Statistics found that too many people had misunderstood the Census question. In other words, those write-in answers to the 2021 Census question are unreliable, because the question was fundamentally flawed.
So, was it such a sin for the BBC to reject the GLP’s offer of an exclusive on the YouGov survey? Does that rejection alone merit the GLP’s new campaign and the sending of 3,800 emails to Jonathan Munro demanding that the BBC “stop its attacks on trans people”?
Or are those ‘attacks’ all in Jolyon ‘angry dad’ Maugham KC’s angry head?
Jolyon Maugham post on X/Twitter, 14 NovemberGLP email to supporters and others, 23 November
We have a hearing in the High Court on 12 and 13 November. The EHRC has already substantially rolled back on where it was and, I think, is in some trouble. [It] has betrayed its responsibilities to safeguard minoritised groups, has massively overplayed its hand politically, has taken bad (or no) legal advice, and is getting seriously found out.
So said the never knowingly understated Jolyon Maugham KC, founder and executive director of the Good Lie Project, on social media on 20 October. But is it the EHRC, or the GLP, that’s in some trouble? And will it be the EHRC, or Jolyon and the GLP, that get seriously found out in the High Court later this week?
Well, as Jolyon himself used to believe, if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law. And, having read Michael Foran’s two-part, forensic demolition of the GLP’s claim, I know what should happen. But I long ago learnt the hard way that predicting the outcome of High Court cases is a mug’s game. We’ve waited seven long months – since the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April – to get this far, and I for one am happy to wait a little bit longer. Delayed gratification, innit.
However, there are a few things we do know for certain. We know, for example, that Jolyon and the GLP have funded their legal challenge by grifting a stonking £475,256 from 11,529 members of the so-called trans community, and their allies (an average donation of £41.22). And that sum makes the crowdfunder the most lucrative of the 87 crowdfunders launched by the GLP since March 2017.
We also know that, should the High Court judge accept the EHRC’s invitation, set out in their detailed grounds of defence, to“refuse permission or dismiss the claim, with costs”, Jolyon and the GLP will face a hefty bill for the legal costs of not just the EHRC, but also those of both the Minister for Women & Equalities and the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, who are parties to the case.
According to their response to my Freedom of Information request, by the end of September the EHRC alone had racked up costs of more than £122,000, but of course to that sum must be added the costs associated with counsel’s preparation for and attendance at this week’s High Court hearing. Add in the legal costs of Bridget the Moral Midget and the DWP, and the total bill might well top £200,000.
And, if nothing else, we know that, whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearing, there will be more fun to come. Jolyon is just one of five biological men who, since April, have grifted a total of almost £723,000 in support of legal challenges intended to undo the Supreme Court ruling won by the indefatigable women of For Women Scotland. And in recent weeks Jolyon and the GLP have launched or threatened new legal challenges against the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Virgin Active and the Football Association.
So we can be sure that, eventually, someone is going to be seriously found out.
Update, 13 November: The two-day hearing concluded with the judge reserving judgment to a later date. Tribunal Tweets were refused permission to live-tweet the hearing (after the GLP opposed their application to do so), but have published their notes along with relevant documents. Also, Sex Matters have bought and published the official transcript of Day One (12 November), during which Daniel Stilitz KC and Alex Goodman KC presented the GLP’s claim. But, especially if you’re not into masochism, this thread on X by Gethin Chamberlain tells you all you really need to know about Day One.
If the most amusing part of Day Two was the mature transwoman who sat in the press box at the front of the court in order to roll his eyes and pull faces at Tom Cross KC as the latter presented the EHRC’s defence, the most perplexing – and worrying – part was Bridget the Moral Midget‘s counsel, Zoe Leventhal KC, going out to bat for the GLP. On that, see this thread on X by Maya Forstater of Sex Matters, and this blog by the Legal Feminist team.
The irony of Bridget the Moral Midget going out to bat for Jolyon in the High Court this week is that, originally, the GLP’s crowdfunded legal challenge was going to be against her, not the EHRC. The GLP did not announce that their legal challenge was in fact going to be against the EHRC, not the Minister, until 16 May. And by that time the crowdfunder had raised £384,747 (81%) of the £476,057 donated to date. So, the great majority of that £476K was solicited on false pretences.
Well, come on, everybody, have you heard the news? Women & Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson is in town, and – having already lost the Labour Party deputy leadership election – she’s now lost her moral compass.
Yep, rather than lay before Parliament the revised Code of Practice that the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) delivered to her two months ago, Bridget the Moral Midget, the Queen of the Transgender Blues, has instead demanded that the EHRC produce a Regulatory Impact Assessment – an analytical tool used by government departments to quantify the costs and benefits of proposed new legislation – on the revised Code.
As is clear from just a quick glance at the Government’s own template for departmental officials to use when completing a Regulatory Impact Assessment, this would be a major undertaking for a small, underfunded public body like the EHRC, and would undoubtedly take considerable time and effort. Over the weekend, Akua Reindorf, an EHRC Commissioner, said it “could take up to a year”.
Regulatory Impact Assessment template (extract)
But even it only took one month, one week or even just one day, it would still be an utter waste of time and effort. Because what would be the point of the EHRC’s hard-pressed staff calculating the Net Present Social Value and Business Net Present Value of businesses and organisations ‘following the law’, when the only other policy option is for businesses and organisations to ‘ignore the law’, and ‘ignoring the law’ is not actually an option that is open to businesses and organisations?
Or, to look at the same point another way, even if the Regulatory Impact Assessment showed that following the guidance in the revised EHRC Code of Practice – in order to comply with the law – would collectively cost businesses and organisations £50 million, £500 million or even £5 billion a year, it would still be an utter waste of time and effort. Because, again, ‘not complying with the law’ is not an option that is open to businesses and organisations.
The law (as clarified by the Supreme Court on 16 April) is the law, and has been since 2010. So, if it would now cost a business or organisation a bit of money to ‘comply with the law’, that can only be because that business or organisation has been, and still is, flouting the law. Sure, it may now cost that business or organisation a few pounds to e.g. change the signs on the doors of its toilets and/or changing rooms (for employees and/or customers). But the business or organisation does have to follow the law.
Following the law is what governments expect businesses and organisations to do. So, for example, we can be sure that, whenever Keir Starmer’s floundering Government gets around to implementing the (not universally popular) provisions of its flagship Employment Rights Bill, which the Government estimates will cost businesses alone as much as £5 billion per year, businesses and organisations will not be allowed to flout those provisions on the fatuous grounds it is ‘too costly’ to do otherwise.
Extract from Employment Rights Bill: Economic Analysis, Department for Business & Trade, October 2024
Furthermore, you don’t have to conduct a Regulatory Impact Assessment to know that, if following the law might be costly to some businesses and organisations, in the long run it will be much more costly to them to continue to flout the law. Because, as businesses in particular are not usually slow to complain, dealing with discrimination claims in the courts and employment tribunals does not come cheap.
In short, only an utter moron would look at the Regulatory Impact Assessment template, with its complex charts and jargon-laden guidance notes – together with the so-called ‘business’ signatories of the numpty Trans+ Solidarity Alliance’s letter to Business Secretary Peter Kyle – and think “Yeah, I want the EHRC to waste weeks or months producing one of those before I tell businesses and organisations to just follow the law”.
So, is Bridget Phillipson an utter moron?
Well, she might be. But, having met her a few times when I worked in Parliament, I don’t think she’s an utter moron. Rather, Phillipson’s seemingly moronic decision to pointlessly demand a Regulatory Impact Assessment looks more like moral and intellectual cowardice on the part of someone who – faced with the above-mentioned numpty campaign by the Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, backed by equally numpty Labour backbench MPs – knows exactly what she is doing.
As barrister Naomi Cunningham noted in a blog over the weekend:
The Government knows that a Code of Practice doesn’t make or change the law, but only explains it. It knows that this is not what a Regulatory Impact Assessment is for. It knows that many employers and institutions are currently delaying complying with the law until the new Code is issued. It knows that many thousands of individuals are suffering ongoing legal wrongs because of the ongoing delay. It knows that a proportion of those will continue to bring claims, and the courts and [employment] tribunals will clog up with cases, and public authorities and private employers will continue to pour legal fees into defending them.
But it also knows that the new Code of Practice will be unpopular with many of its supporters. It is seizing on the idea of a Regulatory Impact Assessment to delay the inevitable; and to redirect the fury of its activists to the courts and tribunals, and to the brave individuals who will have to go to court at great personal cost, often one by one, sometimes in groups like the Darlington nurses, to enforce their rights.
It’s a craven exercise in blame-shifting.
Sunday Times headline, 2 November 2025
And, as journalist and former Labour MP Tom Harris also concluded over the weekend:
If Phillipson had an ounce of the leadership qualities she spent weeks [trying but failing to persuade] Labour Party members she had, she would approve the EHRC [Code of Practice] now and face down women’s rights opponents in her party. A failure to do so will confirm her as a coward and unfit for the office she holds.
So, what should happen now? Well, as Naomi Cunningham notes in her blog, while “it would be helpful for businesses and [organisations] if the [EHRC] were permitted to publish a Code of Practice to help them understand their duties under the law, it’s not essential. The law is as stated by the Supreme Court, and the judgment is written in clear language”. To my mind, the EHRC should now simply forget about the revised Code, leave the ball in Bridget the Moral Midget’s court, and concentrate its meagre resources on taking legal action against non-compliant businesses and organisations.
Plenty of businesses and organisations – including, as noted on this blog, Virgin Active – have already changed their policy/practice to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. But a few high-profile court cases brought by the EHRC would encourager les autres. Meanwhile, it would be left to Bridget the Moral Midget to revoke the (outdated and obsolete) 2011 Code of Practice, to which some idiotic and/or captured businesses and organisations still cling. As Naomi Cunningham notes, only the Government can do that, and it would be “irresponsible and irrational” for it to delay doing so any longer.
However, if Baroness (Kishwer) Falkner and her fellow EHRC commissioners are feeling chipper, they could also send Bridget the Moral Midget a one-paragraph Regulatory Impact Assessment stating:
For most businesses and organisations, following the law will be cheaper than not following the law. Possibly much cheaper. But in any event, all businesses and organisations have to follow the law, and it is not the role of the EHRC or the Government to encourage or permit businesses and organisations to do otherwise.
I’d dig it, I’d really dig it.
Update, 7 November: On Wednesday, it emerged that what Bridget the Moral Midget has asked the EHRC to produce is not a full Regulatory Impact Assessment, but a “minimum assessment”. In answer to an oral question by shadow women & equalities minister Claire Coutinho, the Moral Midget asserted to the House of Commons that:
Any suggestion of delay is simply wrong. The EHRC should know that I am legally required to consult the devolved Governments. The EHRC has not been asked to carry out a full regulatory impact assessment, but instead a minimum assessment.
