Debbie Hayton Debbie Hayton

The sinister attacks on the LGB Alliance

(Photo: Getty)

Lesbian and gay rights are still not secure in the UK. This week the LGB Alliance – a group used to being smeared and misrepresented – came under further attack. With astonishing impudence, the LGBT+ Consortium, Gendered Intelligence, the LGBT Foundation, TransActual, and the Good Law Project ganged up with Mermaids UK in a staggering appeal to strip the LGB Alliance of its charitable status.

The legal action is being brought in the name of Mermaids UK, a controversial charity that works with transgender-identified children. If it wasn’t such a serious attack on a legitimate charity, the appeal would be laughable. It’s clear from their submission that Mermaids doesn’t much like the LGB Alliance, but hubris eclipses accuracy in their grounds of appeal.

In their submission to the court, Mermaids suggests that ‘around 70 people’ at the launch of the LGB Alliance in October 2019 resolved to set up an organisation to ‘advocate for trans-exclusionary or gender critical beliefs’.

As one of the 70 people present that night, I can assure Mermaids that it was fully trans-inclusive. It even heard from a transsexual who is also same-sex attracted (to be clear, a transsexual who was born male and is attracted to other male people). The meeting wasn’t public, though, as Mermaids alleged, it was strictly by invitation only, and we were urged to be discreet.

As I reported at the time, the caution turned out to be wise: the fall-out following the meeting was unforgiving. One Guardian columnist described the creation of the group as ‘frightening and nasty’ before announcing that ‘There is no LGB without the T.’ Exactly why there can be no LGB without the T is never explained, as there are plenty of trans-specific organisations that focus on the T without the LGB.

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