I'm going to disagree with those thinking the misuse of the title Professor is less important than potential TRA bias. I think, if true, it demonstrates a dishonesty which is entirely incompatible with the expectations of the sort of authority lay persons are given on ET panels and with due process.
My evolving theory based on all your critical thinking skills, offerings, research, questions and devil’s advocacy, plus NW’s BEAUTIFUL journalism is below.
Most of this is drawn from here, TT and NS blog and almost entirely speculative.
When taking the case NC Team was aware that the impact of the Stonewalled Bench Book on the judiciary in Northern Ireland has had a longer lasting impact across the board than in the UK where Judges, for the most part, seem to have left that bit of aberrant guidance behind.
NC and CE are, I’m sure, absolutely fed up to the back teeth with the fact that their normally estimable profession has been so open to such ridiculous pressure and has no respect for those who continue to let it unduly influence their approach.
It is noticeable to me that she has shown much less respect for Judge Sturgeon than Judge Kemp as although she argued robustly with Kemp at times she always flavoured her arguments with terms and phrases affording him the respect of his position. It stood out to me that she wasn’t doing this with Sturgeon. That might be due to how NW summarises v TTs but I don’t think so because it was consistent across most of the encounters in different ways. NC might have held Kemp in greater respect due to the fact that Kemp managed a fair approach to pronouns etc very effectively so demonstrated lack of capture in his management of court proceedings. Sturgeon has offered no clarity or broader sense of this and it might be because it is much less pertinent here as no one offering testimony is trans identified. But for all that, Sturgeon has clearly demonstrated a ‘tude’ towards Johnny Foreigner advocates coming in to her court and has shown, in my view, bias in her behaviour in court on this, and has consistently intervened to interrupt NC’s questioning which I had viewed more fairly earlier in that I thought she might be trying to prevent NC using the case as a platform to air wider issues but now I think she was intending to prevent NC opening up aspects of the case around GI to protect the court, as it were, from GC thought.
Moving onto Boyd, lay panel members would get training around the Bench Book and its updates. Perhaps other Rainbow training might also have been offered/ available.
I don’t know when the legal teams get to know who will be the panel but I imagine there is some notice given. If so I’m sure NC Team’s networks will have informed them (on the quiet) that they know PB to be TRA adjacent and so the team will have looked for evidence before coming to court. However, the social media postings are before the TRA campaign was noticed as controversial in any meaningful way (last one 2019?) and could be read as innocent of GI bias but it is also, perhaps, unwise of her, knowing that this is easily available, not to declare this as something the court should be aware of and then make sure it can’t be used to establish a potential for bias given the parameters of this case. Now she might just be so unaware of controversy that this didn’t occur to her but given the postings on SM, and the date the last was posted (which does, in fact, suggest knowledge or she would still be posting Pride flags) that also would seem a stretch.
I think she has been making her bias felt off stage, as it were, and Sturgeon has been working to reign it in because she doesn’t want any risk that she will be found wanting by her peers if it comes to an appeal. I think judges always operate with one eye on the risk of appeal and whilst she wouldn’t be placing too much worry on a case around a small entity like BFF I think she will be aware of what comes with NC’s Team and how that increases the likelihood. So I think where Boyd, in their private discussions, has previously strayed into captured territory, Sturgeon has managed to steer them clear but I suspect underneath her steering them clear she is herself inclined that way although what drives her more is her annoyance at NC being in her court at all.
I think NC’s Team have known all along that this is the framing and no matter how successful the trial goes for them the framing will belie the significance of the evidence ie that the dissembling, lying and contradictory accounts given by MC and MD will be lessened in the judgement to just be a minor issue, of memory and less than great organisation, rather than anything amounting to harassment, hostility or constructive dismissal, but that that in itself would not be grounds for an appeal (and from an earlier posting it is not quite clear what the process of appeals are in ETs in NI).
Then in court Boyd could not disguise her responses to typically TRA areas of strong offence ie pronouns and calling a man a man. This was noticed separately by a number of those present and so clearly stood out. I think that previously Boyd will have asked Sturgeon if she can affect more control of the language in court and that Sturgeon has told her no but that has been the impetus behind some of her interventions. I also think when Boyd asked the court to rise suddenly, mid flow of testimony, because she ‘had a concern’ that this was to do with the use of pronouns etc but that Sturgeon knowing what was coming cut her off from making that declaration and, duly warned, Boyd had changed her ‘concern’ from one to do with activity within the court to a personal concern re pain management. As we all know, as many of us are managing pain ourselves and are well used to managing, say, period pain in professional environments, we don’t halt proceedings unless so ill we have to stop completely. If you are able to return within 5 minutes it is unlikely that you were in such pain you couldn’t have held out for a break or used a pause to request an earlier break. (I can’t go so far as to thinking Sturgeon would actually lie about what they discussed so this seems the most plausible)
Then on Thursday clear evidence of a connection to a group mentioned in SM’s talk at LWS is provided to NC’s team and so they do all that they can to establish that and any other connections, looking for anything substantive about her TRA adjacency. They felt unsure that what they had was sufficiently strong but looking at the preponderance of evidence it was their only real chance at challenging that framework and if they didn’t do it then they couldn’t credibly do it later for an appeal, say, as they would be challenged on why they had let time pass before bringing it forward. Given that the case was going swimmingly for NC they had to weigh up making this application against the likelihood that the panel were not going to be fair in the long run and given Sturgeon’s clear bias against them (not how we do things here) the had to take the risk.
Then on Friday morning they had to work with what they had so furiously wrote up the applications and had no time to pay court due respect. Judge furious because she is already agin Johnny Foreigner and her anger at that is already bubbling underneath so this just lights the fire and she expresses herself in an intemperate way that later embarrassed her (she said she could lift MC being under oath which she couldn’t for example and also had to recuse a panel member so without knowing what was going on she could have admonished without the emotional reactiveness. To me that is clear evidence of her bias against NC Team). A journo slipped them a note which added to their position but we are unclear what that note said.
At this point it has not occurred to anyone on NC’s team to interrogate the Prof title because they have been focussed on the TRA adjacency, quite rightly.
After the clear management of the reasons why Boyd is recusing herself which avoided tackling the question of her associations in a very direct way, and I think it is safe to infer here that Sturgeon is worried about putting anything on record that might prove to be untrue once further digging has occurred, speculation about Boyd is triggered in the public and citizen researcher begins to do the digging.
Unexpectedly, in that digging, folk are not coming up with anything particularly damning re TRA views but can’t source what should be easily accessible information re her professional status. It matters to look into her professional status because if organisations and networks are clearly TRA that would be problematic if also undeclared. In that digging people begin to notice that no one can find any evidence of degrees or academic credentials that justify the title Professor. There are particular routes available to use that title. It affords huge status professionally speaking and will lend enormous weight to a sense of her ability for critical thinking and to informing a non-partisan view on the positions of claimants and respondents (we know this is not always true but it is a general view of the status the title affords and, coupled with the expectations of how lay panel members are expected to operate is important, matters).
If she is misusing that title there are huge ramifications because lay panel members have to be seem to be honest and above board in all their dealings. If they are not it undermines the whole system of justice. If she has misused that title then it also will have huge ramifications beyond this case, as the powers that be will need to reassess all their pay panel members and the whole process of their appointments. It will potentially also undermine any cases she has previously sat on. It will also be HUGELY embarrassing for Sturgeon (as some wit amongst you mentioned earlier how do you do things here will come back to bite her big time).
So here we are. We hope that some journo with contacts will do the due diligence. We hope that NC Team has become aware. Twitter is now quietly aware of the issue so it is going to grow legs over the weekend more widely, I think.