Hearing set for barrister fired after her gender critical views were revealed

Allison Bailey, the English barrister and co-founder of LGB Alliance who is suing the trans lobby group Stonewall and her chambers for discrimination, has been given hearing dates for her claim.

The Employment Tribunal will hold a preliminary hearing on Feb. 11 and 12 with a full two-day hearing on the merits earmarked for June.

In her statement of Jan. 17, Bailey said that she first came into conflict with Stonewall, and her chambers, when she tweeted about the launch of LGB Alliance—a campaign group to "amplify the voices of lesbians" who consider that the trans lobby works against their interests.

Shortly thereafter, Bailey alleged that Stonewall and her chambers communicated over her head about how to frustrate her political activities.

"With other LGB rights campaigners, I helped to set up the LGB Alliance. In retribution for this, Stonewall Diversity Limited (Stonewall), co-ordinated with the barristers' chambers of which I am a member to put me under investigation. This was an attempt by Stonewall to intimidate and silence me and others critical of what we see as its malign influence in British life: workplaces, schools, universities, the police, the judiciary, the Crown Prosecution Service, and all government departments," she said.

Bailey then found that her chambers suppressed her income, which dropped by two thirds, presumably to punish her for behaving contrary to the interests of one of the set's major sources of work.

Bailey, a black lesbian woman from a working class background, had a legal aid practice based on taking state-funded defense cases in the criminal courts. It is a notoriously un-lucrative—if socially-useful, prestigious and demanding—area of law.

Bailey hit the news when the Crowdjustice legal fundraising site shut down her fund when it was set to overshoot the target, despite having signed off on her fundraising text.

Crowdjustice dot com has close associations with the Good Law Project, which is directed by trans activist barrister Jolyon Maugham. Maugham had previously used the fundraising site to bring a high-profile claim against the UK government for leaving the European Union.

The Good Law Project recently raised nearly £150,000 on Crowdjustice for a "trans defence fund" to intervene in the gender clinic's appeal against the court's judgment in Bell v Tavistock.

The court held, in Keira Bell's claim for judicial review of the gender identity clinic's policies, that children are not capable of informed consent to "experimental" trans-affirmative medical procedures for which there is no evidence of curative effectiveness.

Trans lobby groups, apprehending the threat to their sunrise industry of selling body modifications to distressed children, mustered a last-ditch defense of their ideology-based medical experiments.

On Jan. 29 The Good Law Project, in addition to three more trans lobby groups—including the US Endocrine Society, were granted permission by the court to submit representations on paper in the appeal against the Bell decision.

The trans lobby groups are not, however, entitled to bring fresh evidence as the appeal court was satisfied that all the relevant evidence was reviewed by the high court during the hearing in 2020.

Despite this fact, the Good Law Project continues to fundraise on the basis that the Tavistock clinic's staff and patients were denied a fair hearing.

"The voice of trans young people and the voice of the experts who prescribe puberty blockers should have been before the Divisional Court," they wrote.

The statement is bizarre when one considers that the Tavistock has been roundly admonished by the media and the court for failing to follow-up on long-term outcomes for the children it gave puberty blockers to.

As such, it would be more accurate to state that the clinic denied trans-identifying teens a "voice" once they had grown out of puberty, and had time—like Keira Bell—to consider and regret the full impact of pediatric transitioning on their long-term health and fertility.

Bailey's barristers' chambers, Garden Court, pays a hefty subscription Stonewall to to take part in its' controversial taxpayer-funded Diversity Champion scheme. The scheme requires organizations to fulfill requirements to make widely-construed transgender identity supreme among protected characteristics, in return for accreditation as employers hospitable to "diversity and inclusion."

Bailey alleges she was "indirectly discriminated against" on the basis of her sex and sexual orientation "because both [her] chambers and Stonewall treat people such as me who hold gender critical beliefs as being bigoted and unworthy of respect. Those people are overwhelmingly women."

The law of England and Wales provides remedies for sex discrimination whereas, under US law since the Bostock judgment, sex is conflated with gender identity for the purposes of anti-discrimination law.

In the UK, one can still claim discrimination because one is female. There is also a distinct protected category of sexual orientation, which Bailey is also claiming under.