Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing Thread 2

[ickky]

The Tribunal started on 25th April at 10am. If you would like to view online you need to send a request for access as early as possible.

Send an email to

[email protected]

The subject heading of the email request should read

“MEDIA OR PUBLIC ACCESS REQUEST – Case number 2202172/2020 - Ms A Bailey – 25th April 2022.

Then ask for the pin for the online access.

You will be contacted with instructions on how to observe the hearing.

When joining the live tribunal
select the video and mic that are not crossed out, this is the courts vid and mic.
On the next page select NONE on the drop down windows for vid and mic, these are your own video and mic.

You must be muted so as to not disturb the hearing.

There is also live tweeting from twitter.com/tribunaltweets

Abbreviations:
AB: Allison Bailey, claimant
BC: Ben Cooper QC, barrister for AB
SW = Stonewall Equality Limited (respondent 1)
IO = Ijeoma Omambala QC, barrister for SW
RW = Robin White assisting IO
GC = Garden Court Chambers Limited (respondent 2) (GCC would be a better abbreviation)
AH = Andrew Hochhauser QC, barrister for GC
JR = Jane Russell assisting AH
RM= Rajiv Menon QC & SH = Stephanie Harrison QC (jointly respondent 3 along with all members of GC except AB)
EJ = Employment Judge Goodman hearing the case
Panel = any one of the three panel members (EJ and two lay members)

Allison Bailey v Stonewall - Employment Tribunal hearing Thread 1 👇

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4529887-Allison-Bailey-v-Stonewall-Employment-Tribunal-hearing?

I feel like some of you are invalidating my existence.

Para 53 of AB's witness statement is very powerful in explaining her attitude to puberty blockers.

LOL!

Not sure about that specifically but I've seen minutes of meetings discussing the merger to take on trans lobbying which was back in 2014 and then announced in 2015

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/16/stonewall-start-campaigning-trans-equality

😂😂😂😂

It's great they changed chambers set up so we can all see IO properly.

And also properly hilarious 😂 - the whole initial set up & solution is brilliant. Will be great comedy moment in the film.

What was Spindle's post that got deleted? I should know because I replied to it but I can't remember exactly. Was it about the people who protested against us at the last FiLiA conference?

Have a look here from July 2018 SpindleInTheWind:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3301628-The-precise-meaning-of-words-is-so-important

I think Stonewall have done some engineering with URLs and the relevant one, which I expect will have been archived somewhere, is nowhere to be found.

From Filia's website:

"'FiLiA' means daughter; we are the daughters of the women who came before us and we fight so that our sisters and daughters may be free.
FiLiA is a Women-led Volunteer organisation and part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. We have charitable status for our work promoting Women’s human rights.
FiLiA’s vision is a world free from Patriarchy where all Women and Girls are Liberated."

Filia was originally "Feminism in London". When it was decided to take the annual conference out of london to a different city in UK Every year they changed the name.

They put on Europes largest grassroots feminist conference every year - this year it's in Cardiff. Previous conferences were in Portsmouth, Bradford, Manchester & London.

Yes it was. I queried it with MNHQ because I couldn't understand why.

It was the description of the protestors that apparently offended someone enough to report the post to MNHQ.

web.archive.org/web/20180615195847/www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms

There's an archive of the page nauticant referenced from 2018. There are various versions of it from 2016 on; it might be quite interesting to see how it changed over time!

Thanks for those links. Ruth Hunt is saying in Feb 2015 that Stonewall are going to conflate sexual orientation and gender identity in that Guardian article, and that this would be effected in practice within 18 months.

(As an aside, it contains screenshots of supportive tweets from Tara Hewitt and Aimee Challenor (Aimee Challenor as a Stonewall youth rep).)

So anyway yes I think it can be evidenced in my head that Allison was experiencing the effects of that decision in terms of timeline.

If you can use the Wayback machine, you can enter this stonewall.org.uk/at_home/sexual_orientation_faqs/2695.asp and see that around 2015 the definition of homosexual did talk about "same-sex attraction" and sex specifically.

The majority of women and men are heterosexual and they experience attraction and seek partners of the opposite sex. The words ‘heterosexual’ and ‘heterosexuality’ come from the Greek word heteros, meaning ‘different’ or ‘opposite’.

Gay is a term that is used to describe a man who has an emotional and/or sexual orientation towards men. Some women also define as gay rather than lesbian; it is a generic term for lesbian and gay sexuality.

Other women and men can experience erotic and romantic feelings for both their own and the opposite sex and such people are bisexual.

Unfortunately more recent crawls of this URL just auto forward to a generic 'help and advice' page. There is probably a lot more to be found by clicking around SW on an archive site, but it's a big site that's been around for a long time and obviously restructured a lot, so many URLs have changed.

God I was there at Portsmouth FiLiA.

Maybe I should post some of the photographs of the protesters and their deeply offensive placards instead.

But OTOH, I don't want to digress from Allison's case.

(Bizarrely, in that 2018 glossary "homosexual" is described as a "medical term" but "heterosexual" is not. Seems like Stonewall have been pathologising homosexuality for much longer than I realised.)

That's very helpful TastefulRainbowUnicorn. The link I've included below shows the archive laid out over time and if you go to the earliest archive of March 19, 2016 you can find homosexual defined as "sexual orientation towards someone of the same gender".

web.archive.org/web/*/www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms

Like AB said, things seemed to change around 2015.

There are some archived versions of the Stonewall site although none of that specific page (it might be been excluded from robot crawls).

Some of the earlier versions are interesting in advance of SW assimilating T issues.

Although Stonewall does not directly lobby or advise on trans issues, we work closely with trans organisations and ensure the people we work with understand the distinct experiences of trans people.

Looking at SW's Prescription for Change 2008 report is quite nostalgic for its depiction of women in its illustrations and its discussion of healthcare needs such as cervical screening and breast cancer screening plus the lack of awareness of STDs and lesbian sex.

So was I. I remember some of the obscene comments and drawings chalked on the square in full view of passing children, and the shouts that drowned out the voices of sex abuse survivors speaking inside.

I think their actions speak for themselves more clearly than anything we can say, really.

Indeed, @EmpressaurusWitchDoesntBurn and there is an abundance of evidence for those actions.

I'm a big fan of evidence.

I found this page that talks about sexual attraction by sex. It seems to have lasted until 2015, which supports that timeline

web.archive.org/web/20150414103151/stonewall.org.uk/at_home/sexual_orientation_faqs/2695.asp?fontsize=large

The wayback machine is hugely useful for SW.

And Mermaids.

Am I the only one who is tickled by TribunalTweets referring to RMW as RW ?

Presumably every character counts although I hope that RMW isn't experiencing that as a deletion in addition to today's request for the shared camera to be trained on IO as the QC who was leading the questioning for SW.

AB's statement explains how Stonewall were encouraged by a member of or members of GCC (probably via Michelle Brewer) to make the complaints to GCC about AB's tweets. The meeting at which this encouragement was communicated took place at GCC. It was minuted by a member of the Stonewall Trans Advisory Group that the group was encouraged to complain about AB. That member of the Stonewall Trans Advisory Group also advised the 'community' that a meeting was taking place to decide on formal action against AB. That information could only have come from GCC.

So this is looking a lot stronger in light of this evidence.

Michelle Brewer became a full-time judge.

RW is more accurate in terms of how they identify themself in a legal context:

oldsquare.co.uk/people/robin-white/