May 25, 2022 - 2:31pm
Yesterday, while watching the Allison Bailey case online, I heard one of the worst takes on the ‘transgender rights’ to date. Bailey, a criminal defence barrister, is suing her former chambers, Garden Court (GCC), alongside Stonewall, after claiming she was unlawfully discriminated against. Her crime? She believes that sex is biological and cannot change.
Bailey, a black lesbian, argues that GCC wrongly treated her views as transphobic. She is also claiming that her chambers, as a member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, came under pressure from Stonewall to get rid of her.
One of two tweets by Bailey deemed to be ‘unacceptable’ by Stonewall and GCC was in response to the announcement of a series of workshops run by Morgan Page, a transwoman who was subsequently employed by Stonewall. The series was called ‘Overcoming the cotton ceiling’, the premise of which being that transwomen are discriminated against when lesbians refuse to have sex with male-bodied transwomen. This, apparently, amounts to discrimination and unfair treatment.
As Bailey tweeted in 2019: ‘Stonewall recently hired Morgan Page, a male bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can coerce young lesbians into having sex with them. Page called [it] “overcoming the cotton ceiling” and it is popular.’
Stonewall complained to Bailey’s chambers and it was soon announced that Bailey was under investigation, which was carried out by Maya Sikand QC, member of Garden Court’s management board. Relying on advice from Cathryn McGahey QC, vice-chair of the Bar Council’s ethics committee, Sikand was told that Allison’s tweets were “probably over the borderline of acceptable conduct”.
But during yesterday’s cross-examination by Bailey’s QC Ben Cooper, McGahey argued that a lesbian could be persuaded to have sex with a transwoman “in a way that was not coercive”. McGahey added that Bailey’s view that the workshop was coercive “is not substantiated”. “I cannot see that the sole purpose of the workshop,” she said, “was to coerce lesbians into having sex with transwomen”.
But even more shocking than dismissing the substantiated lesbian fears over sexual coercion was the analogy that McGahey used to back up her assertion, comparing a workshop to help trans-identifying males overcome lesbians’ sexual boundaries “to South Africa attempting to racially integrate society”.
Nancy Kelly, Stonewall CEO, has previously complained that the ‘highly toxic’ cotton ceiling issue was ‘analogous to sexual racism’. “[Allison] AB did not have a basis for this tweet,” said McGahey under cross examination. But she did. All lesbians do. It is endemic to the context of anti-lesbian prejudice, bigotry and sexualisation in which we live.
The fear lesbians experience of corrective rape is very real. I have interviewed women in South Africa and Uganda who tell me that men have a get-out-of-jail free card if they tell police they carried out sexual assaults on lesbians to ‘straighten them out’. I have lost count of the time men have told me to get over myself and learn to love the penis. “All you need is a good f**k” is a phrase that lesbians universally recognise.
A senior lawyer comparing transwomen coercing lesbians with black South Africans fighting the system of Apartheid is appalling. To do so in a case involving a black lesbian who has spoken out about being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse is almost beyond belief.
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SubscribeI must have missed the bit where someone said no one has to have sex with anyone if they don’t want to, no matter what they identify as.
You didn’t miss this, but it is very apparent that the people behind this nonsense intend explicitly to confiscate that choice from the rest of us.
Seriously – I don’t want to have sex with you because your taste in music is bad, or I don’t like your crooked front tooth, or you remind me of someone I don’t like, or I have a bad back this week. I find this type of ‘debate’ is truly insane. I have sympathy for trans people who have a hard time finding romantic partners. But there is very much an incel flavour to this – men who think that women owe them sex.
Bravo. My thoughts exactly.
This is true, but did you also miss the bit where lesbians are being called ‘sexual racists’ if they refuse to have sex with men wearing dresses?
If law firms are spending money bringing in special trainers to explain ways in which male-bodied individuals can convince lesbians to have intimate relations with them, then clearly, those firms have too much time and money on their hands. The clients should be asking for fee reductions.
