Naomi Cunningham photographed for The Telegraph at her chambers in central London Credit: Matt Writtle/Matt Writtle 2026
There is nothing of the lofty barrister about Naomi Cunningham. Meeting her at the grand Outer Temple Chambers, in London, on a cold January day, I find her as warm, friendly and open as she always appears at public meetings and women’s rights demonstrations. Dressed in a smart but practical sweater and trousers, she could be a headteacher at a prep school, or a rural member of clergy.
Cunningham, 59, became more widely known in 2023 when she represented Rachel Meade, a social worker suspended by Westminster City Council for private social media posts that included “gender-critical” beliefs.
Meade’s was a pivotal case, as it was the first in which both employer and regulator were found liable for discrimination in relation to someone’s gender-critical beliefs. Meade’s former colleague had submitted a dossier containing 70 of her Facebook posts as evidence that her views (that there are only two sexes, for instance) meant she was unfit to practice. Meade was suspended on charges of gross misconduct for a full year before receiving a final written warning.
In January 2024, Cunningham won. The tribunal subsequently ordered professional regulator Social Work England and Westminster City Council to pay Meade more than £58,000, including aggravated damages.
“I remember my mother, when I was a child, talking to me about transsexualism, and saying it seemed very sad that people had felt the need to go to the extremes of surgery and maybe, if we were all just less hung up on stereotypes, people wouldn’t have the need to do this,” says Cunningham. “And looking back, she was dead right.”
Cunningham was born in Gloucestershire to older parents (her father Charles was 52, and mother Anne 44), who both worked at the UK’s security and intelligence organisation GCHQ. Her father took a late-life sabbatical from his job to train as a barrister, and began practising aged 60.
Having studied law at Reading University and completed pupillage, Naomi Cunningham built her practice in employment law. She says that five years ago, she’d probably have said that what she wanted to do next was retire, “but I am now doing work that I absolutely see the point of and I find fascinating,” she says.
In 2024, she represented rape crisis centre worker Roz Adams in her employment tribunal case against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), after Adams was subjected to what the judge called a “heresy hunt” for believing that those using the service should be able to know the sex of staff. The centre was found to have unlawfully discriminated against and harassed Adams, forcing her constructive dismissal. The tribunal awarded her £68,900, and ordered the ERCC to issue a public apology.
The Adams case came a few months after the Isla Bryson scandal, which Cunningham believes fuelled empathy for Adams. Bryson was a double rapist who only began identifying as a woman after being convicted, and here was a woman hounded out of her job for wanting to reassure rape survivors that they could access a women-only service.
“I think Isla Bryson is one of the real heroes of our movement,” says Cunningham, wryly. No other case in the public eye had laid the problem so bare. The Adams case was also the first in which Cunningham used correct-sex pronouns (he/him) to describe a trans-identified man.
According to Cunningham, the taboo around using accurate language has been so successful (and so “viciously” policed) that lawyers have been cowed. “We’ve seen offensive absurdities like rapists being referred to in court as she,” explains Cunningham. “So when I did it in Adams, it felt like quite a big deal.”
Her most high-profile case yet is that of the nurse Sandie Peggie, against the Fife Health Board. Needing to get changed because of a very heavy period, Peggie, now 50, had gone into a hospital’s female-only changing room on Christmas Eve 2023 – where a biological man who identifies as a woman, Dr Beth Upton, was using the facility. Peggie’s complaint to the doctor in question at the time saw Upton accuse her of a hate crime, for which Peggie was suspended from work, and put through two years of hell.
Cunningham’s most high-profile case yet saw her representing nurse Sandie Peggie against the Fife Health BoardCredit: Jeff J Mitchell/2025 Getty Images
The initial rulings, which came in December, were mixed, and there has also been some controversy after multiple corrections to its judgment were issued (including replacing a “made up” quote). The case is going to appeal.
So how did Cunningham morph from an equal-pay advocate with little-to-no public profile to one of the most sought-after and recognised faces on the legal circuit?
