A coalition of gender-critical groups has accused Stonewall of “targeting” Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the female boss of Britain’s equalities watchdog over her approach to the complex question of how to balance women’s sex-based rights with trans rights, reports the Telegraph.
Led by women’s rights organisation Sex Matters, which believes biological sex takes precedence over self-identified gender in policy and in law, the 39 groups – including the Women’s Rights Network, the LGB Alliance, and Lesbian Labour – have signed a letter to the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (Ganhri), which has been persuaded by organisations such as Stonewall to carry out a “special review” into the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), claiming it is ‘anti-trans’.
In their letter, they say Stonewall has subjected Lady Falkner to the same sort of “unreasonable, vexatious complaints used to harass and intimidate so many ordinary women at work”.
Last year, Baroness Falkner faced an investigation after 12 current or former staff members at the EHRC made dozens of allegations against her.
The dossier of allegations bemoaned “a lack of psychological safety” in the office. One complaint took issue with someone rolling their eyes, while another alleged Baroness Falkner referred to a trans activist as a “bloke in lipstick” [disinformation alert: she uttered that phrase while describing the abuse of trans people].
Baroness Falkner’s supporters believe these spurious complaints only emerged after trans activists and their allies in the civil service became incensed by her attempts to probe whether women’s sex-based rights need greater legal protection as more trans-identifying men are demanding access to single sex women’s spaces like toilets and changing rooms.
In their letter, the campaign groups also accused Stonewall of a “pattern of reprisal, harassment and intimidation” against the EHRC itself. The letter continues:
The EHRC’s job is to protect everyone’s rights, including those with ‘gender critical’ beliefs.
Ganhri has fallen into the trap of responding to unreasonable complaints about gender-critical speech in the same one-sided fashion that has been found to be harassment and discrimination in these recent cases. We urge you to rectify this injustice.”
It is in fact entirely reasonable to challenge the idea that any men can become women, and what is more, the Equality Act protects our right to do so, and not to be harassed for it.
Subsequent legal cases have demonstrated that an organisation or regulator conducting disciplinary procedures against someone for their protected views can itself be harassment.
Stonewall and others first lodged a complaint about the EHRC to Ganhri in February 2022 after Lady Falkner wrote to the governments in Holyrood and Westminster calling for them to pause before enacting laws governing legal gender recognition and conversion therapy.
At the time, the lobby groups’ request for a special review was rejected, but they were invited to contribute to a regular five-year review which took place later in the year. That review re-accredited the EHRC as an A status organisation.
However, in April 2023, the EHRC’s Chairwoman, Lady Falkner, provided advice to Kemi Badenoch, the Women and Equalities Minister, stating that changing the word “sex” to “biological sex” in the equalities law would help bring clarity on contentious issues such as the participation of biological men in women’s sport and the inclusion of biological men in ‘women-only’ shortlists drawn up by political parties.
Specifically, the EHRC Board’s advice on this complex and divisive issue made clear that the Government should lean towards a biological definition of sex as the fairest way of protecting everyone’s rights, but that it should carefully identify and consider the potential implications of any such change for the rights of trans people.
That, however, wasn’t enough for Stonewall et al, who fired off another complaint to Ganhri. The ‘rationale’ behind the complaint was that the EHRC’s suggested protections for biological sex was “actively harming trans people”.
In a letter copied to UN human rights bosses, the organisations accused the EHRC of a lack of political independence and of issuing guidance on single-sex spaces which “sought to enable greater exclusion of trans women” from women-only spaces such as changing rooms and toilets. The suggestion that sex should be defined in law as biological was “unfair”, they added.
Ganhri has since informed the EHRC it will be subject to a special review.