But what the fuck is a “minimum assessment”? Under the 2023 Better Regulation Framework, there are only four types of assessment. And ‘minimum assessment’ is not one of them. So, what is it that Bridget the Moral Midget has demanded from the EHRC? Shadow minister Claire Coutinho is on the case, and we await an answer.
Furthermore, as Lucy Hunter Blackburn of policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie has noted on social media, it is far from clear that Bridget the Moral Midget is under any legal obligation to consult the devolved governments in relation to the revised EHRC Code of Practice.
So, what is Bridget the Moral Midget playing at? I assume she’s waiting for ‘something’ that gets her off the hook. A cabinet reshuffle that enables her to pass the parcel to some other sucker. Keir Starmer ‘accidentally’ falling under a bus. A significant court ruling that gives her enough cover to face down numpty Labour backbenchers. The outbreak of WWIII. Something. Anything.
On Tuesday afternoon, Jolyon Maugham KC’s band of sunshine, the Good Law Project, posted on both X/Twitter and Bluesky:
The EHRC has removed its interim guidance on the Supreme Court ruling on gender.
But this guidance is what Virgin Active gyms and other organisations used to ban trans people from their toilets and changing rooms … so what now?
And these two short sentences – just 39 words – pack in no fewer than four lies.
Lie 1: The EHRC have never issued any “interim guidance” on the Supreme Court’s ruling of 16 April in the case of For Women Scotland. The interim update posted by the EHRC on their website on 25 April, and removed on 16 October, was not ‘guidance’ as such. In this context, as the GLP well know, the word ‘guidance’ has a very specific meaning.
Lie 2: The Supreme Court ruling was not about “gender” – it was about the meaning of the word ‘sex’ (and the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’) in the Equality Act 2010.
Lie 3: Virgin Active have not banned trans people from their toilets and changing rooms. In August, Virgin Active revised their Club Rules on the use of changing rooms, to bring the Rules into line with the Supreme Court ruling. Those Rules now state: “By law, our members and visitors who use a changing room marked as ‘male’ or ‘female’ must select the one that matches their biological sex.”
Lie 4: There is no evidence to suggest that Virgin Active’s August 2025 decision to bring their Club Rules into line with the Supreme Court ruling was based on the EHRC’s interim update of 25 April.
In fact, Virgin Active’s somewhat belated revision of their Club Rules was prompted by the threat of legal action by GB News presenter Michelle Dewberry, supported by the fabulous women at Sex Matters. As the GLP themselves stated on their website and on social media just a few weeks ago:
This summer, Virgin Active were out in force at London Pride, marching in bright red T-shirts with the slogan “Get Active for Pride”. So how did an organisation that that calls themselves an ally to the LGBTQ+ community end up enforcing transphobic rules?
It all started with a legal threat from Michelle Dewberry, a presenter on GB News and a member of the transphobic group Sex Matters. In February, Dewberry sent a legal letter suggesting that, by allowing trans people to use the changing rooms and bathrooms they identified with, the gym was going against the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Instead of standing their ground, [in August] Virgin Active folded and enforced a changing room and bathroom ban on trans people across all their locations.
No mention of the EHRC’s interim update there. And, announcing the change to their Club Rules in an email to members on 15 August, Virgin Active themselves stated:
We’re writing to let you know about an important update to our Club Rules, following a recent legal ruling that affects our business.
In April, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Equality Act 2010 defines sex in biological terms. While the decision was outside of our control, it is legally binding on our business – as well as other gyms, leisure centres and similar facilities across the UK. As a result, we are required by law to make certain changes to how we operate and manage our facilities.
To comply with the law, we have had to update our Club Rules so that our changing rooms and bathroom facilities are designated according to biological sex.
No mention of the EHRC’s interim update there either, and the GLP have not produced any evidence to substantiate their assertion that the interim update “is what Virgin Active used” to revise their Club Rules. In fact, as is clear from the above, in revising their Club Rules, under threat of legal action by Michelle Dewberry, Virgin Active made the change to ensure they are following the law, as clarified by the Supreme Court in April. And, as Jolyon Maugham himself said in September 2019: if the Supreme Court says it is the law, it is the law.
So, 39 words, four lies. Pretty good going. But yesterday’s X/Twitter and Bluesky posts were not the first time the Good Law Project have lied about Virgin Active’s revision of its Club Rules and the EHRC’s removal of the interim update from their website.
Last Saturday, in an email sent to some or all of the more than 300,000 people on the GLP’s mailing list (including me), campaign manager Charlene Pink opened by asserting:
Virgin Active gyms turned their back on trans people with a changing room and bathroom ban. They tried to justify it by claiming they were following guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but that guidance has now been withdrawn.
So, that’s Lie 1, Lie 3 and Lie 4 in one short paragraph. Way to go, Charlene!
But then Charlene contined:
No more guidance means no more excuses. It’s time to make sure Virgin stops discriminating against trans people.
That’s two more lies! The EHRC’s removal of the interim update from their website, six months after the Supreme Court ruling – there was a bit of a clue in the name – makes absolutely no difference to the fact that Virgin Active are required to follow the law. And Virgin Active are not “discriminating against trans people” – if they were, one might expect the GLP to have launched a legal challenge by now.
With her sights seemingly set on achieving some kind of record, Charlene continued:
Virgin Active said they were following the law, but really they were just following transphobes. With no guidance left to cling to, they’ve got zero reason to keep enforcing transphobic rules.
No, Charlene. Virgin Active really are just following the law. They were never clinging to “guidance” (that wasn’t actually guidance), they’re not doing so now, and they’ve got one very good reason to “keep enforcing” their revised Club Rules: the law, as clarified by the Supreme Court on 16 April.
In short, Charlene is a liar. Jolyon is a liar. The GLP are the Good Lie Project.
But why are Charlene, Jolyon and the rest of the GLP telling lies about Virgin Active? Well, as documented elsewhere on this blog, since late April the GLP have grifted a stonking £620,000 from the ‘trans community’, so called, to challenge the Supreme Court ruling. And, for reasons best known to themselves (and their numpty lawyers at the law firm Leigh Day), the GLP chose to focus their legal claim on the EHRC interim update, rather than the Supreme Court ruling itself.
In July, at an inconclusive permission hearing in the High Court, the clearly unimpressed judge ordered the GLP to amend their claim, so as to clarify exactly which bits of the EHRC interim update it is they are seeking to challenge, and on what legal basis. A two-day rolled-up (permission and substantive) hearing of the amended claim is now scheduled for 12 and 13 November,
But with the inevitable (and arguably overdue) removal of the interim update from the EHRC’s website on 16 October, the GLP don’t really have a claim anymore. Oops.
[Update, 28 October: Yesterday, the GLP finally got around to trying to find some evidence to back up their arguably defamatory assertion that Virgin Active are “discriminating against trans people”, posting an appeal on Bluesky.]
Note: First posted on 29 September, this post was periodically revised and updated, until 26 October. Further developments will be addressed in future posts.
As documented elsewhere on this blog, one of the several performative and doomed legal challenges to the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April, on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010, is that launched on 18 August in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by the legal (wet) dream team of retired High Court Master and transwoman Victoria McCloud, the ‘non-binary’ barrister and influencerMx Oscar ‘dying swan’ Davies of Garden Court chambers, and the Trans Legal Clinic, founded and led by the weirdly-endowed transwoman and recent law graduate Olivia Campbell-Cavendish.
Apparently, this is “the first case in history to be brought by a trans-led legal team”, though the marginally less comical barristers Amanda Weston KC of Garden Court chambers and Jenn Lawrence of Monckton chambers, as well as the boutique law firm W Legal – which just happens to employ Victoria McCloud as a ‘litigation strategist’ – stand in the wings, ready to do any actual legal work that might be required. And the case is seemingly funded by not one but two Trans Legal Clinic crowdfunders, the first launched on 19 April and the second on 18 August.
Leading and funding a legal challenge in the ECHR to a ruling of the Supreme Court is not what one might expect of an organisation that appears to be little more than the fantasy plaything of an evidently narcissistic law graduate yet to qualify as an actual lawyer. And, not to beat about the bush, there are a number of unanswered questions about how the money donated to the two crowdfunders – as well as grants totalling £695K from one of the mega-wealthy Sainsbury family’s charitable trusts – is being spent.
It is not clear when Campbell-Cavendish – who has a penchant for yachts and high-end restaurants but has been calling himself “a human rights and civil liberties lawyer” since he was a law student – actually ‘founded’ the Trans Legal Clinic. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been the “founder and CEO” of the Clinic since November 2022, when he was still studying law at King’s College London, from which he graduated with a degree in law (LLB) in 2023. By that time, Campbell-Cavendish was promoting the ‘Pretty Girls Guide to Capitalism’.
Whatever, by early July 2024 the Clinic was claiming to have “furnished” the teenage mountaineers of Trans Kids Deserve Better with “advice and support” while they occupied a ledge high on the facade of NHS England’s head office. And, later that month, at Trans Pride London 2024, Campbell-Cavendish proclaimed the Clinic to be “the UK’s first law firm [sic] to specialise in the law as it intersects with gender identity”.
At that stage, the Clinic’s assets appeared to consist of little more than a few banners and a cushion, but by January 2025 the Clinic had become a registered charity – complete with a financial adviser at a wealth management firm as a trustee – and was busy “restructuring our caseworkers into new teams”, including a Housing & Homelessness Service and a Gender Recognition Service. And on 17 April, the day after the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010, the Clinic burst into the national consciousness when, having acquired a pink gavel, Campbell-Cavendish was interviewed by ITV News in his astonishingly pink office/bedroom.
Two days later, on 19 April, the Clinic launched a Trans Legal Fund crowdfunder to “build, from within, the legal infrastructure we need to protect and defend Trans lives, dignity, and rights in the UK”. By this time, the volunteer-only Clinic had added a Gender-based Violence Service and a Discrimination Service to its Housing & Homelessness and Gender Recognition services, and was looking to “bring a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights against the ruling of the Supreme Court”. But, of course, “this takes time and money”.
Olivia Campbell-Cavendish taking his fake boobs “for a spin” at The Maine restaurant in Mayfair
On 29 April, when Victoria McCloud announced he was planning to seek a declaration by the European Court of Human Rights that the Supreme Court ruling and the response of the Government violated his fundamental human rights, Campbell-Cavendish was alongside, asking people to “donate to the Trans Legal Fund and help us in our trans-led response to the [ruling]”. And, by this time, the Clinic had become a paid-up member of the Advice UK network of independent advice centres, and a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) provider accredited by the CPD Certification Service.