Around 2016 or 2017, Cunningham was following equality and discrimination barrister Anya Palmer, who was tweeting about the subject, on Twitter. This ultimately led to her joining Legal Feminist – a UK collective of solicitors and barristers “interested in a feminist interrogation of the law”. Cunningham says she “gradually got more and more engaged with it”, and wrote her first blog for them in July 2020.
In early 2021, Cunningham was asked by Maya Forstater, director of the Sex Matters campaign group, to write a short piece on why sex matters in the law. Researching it, she was “shocked rigid” to discover that the Crown Prosecution Service was a Stonewall “Champion”, meaning that they actively support and promote the rights and inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals. Digging deeper, she discovered that almost every police force in the country, as well as the legal institutions, Ministry of Justice, the judiciary, and all the big law firms were also signed up. In the end, she wrote a much longer piece on the topic.
This led to accusations from colleagues that she was damaging the chambers’ brand, but Cunningham explained that she was seeking to develop her practice in this area, and that her efforts should be treated the same as those of everyone else. “This is marketing activity as far as I’m concerned, so why am I not getting the same marketing support as any of my colleagues?”
Campaigners Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater of Sex Matters celebrate outside the Supreme Court after its ruling on the Equality Act, April 2025 Credit: HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP or licensors
Today, Cunningham is confident that change is on the way. “There’ll be some remnants of [extreme gender ideology] left but… I think it’s on its way out,” she says.
I ask when she first noticed the shift within the legal profession against near-universal compliance with gender ideology. She tells me that, in the moment between the For Women Scotland Supreme Court hearing (November 2024) and the judgment clarifying the definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 in April 2025, she attended a professional networking event. Fundamentally shy, Cunningham says she’d always hated having to “work the room” and loathed such gatherings.
But as her notoriety grew, she would turn up “like a bad fairy at the christening and annoy people”, and found herself enjoying discussion and debate about legal issues relating to sex and gender, and whether biological sex trumps gender identity, with anyone brave enough to engage with her. At this event, Cunningham noticed, the tide was turning. Suddenly she was in demand.
“I thought that was a really interesting straw in the wind… The atmosphere had definitely changed. Now [at these events with other legal professionals], I’m not the slightly suspect ‘bad’ person I used to be.”
Also telling is the response Cunningham had to a recent LinkedIn post, in which she criticised the capitulation of regulators to trans activists “both in the supine failure of the Charity Commission for England and Wales to insist that charities for women and girls remain focused on their proper beneficiaries, and more broadly in the weaponisation of regulation against the freedom of speech of dissenters from gender ideology.”
In the comments, she added: “If you’re a regulated professional and you wonder whether you dare express approval of this post... that’s rather my point.”
That post was met with a level of online approval that would have been unimaginable even a year ago.
Although she regrets not getting involved in this battle earlier, Cunningham is more than making up for it now. Sallying forth without compromise, she recognises that the movement she is up against is profoundly misogynistic.
“Once you start letting any man who says he’s a woman use women’s spaces, then everything is mixed-sex,” she says. “There’s nothing special about such a man – however fervent his wish or desire to be ‘affirmed’. If he gets into the women-only space, he’ll see Dave from accounts at the next washbasin. And where’s the fun in that? That’s not affirming his gender identity. The more it succeeds, the more it’s a complete failure.”
Cunningham in Dundee in July 2025 for Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal Credit: Iain Masterton
Trans activists have targeted her, submitting multiple complaints to the Bar Standards Board for not using transwomen’s “preferred” pronouns, and for refusing to capitulate to gender ideology during the conduct of her cases. “The process is the punishment,” says Cunningham.
Nevertheless, in 2022 she was inducted into The Lawyer magazine’s Hot 100 hall of fame, and other legal experts consider her a force to be reckoned with.
When I ask Roz Adams what it was like being represented by Cunningham, she says, “My fear of her sharp mind and authoritative tone was quickly turned to appreciation of her warmth and collaborative approach. I’ll be forever grateful”.
Cunningham smiles broadly as I take my leave, saying how lucky she feels to have ended up working on cases that support feminist efforts to thwart this dangerous ideology. And she’s happy at the thought that she’s just coming up to the age her father was when he went to the Bar.
“I may have another 20 years at this,” she muses. “And I may need it before this war is won.”