A senior Arts Council England (ACE) official who said transgender people cannot change sex has won her claim of harassment because of her gender-critical beliefs.
Denise Fahmy took Britain’s biggest arts funding quango to an employment tribunal after she resigned as a grants officer having challenged a decision to withdraw funding for LGB Alliance, a group that represent gays and lesbians.
The group had been given £9,000 to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee to celebrate how the lives of gay men had improved under the monarch’s 70-year reign.
But the funding was withdrawn by ACE in spring 2022 amid “hostile” claims the group was neo-Nazi and transphobic – a claim LGB Alliance denies.
Simon Mellor, the deputy chief executive, held a Teams meeting in April 2022 in which he expressed his “personal view” that LGB Alliance “has a history of anti-trans-exclusionary activity” and so funding them was “not within the spirit of the Jubilee fund”.
His comments prompted Ms Fahmy, 54, to then question why the funding had been removed, what message that sent about “freedom of speech” within the organisation and ask what protection there was at the council for gender-critical beliefs - the conviction that people cannot change their biological sex.
Leeds Employment Tribunal has found Ms Fahmy, from Huddersfield, was the victim of harassment after a colleague then circulated an email and petition on the ACE intranet targeting those deemed “anti-trans”. The petition, which contained some extreme comments, remained up for 26 hours. The judges felt it should have been taken down sooner.
One email claimed “gender-critical views were seen as a cancer... [which] needs to be removed from our organisation”.
Telegraph article that can be read in full at https://uk.style.yahoo.com/gender-critical-feminist-wins-harassment-150000657.html