Yet just three months later, on 4 August, Campbell-Cavendish announced on Instagram – his social media platform of choice – that the Clinic had had to “take the incredibly difficult decision to temporarily close our referrals to new clients until we can establish how to deliver our services more sustainably.” A similar statement was posted in the ‘Get Help’ section of the Clinic’s website. Yet on 16 August, on Instagram, Campbell-Cavendish repeated his bogus boast that the Clinic is “the UK’s first law firm to specialise in the law as it intersects with gender identity”.
On 20 September, the Clinic confirmed on Instagram that it remained closed to new ‘clients’. And, as of 26 October, the ‘Get Help’ section of the Clinic’s website continues to state that “we are currently unable to accept new referrals” as “we do not have the resources to meet the demand within our community”. Which is just a little bit odd, given the vast sums of money the Clinic has successfully solicited from a charitable trust in recent months (see below).
Despite this existential setback, on 18 August the Clinic announced that it had now submitted Victoria McCloud’s application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). And, seemingly not content with one crowdfunder in support of this ‘trans-led’ legal challenge to the Supreme Court ruling – i.e. the Trans Legal Fund launched on 19 April – the Clinic launched a secondcrowdfunder, with a humongous target of £150,000.
As previously noted on this blog, the crowdfunder text does not provide potential donors with the material information they would need to make an informed decision about whether to donate (and, if so, how much). Its four (originally five) short paragraphs do not include any information about the legal basis of McCloud’s application to the ECHR, the legal process that will be followed (and how long it might take to reach a conclusion), or the application’s prospects of success.
Yet, on social media, McCloud has cheerfully admitted to a supporter that, if his application is accepted by the European Court, it would most likely be another five or six years before it reached a hearing, and even then the government of the day could simply ignore any ruling in McCloud’s favour. So, in reality, his application has little or no prospect of meaningful ‘success’, and is simply performative.
To my mind, the omission of this material information from the crowdfunder text is a clear breach of Rule 3 of the Non-Broadcast Code of Advertising Practice (the CAP Code) produced by the Committee of Advertising Practice, the sibling organisation of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). So I have made a complaint about the misleading nature of the crowdfunder to the ASA/CAP (ref: A25-1312920). But, frankly, the ASA/CAP is a chocolate teapot.
Rule 3.1 of the CAP Code, which covers crowdfunders
To date, the crowdfunder has raised £27,207 from 544 donations (an average donation of just over £50). Yet the crowdfunder text gives no indication of how this sum – let alone the target of £150,000 – will be spent, simply stating: “Your support will help cover legal costs, court fees, and the work needed to bring this historic case before the European Court of Human Rights.”
For example, it is entirely unclear how much of the £27.2K – or £150K – will be spent on ‘court fees’, as there are no court fees in the ECHR. And it is unclear how much of the £27.2K – or £150K – will end up in the pockets of barristers Amanda Weston KC and Oscar Davies of Garden Court chambers, and Jenn Lawrence of Monckton Chambers.
It has been suggested that Mx Davies is acting pro bono, though he’s yet to confirm or deny this. And Ms Weston and Ms Lawrence have not responded to my repeated invitations to clarify whether or not they are acting pro bono. But if all three barristers are acting pro bono, it is very hard to see how expenditure on ‘legal costs’ might reach £27.2K, let alone £150K. Then again, with donations to the crowdfunder flatlining at £27.2K, something would have to happen for it to reach its (somewhat ambitious) target of £150K.
Whatever, on or about 22 September, the Clinic was required to delete from its website false claims that it operates “just like a law firm” and that its legal advice is “accredited by Advice UK”. Yet, in its three-page ‘press pack’ about McCloud’s case, the Clinic continues to repeat the false claim, first made by Campbell-Cavendish in July 2024 and repeated in August 2025 (see above), that it is “the UK’s first law firm to specialise in the law as it intersects with gender identity”. And many questions remain about whether – and if so how – the Clinic is fulfilling its charitable objectives, given that it has been closed to new referrals since early August, and there is no evidence whatsoever of any previous or ongoing ‘legal casework’.
In particular, it is entirely unclear how much money the Clinic has raised through the Trans Legal Fund crowdfunder since its launch on 19 April, and how that money has been or will be spent. Donations to that crowdfunder were ostensibly to support “a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights against the ruling of the Supreme Court” yet, as documented above, the Clinic has since raised £27.2K for that very purpose via the second crowdfunder launched on 18 August.
The ‘Practice Areas’ section of the Clinic’s website states: “Our highly specialist teams of caseworkers, overseen by our supervising solicitors [sic] take on real cases, for real clients, providing high-quality legal advice, support and assistance.” This suggests that the volunteer-only Clinic’s ‘specialist caseworkers’ are not qualified lawyers, but the identity of the ‘supervising solicitors’, and how their ‘supervision’ of the Clinic’s ‘specialist caseworkers’ is conducted, is entirely unclear.
And, while the Clinic claims (in the Person Specification for a volunteer Operations Coordinator) to “record and collate data on casework outcomes, referrals, and client activity to feed into reports”, it has yet to publish any such reports. Indeed it is entirely unclear how many “real cases” of “real clients” are processed by the Clinic’s four ‘services’.
On 21 September, I put some of these questions to Campbell-Cavendish, by email, but I’ve not yet had any response. And on 23 September I asked Advice UK to confirm that the Trans Legal Clinic holds Professional Indemnity Insurance – an eligibility requirement of Advice UK membership – and when this was verified by Advice UK. However, Advice UK are refusing to respond to my enquiry on the grounds that it is “vexatious”. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed.
On 2 October, the Clinic advertisedpaid modelling work related to “our upcoming campaigns, website and promotional materials”. And the reason for these paid modelling gigs seems to be an imminent but yet to be announced refresh of the Clinic, its website and Olivia Campbell-Cavendish’s wardrobe, funded by four recent grants totalling a stonking £695,000 from the Three Guineas Trust, one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts.
Made between 27 April 2025 and 2 September, the four grants include one of £445,000 to cover “core running costs” that was made on 18 August, the very day on which the Clinic claimed to have “lodged” Victoria McCloud’s application to the European Court of Human Rights and the Clinic launched its associated crowdfunder (see above). Coincidence? I suspect not.
Furthermore, two of the four grants – including one of £225,000 to cover “premises costs” at the chic Pelican House social centre in Bethnal Green, where the Clinic holds (or, at least, used to hold) its weekly ‘residency’ on Saturday afternoons – were made before the Clinic announced, on 4 August, that it was having to close its doors to new ‘clients’.
The three trustees of the super-generous Three Guineas Trust include Clare Sainsbury of the mega-wealthy Sainsbury family, who appears to have been a ‘trans ally’ for some time, and Dominic Flynn, a solicitor who appears to earn much of his living from distributing the largesse of wealthy ‘liberal’ people. Along with former Observer journalist Sonia Sodha, Flynn is also a trustee of the Indigo Trust, which “supports early stage organisations through flexible grant-making, commissioning research and building partnerships, to address systemic injustices”.
Systemic injustices, you say?
Whatever, as no one involved in the Trans Legal Clinic’s funding, accreditation or legal ‘activity’ seems to want to address these and other concerns, I have now raised them with the Charity Commission (ref: CRM25:004916035).
Picture Gallery
Trans Legal Clinic crowdfunder, launched on 18 August 2025The Trans Legal Clinic’s page on the website of the CPD Certification Service (accessed 29 09 25)The Trans Legal Clinic’s Trans Legal Fund crowdfunder, launched on 19 April 2025Olivia Campbell-Cavendish announces the TLC has closed its doors to new ‘clients’, 4 August 2025The ‘Get Help’ section of the Trans Legal Clinic’s website (accessed 29 September 2025)Olivia Campbell-Cavendish soliciting a yacht on Instagram, June 2025Screenshot of the ‘Services’ section of the Trans Legal Clinic’s website, with the two phrases deleted on or about 22 September 2025, following my complaint to Advice UK, highlighted in red.Launch of the TLC’s Gender Recognition Service, January 2025
Note: First posted on 5 September, this post was periodically revised and updated, until 20 October. Further developments will be addressed in future posts.
As first reported in the Times, on 5 September the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) submitted its revised, statutory Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions & Associations for consideration and approval by the Minister for Women & Equalities, Bridget Phillipson. Following the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April that “women don’t have willies”, between 20 May and 30 June the EHRC ran a consultation on further revisions to the then draft Code of Practice.
The EHRC received more than 50,000 responses to the consultation, most of them stating, in block capitals, that transwomen are women and Baroness Falkner of the EHRC is a fascist bigot who, with the connivance of health secretary Wes Streeting, strangles trans-identifying babies to death on NHS maternity wards.
The Minister now has to decide whether to lay the revised Code of Practice in Parliament, under the so-called negative procedure for statutory instruments (secondary legislation), though – to the evident frustration of the EHRC – it seems she will not do so before the Labour Party deputy leadership contest is out of the way (voting closes on 23 October, and the result will be announced two days later). But, if and when she does lay the Code of Practice in Parliament, it will almost certainly come into force 40 sitting days later, despite an attempt by multiple trans organisations – supported by Liberal Democrat MPs – to force not just a Commons debate, but a free vote, and an apparent plot by trans activist peers to seek to derail the process in the House of Lords.
Thankfully, the numpty Fib Dem MPs and unelected trans activist peers can plot as much as they like, but they can’t thwart the law, as clarified by the Supreme Court on 16 April. The law is the law, and will remain the law even if Bridget Phillipson gets kidnapped by non-binary, asexual aliens and the revised EHRC Code – all 300 pages of it – vanishes up Lord Michael Cashman’s rear fanny, never to be seen again.
Fib Dem MPs denounce reality and the rule of law, September 2025
As previously documented on this blog, since 16 April four organisations have launched crowdfunded legal challenges to the Supreme Court ruling and/or the EHRC’s Interim Update of 25 April and/or the Code of Practiceconsultation. Liberty’s legal challenge was robustly dismissed by the High Court and then the Court of Appeal in June, but those launched by TransLucent, the Good Law Project (GLP) and Victoria McCloud/the Trans Legal Clinic are ongoing, in that they have not yet been abandoned or laughed out of court.
To date, the crowdfunders in support of these misconceived and wholly performative legal challenges have collectively leeched some £718,750 from the fearful, “besieged” and evidently misinformed ‘trans community’. And, were the five still open crowdfunders to reach their current targets, that sum would rise to almost £950,000.
However, back in the real world, the EHRC has concluded its consultation and has submitted the revised Code of Practice for approval by the Minister, withoutthe consultation period being extended from six to 12 weeks (as demanded by Liberty and TransLucent),without the EHRC being declared in breach of its statutory duties (as demanded by the GLP), without the EHRC’s consultation process being declared unlawful (as demanded by the GLP), and without any court issuing a declaration of incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (as demanded by the GLP and Victoria McCloud/Trans Legal Clinic).