Where does one begin. Are these people (excluding Bailey of course) referenced in this piece stupid, or are they malign, or are they both stupid and malign? The question these people need to ask before they open their mouths is…. is my group’s demand for human rights infringing on another group’s human rights.
All of this is just noise designed to rip the human rights away from other people. And they haven’t a cooking clue about apartheid, that’s for sure.
The lack of contact with reality on display with these types of events makes one fear for the justice system as a whole, if legal representation becomes dependent on those with a very narrow type of conformism. I’d have to add to that, a certain lack of intellect, which is perhaps even more surprising.
“Is my group’s demand for _special privileges_ infringing on another group’s _similar demand_?” would more accurately reflect whatever bare attempt at moral calculus is being made.
Exactly. ‘Human rights’ are a radical form of evil, which can be created ex nihilo by the State, but, crucially, also withdrawn by them. They are in fact created obligations imposed on others at the behest of unrepresentative minorities.
This is not what the old legal definition of a ‘right’ meant, which was a right to do anything that was not specifically prohibited by law.
However every ’cause’ proceeds by way of the ‘human right’ template these days.
Kind of think that “believing sex is biological and cannot change” is barking up the wrong tree. Do we “believe” that “a glider is an aircraft with no engine”? No: we assert that, by definition, the word “glider” means that type of aircraft.
Same thing with the biological definitions for the sexes. It’s not at all a matter of “belief”. We assert that, by definition, the words “male” and “female” denote those organisms – of all sexually reproducing species – that have the ability to produce either sperm or ova. From the Glossary of the Oxford Journal of Human Molecular Reproduction, although most credible dictionaries (OED, Lexico, Wikipedia) say the same thing:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
But almost unfathomable that a QC would actually use that analogy “to South Africa attempting to racially integrate society”. Desperation setting in?
She doesn’t ‘believe’ that sex is biological, she knows that sex is biological. Just like she knows that the earth is round and the moon isn’t made from cheese. I do hate disingenuous use of words.
Come on Julie! Get with the programme! All a man needs is a dress to be a lesbian, as woman only needs a beard to be a gay man! It’s you old school types that keep banging on about genitalia. Forget everything you think you know because you’re wrong. Don’t question – just accept… so sayeth The Mermaids, and they should know!
When I was a kid I identified as being a mermaid, but if they had chopped me in half and made me half Haddock I would be in deep s**** now wouldnt I.
I just love the idea that by saying he is a woman a man can demand that a lesbian have sex with him — so that he can, in effect, rape her.
How much of a malignant moron do you have to be to propagate this belief? Like 100%?
malignant morons, that’s what they are. here is the quote that defies belief: “ ‘Stonewall recently hired Morgan Page, a male bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbian”
If the content of the training was as described, surely arrests should in order?
Frankly this is all hilarious and depressing in equal measure. The corners that individuals, activists and now the law have painted themselves into as they try to apply logic to this claptrap is predictable and intractable. No-one will be persuaded to alter their entrenched views for fear of destablising their whole house of cards so all we will get is yet more fragmentation of society as people withdraw into their own identity based groups. This is what happens when societies succumb to identity politics.
The level of stupidity and irrelevance of so called transgender debate is astonishing.
What on earth is this QC on about? In apartheid South Africa sex between those classified as black and white was illegal. I am unaware that sex between any unrelated mentally capable adults is illegal in the UK. The analogy with what Stonewall is pushing seems to be more like a white male South African in post-apartheid South Africa suggesting to a black woman that she had to sleep with him to demonstrate that apartheid was over or she was an apartheid supporter. Even the stupidest Q C would surely see that such a suggestion was no more than a manipulative piece of immoral coercion that had nothing to do with the abolition of apartheid.
Lesbians shamed for not wanting to be f****** by men pretending to be lesbian women! Isn’t this the ultimate act of male intrusion into and domination of the female realm? And institutionalised in the legal world to boot! And there are ‘feminists’ applauding this!
I see another dystopian novel in my future.
