Forget the now-stale dispute between Mr Depp and Amber Heard. A little further down the legal road, Alison Bailey claimed a ‘trans’ dispute led Stonewall to ‘insult’ this ‘lesbian barrister’. The Central London employment tribunal case has transfixed legal experts and the ultimate ruling is seen as the most important relating to transgender issues.
Allison Bailey is suing Stonewall and her chambers
A Stonewall official called a lawyer a “terfy barrister”, a judge has been told, as final submissions were made in a landmark discrimination claim.
The senior figure at the LGBT charity is alleged to have used the term, which is widely considered a slur, to describe Allison Bailey.
The barrister is suing Stonewall and Garden Court, her London chambers, over claims that the campaign group pressed managers to discipline her for having allegedly transphobic views. Bailey is a lesbian and tenant at Garden Court whose sexual abuse as a child and experience of male violence, the tribunal was told, was central in shaping her “view of the world”. She alleges her chambers and Stonewall conspired to discipline the barrister over her public comments that people cannot change their biological sex.
Bailey, launched the LGB Alliance, an alternative campaign group, has practised as a criminal law specialist for more than 20 years at the bar. She has denied that she is transphobic and has claimed that she suffered discrimination based on her protected philosophical views that those who are born male cannot transition to become women.
The case before the Central London employment tribunal has transfixed legal experts and the ultimate ruling is seen as the most important relating to transgender issues since the Maya Forstater case.
Last year, an employment appeal tribunal ruled that Forstater’s so-called gender critical views qualified as protected philosophical opinions.
In the Bailey case, lawyers made final submissions to the tribunal last week, with the barrister’s team reiterating the claim that Stonewall pressured senior figures at Garden Court to discipline her. They said that in 2019, Surat-Shaan Knan, a member of Stonewall’s trans advisory group, wrote to Michelle Brewer, then a barrister at Garden Court, and described Bailey as “the terfy barrister”. Terf is an acronym standing for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
Ben Cooper QC, representing Bailey, told the tribunal that Knan had also referred to Bailey’s organisation as “the anti-trans LGB Alliance”. Cooper said that it was “plainly a derogatory use of the term, not merely a descriptive one”.
Cooper said that Brewer’s response was essentially a “slap down” of her fellow barrister, “rejecting the legitimacy of her concerns”.
Bailey’s barrister said that Judy Khan QC, the joint head of Garden Court, “effectively adopted” Brewer’s response. He claimed that Khan “implicitly agreed [that Bailey’s social media remarks] had been transphobic”.
The lawyers for Garden Court and Stonewall said that Bailey could not benefit from equality legislation because her “own prejudices have skewed her thinking”.
A ruling in Bailey’s discrimination claim has been reserved to a later date.