Sure, on 15 October, six months after the Supreme Court ruling, the EHRC finally removed the Interim Update of 25 April from its website, as demanded by the GLP and TransLucent since late April. But not even the GLP or TransLucent have claimed this is a ‘win’ for them, as of course there was always a bit of a clue in the name and, in the words of the GLP, after six months “the damage has already been done”.
In short, as was both predictable and predicted, the £718,750 grifted from ‘the trans, non-binary and gender diverse’ community’ since 16 April has achieved … nothing. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Or, if you prefer, absolutely fuck all.
The origins and histories up to 31 August of these crowdfunded works of performance art are fully documented elsewhere on this blog. But, in summary, the current state of play in the cases against the EHRC and its Code of Practice consultation is as follows:
TransLucent, led by the vapid transwoman (i.e. biological man) Steph Richards, appear to have abandoned their threatened legal challenge to the EHRC Interim Update and consultation process. However, their woefully uninformative crowdfunder remains open, and to date has raised £11,000, though there have been no donations since 20 July. (A separate TransLucent crowdfunder, launched on 20 July in support of a “potential” intervention in crowdfunded legal action against the City of London Corporation by Sex Matters, has raised some £24,200 to date; in contrast, Sex Matters met their target of £65,000 some weeks ago.)
Good Law Project, led by the wealthy and newly bouffant yet biologically male Jolyon Maugham KC, had a tricky moment in the High Court on 30 July, when a clearly unimpressed judge ordered them to clarify exactly what it is they are seeking to challenge, and on what legal basis. A two-day rolled-up (permission and substantive) hearing is now scheduled for 12 and 13 November, and on 14 October the GLP published their amended claim, along with the EHRC’s detailed grounds of defence, which characterises the GLP’s amended claim as “misconceived” and invites the Court to “refuse permission or dismiss the claim, with costs”.
Meanwhile, the GLP’s two grossly misleading crowdfunders – one launched the day after the Supreme Court ruling, and the other just one week later – have grifted a combined total of almost £620,000. In recent months the initial flood of donations has dwindled to a trickle, but no doubt in early November the GLP will seek to exploit the upcoming High Court hearing toextract a bit more moolah from the midwits.
Somewhat hilariously, Maugham and the GLP are now facing a potentially costly defamation claim by barrister Sarah Phillimore, after they published and promoted on social media a defamatory news item about a (spurious) complaint they have made to the Bar Standards Board, against Ms Phillimore, on behalf of trans activist Sophie Molly/Euan Weddell.The foul-mouthed and attention-seeking Molly/Weddell – who appears to live in a polycule with at least two other mentally ill men – has since raised his profile by publicly celebrating the assassination in the USA of Charlie Kirk.
Victoria McCloud (hair by Disney) and Steph Richards (hair by Wigs R Us)
If not dismissed as ‘manifestly unfounded’, as some legal experts anticipate, the application to the European Court of Human Rights by the legal (wet) dream team of retired judge and transwoman (i.e. biological man) Victoria McCloud, the ‘non-binary’ but biologically male Instagram celebrityMx Oscar ‘dying swan’ Daviesof Garden Court Chambers, and the Trans Legal Clinic – led by recent law graduate and weirdly-endowed transwoman (i.e. biological man) Olivia Campbell-Cavendish – is unlikely to be determined by the Court for at least five years, according to McCloud. And even then there would be no obligation on the government of the day to act on any ruling in McCloud’s favour.
Despite these poor prospects, the Trans Legal Clinic’s grossly misleading crowdfunder in support of McCloud’s application has already raised more than £27,100of its whopping target of £150,000 to “help cover legal costs, court fees, and the work needed to bring this historic case before the European Court of Human Rights”.Yet, at the time of writing, it is a mystery how the costs of the case might reach £27,100, let alone £150,000, given that there are no ‘court fees’ in the European Court of Human Rights, and Mx Oscar ‘dying swan’ Davies, at least, appears to be providing his legal services pro bono.
Mx Oscar ‘male pattern baldness’ Davies of Garden Court chambers, Instagram, August 2025
It may be that the crowdfunded largesse is to pay the ‘legal costs’ of the slightly less comical barristers Amanda Weston KC (Garden Court Chambers) and Jenn Lawrence (Monckton Chambers), and the boutique law firm W Legal, who stand in the wings, ready to do any actual legal work that might be required.On 9 September, and again on 25 September and 16 October, I contacted Ms Weston and Ms Lawrence to ask whether or not they, like Mx Davies, are providing their legal services pro bono, but to date they have not responded.
On 22 September, the Trans Legal Clinic was required to delete false claims that it operates “just like a law firm” and that its legal advice is “accredited by Advice UK”, of which it is a fee-paying member.However, it continues to falsely claim, in a ‘press pack’ about McCloud’s case on its website, that it is “the UK’s first law firm to specialise in the law as it intersects with gender identity”, while Olivia Campbell-Cavendish also includes this false claim in his LinkedIn profile.And many questions remain about whether – and if so how – the Trans Legal Clinic is fulfilling its charitable objectives.
On 21 September, I put some of these questions to Campbell-Cavendish, by email, but to date I’ve not had any response.And on 23 September I asked Advice UK to confirm that the Trans Legal Clinic holds Professional Indemnity Insurance – an eligibility requirement of Advice UK membership – and when this was verified by Advice UK. However, Advice UK are refusing to respond to my enquiry on the grounds that it is “vexatious”.
As reported elsewhere on this blog, on 2 October, the Trans Legal Clinic advertisedpaid modelling work related to “our upcoming campaigns, website and promotional materials”. And the reason for these paid modelling gigs seems to be an imminent but yet to be announced refresh of the Clinic, its website and Olivia Campbell-Cavendish’s wardrobe, funded by four recent grants totalling a stonking £695,000 from the Three Guineas Trust, one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts.
Final paragraph of the (revised) Trans Legal Clinic crowdfunder text
In short, five self-obsessed biological men are busily blowing a pile of other people’s money on trying to undo the Supreme Court legal win by the three indefatigable women of For Women Scotland. This blog will document future developments in this ongoing mananadrama, and I will endeavour to update it (and the table above) at least weekly. But 5 September 2025 seems likely to be remembered as Doomsday for Victoria, Olivia, Jolyon, Oscar and Steph.
Jolyon Maugham KC, Dame Olivia Campbell-Cavendish of The Gavels, and Mx Oscar Davies
Needless to say, the five drama queens have been taking the above news like, well, drama queens. Asserting that the revised Code of Practice sent to the Minister – which, like the rest of us, they have not actually seen – “appears to offer little protection to anyone except transphobes”, Jolyon Maugham KC and his Good Law Project promptly took to social media to announce they “will challenge it in court”. Why wait to read something before announcing you are legally challenging it, eh? And, seemingly from his holiday chalet, Mx Oscar ‘dying swan’ Davies urged his many teenage fans to write to their MP to “demand a full debate and vote on the EHRC Code” that he, like the rest of us, hasn’t yet read.
On 14 October, the GLP and others got very, very excited about a letter sent to the trans activist Chairs of the Women & Equalities Committee of MPs and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, by the infamous trans activist Michael O’Flaherty, now the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights. With a massive bulge in his trousers, Maugham took to social media to feverishly hail the letter as “a very serious bollocking” of the Labour Government, and to frenziedly demand of the Prime Minister:
Are we going to be a nation that respects its human rights obligations, or are we going to abandon them whenever the rightwing press demands it? First immigrants, then trans people – who next, Sir Keir?
However, O’Flaherty’s numpty letter was promptly dismissed by both home secretary Shabana Mahmood and shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, and then forensically demolished by Michael Foran, associate professor of law at Oxford University. But hey, we now have this image, for use when the High Court rules on the GLP’s legal challenge:
Back in October 2022, when Jolyon ‘Angry Dad’ Maugham KC and his (Not Very) Good Law Project were still using Crowdjustice to host their crowdfunders, I reported on this blog the strange case of the GLP’s crowdfunder in support of legal action by the law firm Bindmans on behalf of Nina Cresswell, who was being sued by a man she had publicly accused of sexually assaulting her.
The crowdfunder had an initial target of £30K and, under Crowdjustice policy, that target had to be met within 30 days, or the donations pledged to that point would not be drawn down, and another GLP campaign would have flopped. A few months earlier, a new GLP campaign to tackle ‘racism in schools’ was abandoned after the associated crowdfunder failed to reach its initial £30K target, and the £13,690 of donations pledged were not drawn down.
The Nina Cresswell campaign would most likely have met the same fate, were it not for a mysterious series of very large – and oddly sized – anonymous donations. At the end of the 30-day period, the crowdfunder stood at £41,285 from 842 pledges. But £23,972 (58%) of that £41,285 came from just six anonymous pledges by up to six presumably wealthy donors. So, without those six donations, the crowdfunder would not have met its £30K target, and the 836 smaller donations would not have been received by the GLP.
This ‘target met within 30 days or nothing’ policy of Crowdjustice may well be one of the reasons why, in March 2023, having hosted 54 crowdfunders on Crowdjustice since March 2017, the GLP switched to hosting all their crowdfunders in-house, on their own website. Between 1 April 2023 and 31 May 2025, the GLP launched 28 such in-house crowdfunders on their website.
Fast-forward to 3 June this year, when Angry Dad and the GLP launched a crowdfunder – not on their own website, but on Crowdjustice – in support of their intervention, later that same day, in the High Court, where the landlord of the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s London office was seeking an injunction against protests outside the commercial, multi-tenancy building by Trans Kids Deserve Better, the puerile activist group led by Angry Dad’s eldest daughter, who goes by the name of ‘Grin’.
Funnily enough, the first donor to the new crowdfunder was ‘Jo’. As Grin’s father, Jolyon Toby Dennis Maugham KC, often styles himself.
Later that day, with the crowdfunder having reached a mere £701 from 12 pledges (including a £500 pledge from ‘Val’), the GLP announced that the High Court had dismissed the landlord’s injunction application. Angry Dad was so delighted with this rare ‘legal win’ that he later baited JK Rowling on social media with the ludicrous and distasteful taunt “your lot took a hell of a beating in the High Court today”.
In actual fact, the GLP’s intervention did not influence the outcome of the court case, as the judge concluded that there was simply insufficient evidence that, unless restrained by an injunction, there was a ‘strong probability’ that Trans Kids Deserve Better would commit further trespasses (the test set by the case law). In other words, the GLP’s intervention in the High Court achieved nothing of significance.
Whatever, the GLP announced they would keep the crowdfunder open ‘in case there is an appeal [by the landlord]’, and by the morning of 5 June it had reached a total of £805 from 17 pledges. Then, later that day, a single pledge of £14,975 took the crowdfunder beyond its £15K target, to £15,780.