If this wasn’t UnHerd, I’d really think I was through the looking glass. No mad hatters and March hares, just QCs?! Let’s hear from their peers. Simply not possible that these perverted views are anything but a tiny minority (fingers crossed)
Sigh! Whatever happened to falling in love? I was around in the 1960s but I find this modern attitude to sexual relations baffling. Isn’t it supposed to be the most joyful, happy, fun you can have and it costs nothing (maybe the cost of a romantic meal doesn’t go amiss?). Thankfully, most of the young people I know have relationships which bear no relationship to the confusing mess discussed in the article.
Why would you compare anything to modern South Africa as if it was a positive?
Presumably, “South Africa attempting to racially integrate society” is something of a positive – even if they may not be particularly successful at it.
But the problem is in the argument of QC McGahey that “a workshop to help trans-identifying males overcome lesbians’ sexual boundaries” was analogous to that attempt at racial integration. Ergo, the rather odious implication being that Allison Bailey was more or less equivalent to a racist for objecting to that “workshop”.
My goodness me. The world is so horrible. How can people be commodified in this way?
Sigh. Years ago as a junior year abroad student in Japan, I came across the proverb “The leper envies the syphilitic.” I just recalled it.
One does not have sex with a category. One has sex with an individual. That individual has the right to decline the intrusion of a p***s.
It used to be the law that a husband could not be convicted of raping his wife. Is this to be resurrected and applied to lesbians.
Congratulations William Shaw. You managed to eek the weirdest, most obscure “critique” out of an article about an outrageous phenomenon that lesbians regularly report they experience (in the hundreds of thousands), because you hate women and critique Julie Bindel every time she writes here.
Why do you subscribe to a journal that makes you so insecure about your inability to get women to sleep with you?
Ask yourself why we all know the image references cotton knickers not cotton boxer shorts. The implicit coercion is in the physical strength differential a male has over a female. No gay male will ever agree to sex with a trans man because he’s frightened she might harm him if he refuses.
This may be a silly question, but why would a trans-woman want to have penetrative sex with a lesbian rather than with a heterosexual woman?
I’ll be honest, as a heterosexual woman. Prior to meeting my husband I had a few rules. Never date anyone who takes longer than me to get ready and never date anyone with more problems than me. Both of these would rule out trans women. Not to mention being attracted to manly men which is why I consider myself a heterosexual woman. So the answer as to why they target lesbians is simple, few heterosexual women will entertain them.
Yes I thought that was probably the answer.
Good answer. I sometimes feel that incels, who complain of no sex life should try having a wash and stop dressing like losers. Similar situation.
Trans women have a vanishingly small pool of humans willing to have sex with them, that is why they resort to coercion.
This nonsense can only happen when having sex, something quite basic and, let’s face it, animalistic, is elevated to the status of humankind’s primary reason for being.
I mourn for our species, bereft of aspiration towards experiencing life that is greater, more fulfilling and ultimately more rewarding than merely indulging the base urges of our genitalia.
Apologies to “animals” for any insults caused or offence taken. You are likely to be wiser and more self-realised than the lot of us. Particularly the lot mentioned in this piece.
Even The Guardian has an opinion piece that supports the common sense position this morning.
But of course comments are closed, yet the mere fact that Sonia Sodha’s piece has made it to print at all in that bastion of identity politics again suggests to me that the high water mark on this cognitive dissonance is behind us.
Let us hope that you are correct; but I fear that you are not.
It is a miracle that Sonia Sodha’s piece passed the gender ideology police in the Guardian. I was amazed it was ‘allowed’. The Guardian have articles pushing the trans agenda every day, always without comments.
Julie, I wonder if lesbians are so threatening simply because they are telling men ‘we don’t need you’, you are redundant?
Your comment seems somewhat off topic.
As a man, I don’t think lesbians are threatening and can’t actually think of any male colleague expressing that in any way.
I don’t think the average man feels threatened that they are redundant, except in the fictional writings of a gender studies class
Lesphobia- the fear of women who neither want nor need a man or his parts. Coercion, threats, and physical assaults will never stop our tribe of women-loving women.
Why is it remarked twice that she is a *black* lesbian?
I imagine to amplify the comparison to apartheid.
Getting laid is not a human right.
Getting laid is not a human right.