2022

The Year the Ailing UK Gender-Critical Movement Succumbed to Litigatitis

Kezia Dugdale. Photo credit: Rex Features

UK gender-critical journalist Jo Bartosch has claimed that “2022 has been the year that the British public said ‘no’ to the worst excesses of US-imported grievance culture - most notably to transgenderism.” Bartosch rightly points to the successful employment litigation of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey as significant progress, but in writing that the “Tavistock gender-identity clinic in London is…soon to be closed” the signs of wishful thinking begin to appear.

While the children’s clinic at the Tavistock will close, the Tavistock’s adult clinic remains: when I was an NHS adult psychiatry consultant, I was pressured to take several underage patients, one as young as thirteen. Other NHS child gender clinics are planned and the transgenderist capture of almost all psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychotherapy professional bodies means that the broadly gender-critical recommendations of paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass can be undermined.

Other important omissions in Bartosch’s piece include the failed coup against Society of Author’s chair Joanne Harris—just over one per cent of its members supported a gender-critical influenced motion.

And Bartosch’s title celebrating “Terf Island” is under pressure from the United States, following the record re-election margin of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on a platform including gender-critical healthcare. More recently, prominent ex-Democrat politician Tulsi Gabbard ominously singled out the UK as a leading underminer of single-sex spaces for women. It might not take long for gender-critical Americans, especially ethnic minority ones such as Gabbard, to cotton on to the fact that UK transgenderism is propped up by the allegedly racist Prince and Princess of Wales.

Such gender-critical selective attention to facts is widespread, as shown by examining two key parliamentary votes since December 2021, and how leading campaigners have responded to them: by encouraging litigious fantasies rather than address the real problems.

In late 2021, no leading gender-critical campaigner wanted to openly discuss how only two of the eleven members (and only one of the eight women members) of the Westminster Women and Equalities Committee had been persuaded to formally oppose self-identification and other transgenderist recommendations. The committee chair Caroline Nokes MP was treated as a “confused” aberration, yet somehow having mysterious powers of persuasion.

Exactly a year later, Bartosch treats the recent Scottish Parliamentary vote, in favour of self-identification and reducing the age of legal "gender recognition" to sixteen, as a mere bump in the road. The failure of campaigners, led by the former Labour Party leader in Scotland Johann Lamont, and past major Labour donor JK Rowling, to persuade more than two of twenty-two Scottish Labour Members of the Scottish Parliament to vote against the bill, should be ringing loud alarm bells.

Before the Scottish vote, gender-critical campaigners were fond of pointing to opinion polls indicating that the public was against the bill. But they ignored polling which clearly showed that a transgenderist Labour had replaced the Conservatives as the second party north of the border since the 2021 election. Voters appear to view gender-critical issues as minor, despite one of Scotland’s best known residents raising international awareness of them since 2019.

The Scottish campaigners have been outmanoeuvred by another former Labour leader at Holyrood, Kezia Dugdale, founding director of the John Smith Centre (JSC) at Glasgow University. Despite Dugdale’s open support for the bill in the Times nine months earlier, and links to high profile transgenderist politicians such as Lisa Nandy, there has been no serious examination of the JSC, and its corporate Pharma and biotech backing. For this piece, it took me five minutes on Google to find a link to Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the puberty blocker manufacturer notorious for its donations to the strongly transgenderist Liberal Democrats, via a member of the JSC board: former Tony Blair aide Matt Carter has worked for PR firm Burson-Marsteller, although he left before they announced their Ferring contract. Other JSC board members have worked for public relations giant WPP, which has a direct financial interest in Pharma/biotech advertising and PR (while presenting such interests as “authentic representation and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people”), Facebook and Google.

For months, polling for the next UK Westminster election in two years time has indicated a Labour government, either in its own right or effectively propped up by the equally transgenderist Scottish National Party. The leading UK gender-critical groups show little desire to prepare for this by properly examining the defeats of the last year. Malcolm Clark, co-founder and close associate of the LGB Alliance, has lashed out at the victorious Dugdale as “profoundly thick,” rather than reflect on how she won. Inevitably, losing campaigners who habitually call their winning opponents “morons’“will struggle to be credible.