Strangely, this (anonymous) £14,975 pledge – made a full two days after the legal case had been resolved to the GLP’s satisfaction, remember – never appeared in the crowdfunder’s list of ‘recent contributions’ before, after ‘Jon’ had made one more pledge (of £50), the GLP closed the crowdfunder on 7 June, at £15,830 from just 19 pledges.
All of which rather begged the questions: who donated that £14,975? And why?
At the time, in the absence of any other explanation, I wondered whether the GLP, or Angry Dad himself, had made the donation, simply to take the crowdfunder beyond its £15K target and so protect the other £855 of donations. However, while the £14,975 would simply cycle back to the GLP, with Crowdjustice taking a 3% cut of all donations the net financial gain would be marginal (about £400). On the other hand, the GLP would avoid the (mild) embarrassment of the 18 genuine pledges not being drawn down. Overall, it wasn’t much of a theory.
However, out of the blue, on 27 June the famously photogenic activist and self-employed ‘public figure’ Patsy Stevenson breathlessly announced on social media that, as she hadn’t needed to use the money that “thousands of you contributed to cover [my] legal costs” in 2022, she had now “reallocated the funds”, under Crowdjustice rules, to the GLP’s EHRC protest ban crowdfunder. Which, as noted above, was unusually but conveniently hosted on Crowdjustice, not the GLP’s website.
In fact, back in the summer of 2022, only 818 people – not “thousands” – donated to Patsy’s Crowdjustice crowdfunder. But the crowdfunder did raise a cool £18,592.
However, £18,592 is £2,762 more than the grand total of £15,830 received by the GLP crowdfunder, and £3,617 more than the £14,975 anonymous (and unlisted under ‘recent contributions) sum received by the GLP’s Crowdjustice crowdfunder on 5 June. Yet, on social media on 29 June, Patsy insisted that she had reallocated all of the money donated to her crowdfunder, even as she failed to answer direct questions about the actual sum reallocated by Crowdjustice. All that Patsy was able (or willing) to say was that she hadn’t kept any of the money herself.
So, what happened? Did Crowdjustice perhaps take a cut of the £18,592 before reallocating the balance to the GLP? Or did the law firm Bindmans, who were acting for Patsy in 2022 and were named on her crowdfunder, retain some of the £18,592 to cover the cost of their legal work on Patsy’s behalf, leaving a smaller balance for reallocation to the GLP? Or both?
Or was the £14,975 anonymous donation to the GLP’s crowdfunder on 5 June simply unrelated to Patsy’s reallocation? When challenged on social media on 29 June, Patsy haughtily suggested that the £15,830 received by the GLP’s crowdfunder did not include her reallocation: “that’s from their own pledges”. Which would imply the GLP’s crowdfunder received a total of £15,830 plus the reallocation from Patsy’s 2022 crowdfunder (i.e. as much as £34,422).
However, the following day, 30 June, Patsy deleted that post. Which to my mind suggests that Patsy has realised – or has been told, or has known all along but pretended otherwise – that the £14,975 received by the GLP’s crowdfunder on 5 June is indeed the reallocation from her 2022 crowdfunder.
Yesterday, on social media, I sought clarification from many of those involved in this farrago of deception and hyperbole: Crowdjustice; the Good Law Project; barristers Adam Wagner and Shanthi Sivakumaran at Garden Court, who acted for the GLP in the High Court last month; the law firm ITN Solicitors, who instructed Wagner and Sivakumaran; solicitor Rachel Harger at the law firm Bindmans, who acted for Patsy in 2021 and 2022 and who, as the named law firm on Patsy’s 2022 crowdfunder, would have received and held the money donated to it; and, last but not least, Patsy herself.
Suffice to say, I have not had any responses, let alone answers. Not for the first time in recent years, I am struck by how little those who applaud themselves for holding the government and others to account feel any need to be transparent and accountable themselves, even when they are grifting (and wasting) other people’s hard-earned money.
On social media, Patsy has sought to justify her decision to reallocate the (balance of) funds in her 2022 crowdfunder to the GLP’s EHRC protest ban crowdfunder by claiming the two causes are one and the same. In truth, of course, they are very different, especially if you are not a member of the trans cult, so do not believe that men can become women by growing their hair and wearing mini-skirts. There is no evidence of Patsy having consulted the donors to her 2022 crowdfunder about her choice of reallocation, and it’s already clear that at least some of them are deeply unhappy with her decision.
Unfortunately, crowdfunded lawfare is the Wild West of our legal system, where the regulators are heavily out-gunned by the cowboys, and no one is ever held to account.
[Update 14 July: Somewhat belatedly, perhaps, today Angry Dad finally acknowledged Patsy’s fraudulent generosity with other people’s money.]
Note: First published on 27 June, this post was regularly updated until 31 August. Now that the EHRC has submitted its revised Code of Practice to the Minister for approval, further developments in the various legal challenges documented below will be documented in this new post.
Since the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act on 16 April, four organisations – the trans advocacy group TransLucent, the civil liberties group Liberty, Jolyon Maugham KC’s Good Law Project, and the Trans Legal Clinic – have launched no fewer than seven crowdfunders in support of proposed legal challenges to the ruling and/or the response of the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC), or other related legal action.
To date, the seven crowdfunders have collectively grifted a total of more than £702,000. And, were the five still open crowdfunders to reach their current targets, that sum would rise to almost £950,000. Which is a fuck of a lotof (other people’s) money.
However, none of the crowdfunders has ever provided potential donors with the material information they need to make an informed decision – as opposed to a partisan or purely emotional decision – to donate (and, if so, how much). And, as noted on this blog in June, none of the legal challenges by Liberty, TransLucent and the GLP to the response to the Supreme Court ruling of the EHRC – namely the Interim Update published by the EHRC on 25 April, and the consultation on updates to the statutory Code of Practice launched on 20 May – has ever offered much prospect of success.
Indeed, with the Court of Appeal having refused Liberty permission to appeal against the earlier refusal of permission by the High Court, their legal challenge is now as dead as the parrot in that Monty Python sketch. So, with the Court having ordered Liberty to pay £20,000 of the EHRC’s legal costs, Liberty’s sole achievement has been the transfer of almost all of the £20,638 grifted from the trans community (and allies) by their now closed crowdfunder to the pockets of the solicitors and barristers that the EHRC had to hire to defend the legal challenge. Make it make sense!
On 1 July, a full six weeks after Jolyon Maugham KC combatively told us to “watch this space”, we finally learnt that there will be a permission hearing in the GLP’s slow-moving legal challenge to the EHRC Interim Update and consultation process, in the week commencing 28 July. Ten days later, the GLP announced they have launched a parallel legal challenge against the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (though it’s unclear which if any of their crowdfunders is funding this legal action). And on 12 July, almost seven weeks after receiving the EHRC’s response to their ‘legal letter’, TransLucent finally let it be known that they and their lawyers – the clownish law firm Leigh Day – are now “playing the long game”.
Apparently, this means that, instead of bringing their promised legal challenge to the EHRC Interim Update and consultation process, TransLucent and Leigh Day will “consider” bringing a legal challenge to the EHRC Code of Practice, once it is finalised. So, their Crowdjustice crowdfunder remains open (though it hasn’t received any donations since 20 July), and the £11,000 donated to date may now be used to fund the equally pointless and performative legal action that TransLucent and Leigh Day are now threatening against both the House of Commons Commission (about toilets on the parliamentary estate), and the Labour Party (about the National Executive Committee’s recent decision to align the Party’s rule book with the Supreme Court ruling).
Telegraph headline, 15 July 2025
Evidently undeterred by this collective lack of impact, on 20 July the increasingly litigious TransLucent launched a Go Fund Me crowdfunder, with a target of £50,000, in support of a “potential” intervention in crowdfunded legal action being brought by Sex Matters against the City of London Corporation’s decision to continue to allow transwomen (i.e. biological men) to use the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. Donations to date include a very generous £2,500 from Val Walker; £500 from Debora Diamond (not to be confused with the pornstar Deborah Diamond) and another £500 from Mise Spain; an anonymous donation of 1,000 US dollars (£744); and a somewhat miserly and arguably improper £50 from Charles Lord OBE of … the City of London Corporation. Once again, Leigh Day are on the case.
On 29 July, the GLP finally let it be known that the High Court permission hearing in their slow-moving case would take place the very next day, 30 July. However, on the day, thanks to the GLP having filed a last-minute application to amend their claim form, the hearing became little more than a case management review, with the clearly unimpressed judge first ordering the GLP to amend their claim form to clarify what it is they are seeking to challenge, and on what legal basis – at one point, the judge noted caustically that the GLP’s counsel, Alex Goodman KC, was arguing “more a point of grammar than a point of law” – and then issuing directions for a two-day, rolled-up permission and substantive hearing in the week commencing 10 November (see the note of the hearing by Tribunal Tweets, and the EHRC’s statement).
With characteristic dishonesty, the “really happy” GLP promptly proclaimed this further lengthy delay to their increasingly academic legal challenge as “great news”, with their trans community outreach lead, Jess O’Thomson, brazenly asserting that it means “businesses and services should hold fire, or find themselves in hot water”. Needless to say, it means nothing of the sort.
Good Law Project post on Instagram, 30 July 2025
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the EHRC consultation closed nine weeks ago, on 30 June, without the EHRC’s Interim Update being withdrawn (as demanded by the GLP and TransLucent), without the EHRC being declared in breach of its statutory duties (GLP), without the EHRC’s consultation process being declared unlawful (GLP), without the consultation period being extended from six to 12 weeks (Liberty and TransLucent), and without any court issuing a declaration of incompatibility with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (GLP).
So, with Liberty’s legal challenge as dead as that deceased Monty Python parrot, and TransLucent’s challenge abandoned without getting anywhere near a courtroom, only the GLP and their lawyers – the always willing Leigh Day – are still chasing a legal win over the EHRC. And it hasn’t got any easier to see them securing that win when they finally get to court in November (by which time the finalised Code of Practice will have been on the Minister’s desk for some weeks, if not months). On 15 July, Michael Foran, incoming associate professor of law at Oxford University, concluded his two-part analysis of the GLP’s court claim with these somewhat less than admiring words:
The [GLP’s] arguments barely engage with the law in this area. They flip between incoherence and what can only charitably be described as wilful misunderstanding. One cannot escape the impression that the target here is not the EHRC but the [Supreme Court] judgment in For Women Scotland itself. That being the case, it is surprising how much of that judgment whoever wrote [this claim] appears not to have read.
