‘Lies about gender identity’ spurred founding of LGB Alliance, court told | Transgender

The organization LGB Alliance was founded to “prevent the spread of the lie about gender identity”, a court was told on Wednesday during a hearing on whether the Charity Commission was right to grant the body charitable status.

Co-founder Kate Harris told a hearing that an increase in anti-lesbian discrimination was another motivation for the creation of the organisation.

The General Regulatory Chamber is considering a challenge by transgender children’s charity Mermaids to the Charity Commission’s decision to grant charitable status to the LGB Alliance last year.

The hearing examined whether the defense of trans rights could lead to conflicts with women’s rights or the rights of lesbians, gays and bisexuals.

Michael Gibbon, KC for Mermaids, on Wednesday questioned the two co-founders of the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson and Harris, who are both lesbians, whether the organization was primarily focused on an anti-trans political and lobbying agenda, or whether it was created to carry out charitable activities in support of lesbians, gays and bisexuals.

Asked about the organization’s creation, Jackson said organizers were motivated in part by a change in the definition of homosexuality adopted by Stonewall and other leading LGBT groups around 2015 from same-sex attraction to same-sex attraction.

She said the founders wanted to bring together “other LGBT people who agreed with our view that homosexuality was being redefined in a way that we found offensive”.

She said that lesbians had found the redefinition particularly challenging, with some feeling that they were no longer free to express same-sex attraction; she pointed to the expulsion of lesbian activists from a pride march for asserting same-sex rather than same-sex attraction.

The hearing spent some time dealing with the concept of gender. “We objected to the view that everyone has a gender identity. I don’t have a gender identity and I object to being told that I do,” Jackson said.

Gibbon questioned Jackson about the “provocative and inflammatory” language used in tweets by staff at the charity, including the use of the hashtags #endgayconversion and #transingthegayaway – referring to the LGB Alliance’s belief that gay children were affected by messages on YouTube and social media to believe they were trans and subsequently seek treatment.

Jackson responded that the LGB Alliance used these hashtags to draw attention to their work. “Anti-lesbian prejudice and fear lead many teenagers, especially lesbians, to believe they have ‘gender identity’ issues when in fact they are struggling with their new lesbian/homosexual orientation,” Jackson said in her testimony.

She said the organization believed the use of puberty blockers by Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) on children “who might otherwise grow up to be gay adults” was “a huge medical scandal in the making”.

Co-founder Harris described gender identity as “a lie” during a speech at the launch of LGB Alliance Scotland in 2020, the court heard, dismissing it as “pseudo-science”. She said she had “a personal interest” in the question of how the discussion of gender identity could affect children, and described how she was “considered the boy by others” as a child and placed in the boys’ teams for sports at school.

She said she was “100% sure” that if she had been taught in sex education classes that everyone has a gender identity that could differ from the gender assigned at birth, she would have asked to be “prompt traced to puberty blockers,” she insisted. on hormone therapy and no doubt ended up having surgery”, rather than “growing up to be a happy lesbian”.

In evidence given earlier this week, Dr. Belinda Bell, chair of Mermaids’ trustees, said it was unlikely to suggest that gay children would embark on the difficult transition process in response to homophobia, noting that the vast majority of trans adults are not straight, so the transition process could not accurately described as homoconversion.

“The LGB Alliance seems to take the view that trans kids don’t exist or that they can’t know they’re trans until adulthood,” she said. “The LGB Alliance has repeatedly stated in public forums that Mermaids seeks to inappropriately push LGB children to identify as trans. Such claims are false and damaging to the ongoing work of Mermaids.”