The LGB Alliance can reasonably say it has been distracted throughout 2022 by the hostile litigation against it from Mermaids and its transgenderist allies. The other leading UK gender-critical group which has campaigned unsuccessfully in Scotland is Sex Matters. It is not surprising that Jo Bartosch only ever praises them, because she compiles their “weekly memo," a fact omited in the version of the memo I receive by email, and it is not usually stated in Bartosch’s journalistic pieces. It might be a good idea to remedy this because Sex Matters’ statements that it is a “human rights organisation” may already explain why it has failed to convince many conservatives, for whom “human rights” is a marketing term lawyers (and half of Sex Matters’ founding directors are lawyers) use to make paid work for themselves.

Sex Matters might also want to look at its use of health professionals, if it wants to increase credibility. Before the Scottish bill was passed, I was surprised when its director, Maya Forstater, admitted that its only publicly named health professional adviser, Tavistock “whistleblower” Marcus Evans, had provided no input into the Sex Matters submission to the NHS consultation on gender identity services for children and young people. Nor did Evans write the group’s recent commentary on WPATH’s latest transgenderist guidelines: that was done by James Esses, the former barrister now suing the Metanoia Institute and the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) over his expulsion from a child psychotherapy training course. Esses’ only health professional qualification is a foundation course for that training.

If Sex Matters are having second thoughts about Marcus Evans because of his adherence to Freudian psychoanalysis, that might be a good thing. The gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock has also recently suggested that psychoanalysis at the Tavistock has been a cause, and not a remedy, for transgenderism.

Esses’ payout from a successful outcome against Metanoia is likely to be modest. If he really wants to be a psychotherapist, as he says, I wonder if it is in his best interest to pursue what appear to be quite speculative legal claims against other parties. One has already been struck out, but he told me that his lawyers are "currently considering options around appeal" despite such an appeal relying on a "very technical legal concept."

Maya Forstater is a strong supporter of Esses’ barrister, Akua Reindorf: her solicitor Peter Daly, who was involved in the failed litigations of Raquel Rosario Sanchez and (against Stonewall) Allison Bailey, is Esses’ solicitor as well. Some gender-critical responses to Bailey’s case in July of this year were extreme examples of wishful thinking about Stonewall. In her 2022 review pieceJulie Bindel, rightly criticised by Bartosch on other grounds, thundered that Bailey had “crushed” Stonewall because of the legal disclosures of its behaviour. No one dared to point out that many of the disclosures would have happened anyway, if only the well-founded case against Bailey’s employer had proceeded. And Bindel gave the game away by writing that “It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes.” Five months on, Stonewall founder-turned-opponent Simon Fanshawe is pleading with corporations to leave the charity’s Champions scheme, with no mention of Bailey’s failed litigation, or her intention to appeal the Stonewall ruling on what appear to be very tenuous grounds.

In 2021, when Esses launched crowdfunding for litigation he Tweeted that he was “taking legal action” against Metanoia, and that “…I cannot do this without your support. I need to raise money to fund my legal case.” I put it to him that so-called “litigation funders” are available for well-founded cases, and potential donors should have been informed of that. His initial response was that litigation funding is not available for cases with modest payouts, but when I told him that I had very quickly found a funder apparently willing to take on such small cases, his response shifted: “crowdfunding…enables the litigant to retain full control of legal strategy and decision-making and not feel beholden to large funding organisations.”

That is quite different from “I cannot do this without your support,” and misses the point that speculative litigation is of financial benefit to all the lawyers involved, but often a distraction from making progress on the real issues. In a legal system where lawyers often collude to keep conflict going, Sex Matters and other gender-critical organisations that effectively market lawyers are sometimes wasting funds which could be used for more direct and effective policy work and campaigning. One can only imagine what the half a million pounds crowdfunded for the Allison Bailey case alone could have achieved against Kezia Dugdale and her corporate chums.