On 17 July, the GLP quietly published the EHRC’s Summary Grounds of Resistance to their claim. Dated 11 July, the 17-page document is an entertaining read, best enjoyed with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. But all you really need to know is that the EHRC dismisses the GLP’s claim as “wholly misconceived” and “entirely without merit”. And paragraph 7 includes a nice little dig at the GLP that I could have written myself:
It is a matter of public record that the GLP has been extremely critical of the Supreme Court’s judgment, describing it as “unforgivable”. The GLP immediately began crowdfunding to challenge the judgment, with Mr Maugham confirming in his witness statement that the GLP has raised over £600,000 for this purpose. It appears that this claim is nothing more than an ill-conceived attempt to find a ‘target’ for the GLP’s fundraising.
The Commission’s skeleton argument, dated 24 July and published by the GLP as the High Court hearing got under way at 10:30 am on 30 July, is no less scathing. For example, on the question of the EHRC’s compliance with its statutory duties (Ground 2 of the GLP’s original, now to be amended claim), it suggests that:
It is absurd [for the GLP] to submit that, when considering the key practical implications of [the Supreme Court ruling] in For Women Scotland (which itself carefully analysed the relevant discrimination and human rights issues), the Commission somehow neglected to consider those very matters.
Whatever, in what appeared to be a further shift in the ‘target’ of the GLP’s legal action against the EHRC, on 31 July they excitedly announced that leaked EHRC documents show that “the EHRC is planning not to read 50% of consultation responses. Instead of reviewing all the submissions, AI will determine whether people’s stories will be heard. They’ve essentially opened the door to trans voices, only to close it in their face again.” The news update continued:
The EHRC never took the consultation seriously: they proposed an unrealistic two-week window, they published transphobic interim guidance in the middle of it, and then refused to consult on their legal position. Now, they’re refusing to read responses they did get. This wasn’t a consultation, it was a joke.
On social media, the always bullish Jolyon Maugham KC noted ominously: “we expect to sue”. And the following day the GLP further suggested – in a now deleted news update (see below) – that the “cache of leaked documents” indicates that the EHRC Board has asked for the draft Code of Practice to be finalised by 18 August. This thundered:
The principles that outline how public bodies like the EHRC must carry out consultations are clear: there must be “adequate time” both for people to consider the question and for them to respond. All the evidence is that the EHRC’s botched consultation breaches these guidelines, and we have instructed lawyers accordingly.
Jolyon Maugham KC post on Bluesky, 31 July 2025
In fact, Leigh Day had already written to the EHRC, on behalf of the GLP, in early July, expressing concern about the use of AI in the processing of consultation responses. And, on 11 July, the EHRC’s lawyers’ blunt response had been crystal clear:
The process by which the EHRC conducts its review of consultation responses is a matter for the EHRC in accordance with its statutory duties. It is not for your client [i.e. the GLP] to question the manner in which that process is being conducted while the process is ongoing.
While neither of the GLP news updates of 31 July and 1 August mentioned the involvement of TransLucent, on 1 August the latter announced – in a now deleted social media post (see below) – that “in partnership with the GLP, [we] have instructed our solicitors (Leigh Day) to urgently write to the EHRC’s solicitors (Burges Salmon) regarding the methodology of their consultation”. And the social media post included screenshots of Leigh Day’s unintentionally hilarious letter to the EHRC, on behalf of the GLP and TransLucent.
It’s unclear whether anyone at the GLP, TransLucent or Leigh Day was even aware that, far from being unlawful, the use of AI to process consultation processes is being rolled out across government and the public sector (including in Scotland, by the Scottish Government), in a bid to save taxpayers millions of pounds. But Leigh Day’s letter to the EHRC concluded by thundering that, if no response was received by 6 August, the GLP and TransLucent would consider … sending a further letter.
On 8 August, amid a flurry of press reports suggesting that the EHRC is set to finalise and submit the new statutory Code of Practice to the Minister before the end of August, Jolyon boldly but disingenuously told the Independent that the Code of Practice “is subject to [our] legal challenge – a hearing is scheduled for later this year – and a court will decide whether it is compatible with the Equality Act. Given the evident hostility of the [Code] to the rights and dignities of trans people we are confident the EHRC will lose.”
Somewhat less bullishly, on 15 August the GLP announced on social media that, far from initiating joint legal action with TransLucent against the EHRC’s processing of consultation responses (see above), they have now deleted their news update of 1 August, along with at least three associated posts on X/Twitter (posted on 31 July, 1 August and 3 August), and have removed all references to the leaked EHRC documents from their news update of 31 July. This is in response to the EHRC threatening the GLP with (unspecified) legal action. In a humiliating update to the news update of 31 July, the GLP state:
Faced with a threat of legal action, we’re picking our battles and taking down information about the EHRC’s consultation on trans rights. As a result, this [news update] has been updated and amended on 15 August.
We’re not interested in a legal battle to decide whether it was right to publish that information. We’re clear it was in the public interest given the importance of the consultation and the controversy that has already surrounded the EHRC’s efforts to cut it short. But we don’t want to get distracted by a sideshow. The fight to defend trans rights is more important than a legal tussle over whether the public has a right to know about a flawed consultation.
Our challenge against the EHRC’s interim [update] goes on. And we’ll keep working to hold the EHRC to account over its consultation.
Similarly, on 15 August, TransLucent deleted their social media post of 1 August, along with its screenshots of Leigh Day’s letter to the EHRC. As I noted on 3 August, chickens have been having to work overtime to produce enough eggs for the faces of everyone involved in this vexatious (threatened) legal action against the EHRC.
GLP post on X/Twitter on 3 August, deleted on 15 August
The laughter generated by the GLP’s self-humiliation was only just dying down when, on 18 August, the transwoman and retired judge Dr Victoria McCloud announced that he and his legal team at the Trans Legal Clinic – led by recent law graduate and Munroe Bergdorf mini-me Olivia Campbell-Cavendish, who claims to be “the first black trans lawyer in the UK”, despite not being an actual lawyer – have finally submitted an application to the European Court of Human Rights, challenging the Supreme Court’s dismissal, in October last year, of McCloud’s application to the Supreme Court to intervene in the For Women Scotland case. The GLP had grifted £31,874 from the ‘trans community’ for that failed application, but at the time Dr McCloud did not seem that bothered by the Supreme Court’s dismissal of his application, blithely telling one newspaper:
The Supreme Court is comprised of very able and mature minds, aware of the law and of their duties. The case brought by For Women Scotland concerns a pure and straightforward matter of statutory reading and I have no doubt that the voices of the various campaign groups permitted to intervene – all but one of which are supportive of [For Women Scotland’s] desire to create a new court-based definition of sex away from the statutes – will be accorded the weight and respect which they are due. I have every confidence the law plainly stated will prevail.
Unfortunately for Dr McCloud, the very able and mature minds of the Supreme Court did not deliver as he expected, so now the Trans Legal Clinic has launched an in-house crowdfunder – with an initial target of £150,000 – in support of the no longer sanguine Dr McCloud’s application to the European Court.
Should the claim make it to a hearing in Strasbourg, Dr McCloud would be represented by barrister Mx Oscar Davies of Garden Court Chambers, whom we must assume would seek to wow the judges with his impression of a dying swan. However, as lawyer Dennis Kavanagh has set out in a thread on X/Twitter, there are many reasons to think it will not make it to a hearing. Indeed, the aforementioned Michael Foran of Oxford University says he would be “shocked if the claim is not dismissed as manifestly unfounded”:
There simply isn’t a right to intervene in [Supreme Court] cases just because the outcome might affect you. If McCloud had a right to intervene, everyone did.
As with the GLP, TransLucent and Liberty crowdfunders, the McCloud/Trans Legal Clinic crowdfunder does not provide potential donors with the material information they would need to make an informed decision to donate (and, if so, how much). Its five short paragraphs do not include any information about the legal basis of McCloud’s claim, the legal process that will be followed (and how long it might take to reach a conclusion), or the claim’s prospects of success. Instead, they simply recycle emotive and grossly misleading falsehoods about the Supreme Court having “redefined ‘sex’ in the Equality Act”, thereby “stripping away legal recognition for people like Victoria”, after hearing “only one side of the story”. In reality, of course, the ‘other side of the story’ was presented to the five judges by the well-resourced defendant – the Scottish Government – and the intervening Amnesty International UK.
Victoria applied to intervene in the [For Women Scotland] case so that the [Supreme] Court could hear directly from someone whose rights would be profoundly affected. Her application was refused without reasons, without a hearing, and without any opportunity to present evidence even though multiple “gender critical” groups were permitted to participate and submit evidence. This meant the Court heard only one side of the story.
However, in the early hours of 19 August, on social media Dr McCloud cheerfully admitted to a supporter that, if his claim is accepted by the European Court, it would most likely be another five or six years before it reached a hearing, and even then the government of the day could simply ignore any legal win by McCloud. To my mind, the deliberate omission of this material information from the crowdfunder text is nothing short of obtaining money by deception. As lawyer Peter Daly noted on social media on 18 August: “Many good [legal] cases fail for want of sufficient funding. This is funding failing for want of a sufficient case.”
Dr Victoria McCloud post on Bluesky, 19 August 2025
Furthermore, Dr McCloud’s late night post confirms what he told the Daily Express on 18 August: that a legal win in the European Court of Human Rights is not the real objective. Rather, the claim is simply about trying to “impose political pressure” on the Government and others:
There is no space for decision-making about us, without us. I intend to ensure that there will be no peace for the gender-critical ideological movement, the Labour Government appeasing it, or space in our schools, homes and workplaces for an ideology which causes harm, misery and oppression of a small and law-abiding minority in our formerly tolerant country.
And, on 19 August, on social media, Dr McCloud added: “I hope to ensure this stays live through the election, blighting Labour, who want this to go away.”
In any case, while Olivia Campbell-Cavendish has claimed repeatedly that the Trans Legal Clinic is a “law firm”, neither he nor anyone else at the Clinic is a qualified solicitor. And Oscar Davies is too busy curating his Instagram account to do much serious law. So, standing in the wings, ready to do any actual legal work that might be required, are the boutique law firm W Legal – which just happens to employ Victoria McCloud as a ‘litigation strategist’ – and barristers Amanda Weston KC of Garden Court Chambers and Jenn Lawrence of Monckton Chambers. The colourful Ms Campbell-Cavendish and Mx Davies are mainly there to scam the ‘trans community’ into throwing money at “the first case in history to be brought by a trans-led legal team.”
No wonder then, that just two days after launching their crowdfunder, the legal dream team of McCloud, Campbell-Cavendish and Davies heavily revised its text, deleting most of the third paragraph and adding a final sentence about how ‘excess funds’ will fund the general work of the Trans Legal Clinic, or maybe charter Campbell-Cavendish the fancy yacht for which he yearns.
In short, the four organisations and their lawyers have been – and three still are – taking liberties with the £702,000 they have self-righteously but self-interestedly leeched from the fearful, “besieged” and (evidently) misinformed ‘trans community’. And it is quite extraordinary that the Scottish Government is using the GLP’s “wholly misconceived” and now much delayed legal challenge as justification for its own lack of action to ensure that its policies are compliant with the Supreme Court ruling.
Meanwhile, with Parliament’s long summer recess coming to an end, numpty MPs including Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome are trying to put put political pressure on Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson to reject some or all of the EHRC’s revised Code of Practice.
Social media is currently host to a number of quite astonishing clips from the Parliament TV recording of yesterday’s two-hour oral evidence session of the Trans+ Rights Select Committee of MPs, supposedly on the work of the Equality & Human Rights Commission but in the event mostly about the Supreme Court ruling of 16 April. But, having now watched the entire recording through twice, I decided to transcribe the following 8-minute section, as to my mind it contains several of the most significant moments in what was a deeply depressing demonstration of just how low the quality of MPs has fallen over the four decades that I’ve been involved in public policy (including almost five years working for an MP in the House of Commons).
This section starts – at about 45 minutes into the two-hour session – with one of committee member Rosie Duffield’s four questions to Baroness Falkner (each member of the committee got to ask four questions). And yes, it includes the bit where Baroness Falkner referred to comments made by Jolyon ‘Angry Dad’ Maugham KC in relation to a five-day protest outside the EHRC’s London office by Maugham’s eldest daughter, Grin, and other members of the trans+ activist group Trans Kids Deserve Better, and the EHRC’s landlord’s (unsuccessful) application for an injunction.
Participants: Rosie Duffield MP, committee member (RD); Baroness (Kishwer) Falkner, Chair of the EHRC (KF); Sarah Owen MP, committee Chair (SO); Rebecca Paul MP, committee member (RP).
15:11:04 RD: There have been numerous cases reported of intimidation, even bullying, of the EHRC, particularly relating to the guidance on women and single-sex spaces that you mentioned. In 2022, it’s reported that a group calling themselves – forgive my language – Pissed Off Trannies, left more than 60 bottles of urine outside your offices, poured some of the content into the revolving doorway, and staged what they called ‘a piss-in’.
In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court judgment, and your EHRC interim update on the law, we’ve seen placards calling for violence against women who want to protect our rights, with slogans such as “The only good TERF is a dead TERF”. Having been on the receiving end myself for years, I understand the toll that that can take, and it’s been reported that you have had similar experiences in your role as Chair. What do you think needs to change, especially to ensure that the next Chair doesn’t experience – or your staff – such incidents.
15:12:09 KF: [pause] Sorry, I’m trying not to be emotional about this, because it goes to the heart of what public service is about. And I’ve been involved in public service for 21 years now, as a parliamentarian, and long before that, in fact in the same political party as Christine Jardine and Alex Brewer. For some 40 years of my life, I have attempted to engage with legislation to make things better for people. That’s what we all do – all of us, on all sides, are here because we have an ambition to improve public policy for people. It’s the personal attacks – and I refer to personal attacks, as well as attacks on my staff, but I’m more concerned about attacks on my staff than I am about personal attacks – because we have a duty of care to our staff, and we must ensure that our staff are able to work in a respectful, safe place of work. You will have seen, perhaps, that we were due to go to Glasgow for our Board meeting, our regular annual Board meeting in Scotland, and we were unable to go, because the police hadn’t been informed, and there was serious risk of violence, from messages that were seen, I understand.
So, I think, what bothers me more than my personal security, is that our staff should be able to come to a place of work in safety, and that has been somewhat lacking in the last several years. I reflect on it, and if you don’t mind I shall share a reflection with you. Rebecca Paul was just talking about, shall we say, if we want to put them on opposing sides, the other side of the debate, women and girls, particularly, though men are also part of that debate, because they are also covered by the protected characteristic of sex. And one of the things that one notices, is that the vast majority of that part of our population – which is particularly the women and girls part, which is more than half our population, but if you take the protected characteristic of sex it covers everyone in our population – that the vast majority of those people who felt disadvantaged, or felt the law was not supporting them, did so in a dignified, respectful manner, frequently using the last resort of a tribunal or a court to pursue justice for themselves, or their loved ones.
Here we have a group [trans+ people] that I appreciate is vulnerable. But I don’t think that’s fair, because women and girls are vulnerable as well. So I don’t think it’s fair to have a balancing act of who is more vulnerable, victimhood is not the way I approach things. But the idea – and let’s be clear, this Supreme Court ruling only covers 8,464 people, the holders of a GRC. So, in terms of [the Supreme Court ruling] changing things at all – not disadvantaging, but changing things – those are the people affected. But the level of agitation that they can cause, in terms of personal attacks – libellous attacks, defamation – when our family members are affected, our intimate family members have to think about how they are going about their place of work and so on, has got to stop.
And I’m not saying that because I’m departing as a Board member – I’m very silent about my own role, I’ve never spoken about it before, incidentally, about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this, but I didn’t come into public life to bleat on about myself and feel sorry for myself. I remember in the old days, you would say ‘oh it’s the media’ and everyone would tell you ‘oh you’ve got to live with it, either you live with it or you don’t’. I have chosen not to walk away. I chose to stay here and I chose to deliver in the public interest, as has done every member of my Board. And they don’t need to do this, they do it because of a desire for public service –
15:16:36 SO: [interrupting] Thank you Baroness Falkner …
15:16:37 KF: – as do my senior staff.
15:16:40 SO: Thank you, I appreciate that. Before, Rosie, I come back to you, I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t an inadvertent or unwitting tarnishing of all campaigners and activists, of either side at all, was there? When you spoke [Baroness Falkner], you said …
15:16:59 KF: We’re here to defend the right to protest, and we do so, vigorously. We absolutely defend the right of people to protest, even though I noticed last week that we were accused of not doing so in a particular injunction. That was untrue. And defamatory. And libellous.
15:17:14 SO: It is quite clear that we are not silencing people’s right to protest, but perhaps the way that they do so should be thought of. I will hand back to Rosie, but before I do I just wanted to make clear, there was an exchange earlier around sports, and I think, you know, Rebecca [Paul’s] question, we’re talking about the Supreme Court judgment at the moment, I think it’s really important to note that the Supreme Court judgment was purely about positions on boards, it actually wasn’t talking about sports, or toilets, um, and I think that’s important in the context of what we’ve heard about. I think there are wider implications which we were going to come to anyway, and that probably would have been better under that. I just wanted to make sure …
15:18:00 [Rebecca Paul attempts to speak]
15:18:01 SO: I haven’t finished yet, sorry, you can make a point in a minute, um, that we just make sure that this section was about the Supreme Court. I think Rosie’s was about the Supreme Court, we have a section on wider implications, I just want to make sure there was no confusion as to which bits we were discussing. It’s a completely valid question, I just want to make sure it wasn’t being confused with the Supreme Court. Rebecca.
15:18:20 RP: I would just like to say, with respect, it is absolutely relevant, because the Supreme Court ruling determined the legal definition of ‘sex’ for the purposes of the Equality Act, and the single-sex discrimination piece [?] covers sports. So, with respect, it was very relevant.
Note: this post was revised and updated on 10, 17 and 24 June, and again on 1 July, in light of relevant developments and new information
For several weeks now, there have been not one, not two, but three separate crowdfunders in support of proposed legal challenges to the draft updates to the Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations, issued for consultation by the Equality & Human Rights Commission on 20 May, in response to the landmark Supreme Court ruling of 16 April on the meaning of the words ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010.
The EHRC’s six-week consultation closed yesterday (30 June). So, how are the three legal challenges coming along?
Supreme court grifting, Part I
First up, naturally, was Jolyon ‘Angry Dad’ Maugham KC and his Good Law Project, who – having launched one lucrative crowdfunder in support of a new GLP Fighting Fund for Trans Rights within 24 hours of the Supreme Court ruling – launched a second, even more lucrative crowdfunder in support of a vaguely specified legal challenge to the ruling itself on 25 April. As Julie Burchill notes trenchantly in Spiked, “given the merest glimpse of a dead horse, from Remain to transvestites’ ‘rights’, [Jolyon Maugham] will rush to … start up a crowdfunder”.
The ‘challenge the Supreme Court ruling’ crowdfunder has to date raised a stonking £441,466 from some 10,900 pledges – considerably more than the £325,659 collectively raised by all ten crowdfunders launched by the GLP between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. It is already the most lucrative GLP crowdfunder of all time, out of the 85 launched since March 2017.
As previously reported on this blog, I made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about the crowdfunder on 1 May (ASA ref: A25-1920281), as I consider the crowdfunder text to be grossly misleading and manipulative. More to the point, it fails to provide potential donors with the material information they need to make an informed – as opposed to a purely emotional – decision to donate (and, if so, how much). To my mind, this is a clear breach of Rule 3.3 of the Non-Broadcast Code of Advertising Practice (the CAP Code) produced by the Committee of Advertising Practice, the sibling organisation of the ASA. Crowdfunders are covered by the CAP Code.
In any event, the legal challenge that the GLP has ended up proposing – in their 32-page pre-action protocol letter before action, sent to the EHRC on 16 May and published on the GLP’s website, but not added as an update to the crowdfunder text – is not the legal challenge to the Supreme Court ruling suggested in the crowdfunder text and title. Rather, it is to the EHRC’s interim update of 25 April, and to the EHRC’s interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling that underpins both that (now somewhat irrelevant) interim update, and the draft revised Code of Practice published on 20 May. However, if those parts of the legal challenge are dismissed, the GLP will then ask for a ‘declaration of incompatibility’ with Article 8 and/or Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
According to a recent blog by Ian Dunt – the “most-read columnist at the award-winning i newspaper” – the GLP’s letter before action is “tightly argued, literate, thorough and forensic. It has the kind of unmistakable legal swagger you see when an author is feeling very confident about their position.” However, Dunt appears to be unaware of – or to have deliberately overlooked – the legal swagger with which Maugham and the GLP have fired off so many letters before action, only to either fold or get one hell of a beating in court. Indeed, it is now almost two years since the GLP last launched a crowdfunder that concluded with a win in court. As Maugham himself said recently, “it is very foolish to be overconfident about these things”.
In contrast, the senior barrister Aidan O’Neill KC, who represented For Women Scotland in the Supreme Court, and who probably knows a tad more about ‘legal swagger’ than Ian Dunt, says that Maugham and the GLP are giving trans-identifying people “false hope” by pursuing a legal challenge with no realistic chance of success. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
In their letter before action, the GLP arrogantly demanded a response from the EHRC by 23 May, which is one week shorter than the usual 14-day timeframe set out in the pre-action protocol. But on 20 May, the EHRC responded by requesting an extension of the normal deadline, from 30 May to 20 June. This led the nothing if not excitable Maugham and GLP to claim that “the wheels are falling off the false EHRC guidance”. And, in a video posted on social media on 21 May, a combative but evidently somewhat stressed Maugham told supporters to “watch this space”.
On 6 June, the GLP announced that they had now filed their claim in the High Court. However, they have not yet published this court claim, despite Maugham stating on social media on 7 June that “it will be” published. Then, on 17 June, in a news article published on their website and headed “EHRC backs down on single-sex toilets”, the GLP published the EHRC’s formal response, dated 13 June, to the GLP’s letter before action of 16 May.
Needless to say, there has been no ‘rowing back’, ‘conceding’ or ‘backing down’ by the EHRC, on toilets or anything else. If they had ‘backed down’ on what they said (and still say) on single-sex toilets in their Interim Update of 25 April, they would have amended the wording of the Interim Update accordingly – otherwise, they’d be cruising for a bruising if/when the case reaches court. But they haven’t amended it. They’ve simply explained it to Maugham, the GLP and the law firm Leigh Day, who now appear to be acting for the GLP. In reality, the EHRC’s response robustly dismisses each of the three grounds set out in the GLP’s letter before action that are directed to the EHRC, as “misconceived” (Ground 1), “an unsustainable allegation, improperly made” (Ground 2), and “adding nothing” (Ground 4) respectively.
A fourth ground – (Ground 3), the ‘declaration of incompatibility’ with the European Convention on Human Rights – is directed not to the EHRC, but to the Minister for Women & Equalities, Bridget Phillipson MP. However, there is no indication from the GLP whether they have yet received a formal response from the Minister. And there is no indication from the GLP of when they expect the High Court to make a decision on permission.
So, we continue to ‘watch this space’, and to stockpile popcorn.
Supreme court grifting, Part II
Next to take up arms against the EHRC was the “trans-led advocacy and human rights organisation” TransLucent, which on 13 May launched a crowdjustice crowdfunder in support of vaguely specified legal action aimed at forcing the EHRC to “withdraw the existing interim update, and [establish] a FULL and proper, twelve-week consultation”, as well as ensuring “a full, proper and independent review of the consultation responses before any new or amended [EHRC] guidance is published”.
The crowdfunder has so far raised just £10,855 from 248 donors (an average donation of £43.77). This is some way short of the current target of £60,000, and the crowdfunder text indicates that, ultimately, TransLucent might need to raise as much as £100,000 to pursue the proposed legal action in court.
According to the crowdfunder text, TransLucent’s lawyers – the law firm Leigh Day – sent “a legal letter” to the EHRC on 12 May. And, on social media on 28 May, Translucent confirmed that Leigh Day had received the EHRC’s response, and that “we are now consulting with them and our KCs”. However, it is entirely unclear whether this ‘legal letter’ was a pre-action protocol letter before action, or just a letter. In a news article on their own website, Leigh Day refer only to “a letter sent to the regulator”.
TransLucent have not published either Leigh Day’s letter of 13 May, or the EHRC’s response, and there has been no update since 28 May, despite the dismissal by the High Court on 6 June of Liberty’s similar legal challenge (see below). They have not named the KCs advising them, and have not given any indication of the proposed legal challenge’s prospects of success. Accordingly, potential donors to the crowdfunder have not been provided with the material information they need to make an informed decision about whether to donate (and, if so, how much).
So, to my mind, the TransLucent crowdfunder is in breach of Rule 3.3 of the CAP Code, and I have made a compliant to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA ref: A25-1296571). Furthermore, as the law firm Leigh Day is clearly complicit in what has become an exercise in obtaining money by deception, I have made a complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Supreme court grifting, Part III
Perhaps feeling a bit left out, on 30 May the civil liberties advocacy group Liberty announced the launch of a crowdjustice crowdfunder in support of vaguely specified legal action against the EHRC “over their failure to carry out a fair consultation on changes to their Code of Practice following [the] Supreme Court decision” of 16 April.
It was unclear from the crowdfunder text whether Liberty had already issued a claim in the High Court, or had simply sent a letter before action to the EHRC. According to a news report, Liberty “sent a pre-action letter to the EHRC earlier this week [sic] and have now submitted legal papers to the High Court”, while Liberty’s own news article states “we have taken legal action because the consultation period set out by the EHRC is unlawful” and “a High Court judge will now decide how quickly the case should be dealt with and whether it will go ahead to a hearing”. On social media and by email, I asked Liberty to clarify, but I have not had any response.
However, on 6 June, Jolyon Maugham posted on social media that Liberty had just been refused permission by the High Court. At that point, Liberty’s crowdfunder stood at £13,274 from 508 donations. Later that day, the EHRC confirmed that Liberty had been refused permission, and on 9 June the Administrative Court blog reported the judge’s reasons for refusing permission. But it was only later on 9 June that Liberty themselves announced – in a perfunctory, 41-word update to the crowdfunder text – that they had been refused permission and will attempt to appeal in the Court of Appeal.
On 18 June, in another perfunctory update to the crowdfunder text, Liberty announced they have secured an appeal hearing in the Court of Appeal “in the week commencing 23 June” – that is, in the final week of the six-week consultation. The appeal was subsequently set for 26 June.
On 26 June, in a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal refused Liberty permission to appeal the High Court’s ruling of 6 June, and ordered Liberty to pay costs of £20,000 to the EHRC. During the hearing it emerged that the EHRC has already received more than 12,000 responses to the consultation. In a statement, the EHRC welcomed the ruling, and on 27 June Liberty finally closed their crowdfunder, which by then had raised £20,638 from 808 pledges.
Liberty have not at any stage published their letter before action to the EHRC, or the EHRC’s response, or the written judgment of the High Court refusing permission, or their appeal to the Court of Appeal. They have not published details of their legal team, and have not at any point given any indication of the legal challenge’s (and now their appeal’s) prospects of success. So, once again, potential donors to the crowdfunder were not provided with the material information they needed to make an informed decision about whether to donate (and, if so, how much). Accordingly, I have made a complaint about the crowdfunder to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA ref: A25-1296348).
What might all this supreme grifting achieve?
Between the three crowdfunders in support of legal action against the EHRC, the Good Law Project, TransLucent and Liberty have already grifted a total of more than £467,000 from the trans community (and its allies). And, were all three crowdfunders to reach their current target, that sum would rise to £585,000. Yet it is hard to see any of the proposed legal challenges achieving anything hugely significant.
Until the High Court refused them permission on 6 June, I thought Liberty probably had the best chance of a legal win in court, as they were not actually asking for very much: should a court rule in Liberty’s favour, the EHRC would simply have to extend the consultation on its draft Code of Practice by six weeks (i.e. move the deadline from 30 June, to mid-August). However, beyond some embarrassment (and minor administrative inconvenience) for the EHRC, that would be something of a hollow victory, as nothing significant would be achieved. The EHRC could keep the consultation open for six months, but that wouldn’t significantly alter the outcome – the Supreme Court has said what the law is (and has been since 2010), and that is not going to change.
This did not go unnoticed by some Liberty supporters and trans activists. One noted on social media: “Can you tell us what you hope to achieve with this action? A longer bogus consultation just enhances its legitimacy. Good Law Project’s action is aimed at defending our rights. I can’t see what the purpose of this is.”
Whatever, as noted above, on 26 June the Court of Appeal refused Liberty permission to appeal. So their legal challenge is now as dead as the parrot in that Monty Python sketch. And its sole achievement was to transfer £20,000 of the £20,638 raised by their now closed crowdfunder to the barristers and solicitors that the EHRC had to hire to defend it.
Accordingly, I also thought, initially, that TransLucent might also have some chance of being able to claim at least a partial legal victory (on the 12 weeks point). However, with the High Court [and now also the Court of Appeal] having refused Liberty permission on that point, that now seems most unlikely. And I really can’t see any High Court judge granting TransLucent’s wish for a “a full, proper and independent review of the consultation responses before any new or amended [EHRC] guidance is published”. Apart from anything else, that would amount to judges making policy and, according to no less a legal authority than Jolyon ‘Angry Dad’ Maugham himself, that is not their job.
As noted above, TransLucent have gone very quiet since they received the EHRC’s response to Leigh Day’s letter on 27 or 28 May, and their crowdfunder has been moribund since early June (over the past two weeks, it has received just two donations). So it is increasingly hard to believe that this proposed challenge will ever reach court.
Which leaves just the proposed challenge by Jolyon Maugham and the GLP. And today we learnt that there is a permission hearing scheduled for the w/c 28 July.
I’m a policy wonk, not a lawyer, but – in light of the judge’s reasons for refusing Liberty permission on the 12-week point, the generally supportive response to the EHRC consultation of Michael Foran, incoming associate professor of law at Oxford University, and the robustness of the EHRC’s formal response to the GLP’s letter before action – I find it very hard to see a High Court judge agreeing to blow up the entire EHRC consultation process, some weeks after it has concluded. Indeed, the GLP’s failure to publish the filed claim suggests to me that they might even have dropped Grounds 1, 2 and 4, to concentrate on seeking a ‘declaration of incompatibility’ (Ground 3).
Whatever, I find it even harder to see a High Court judge effectively overturning a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court by issuing a declaration that the Article 8 ECHR right to a private life includes the right to access single-sex spaces reserved for the opposite (biological) sex.
Maugham and others – such as the trans-identifying barrister Robin Moira White and former judge Victoria ‘Strasbourg’ McCloud – appear to have convinced themselves that the Supreme Court somehow overlooked the European Convention on Human Rights. But, as Michael Foran and others have previously explained, that argument has more holes than a block of Emmental. And, in any case, such ‘declarations of incompatibility’ are not binding on Parliament.
So, even if – and at this stage that’s an enormous ‘if’ – Maugham and the GLP were to ‘win’ such a declaration in court, that wouldn’t necessarily make any difference: there is no evidence of any appetite among ministers for the Government to legislate to nullify the Supreme Court ruling. On the contrary, as Joan Smith noted earlier this month, the Government’s unexpected announcement of Dr Mary-Ann Stevenson as ministers’ preferred candidate to replace Baroness Falkner as Chair of the EHRC in the autumn suggests that “Keir Starmer has quietly come to the conclusion that Labour’s long history of trying to please trans organisations is no longer tenable”:
Starmer must have anticipated — and prepared for — the reaction to Stephenson’s appointment. Perhaps he’s finally realised he has to choose between offending zealots in the parliamentary party and the general public, who’ve had enough of rainbow flags and ‘gender-neutral’ facilities.
Not that the failure of all three proposed legal challenges would be the end of the matter, of course. As Lara Brown notes in the current issue of the Spectator, for transgender ideologues like Maugham, “defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity”.
Who knew that the most marginalised and disadvantaged community on the planet had so much spare cash to throw away on half-baked, performative lawfare?
Labour Pains 