Transgender Group Loses Legal Challenge To Strip Gay Rights Charity’s Status

General view of the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual, and agender) flag outside a bookshop during UK Pride Month 2021 in London on June 1, 2021. (Edward Smith/Getty Images)

Transgender lobby group Mermaids has lost a legal challenge to strip the gay rights organisation LGB Alliance of its charity status.

Mermaids, which promotes transgenderism in gender-dysphoric children, had appealed against the decision of the Charity Commission to grant LGB Alliance charitable status in 2021.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Mermaids had lost what is believed to have been the first case of its kind in the UK.

Mermaids had backing from lobby groups such as Good Law Project, the LGBT+ Consortium, LGBT Foundation, Gendered Intelligence and TransActual.

“We are delighted that the tribunal found in our favour and that Mermaids and the LGBT Consortium have failed in their bid to remove our charitable status,” wrote LGB Alliance on Twitter.

“The Tribunal found in our favour and we will retain our charitable status,” it added.

Mermaids had sought to argue LGB Alliance shouldn’t be recognised as a charity because “it was focused on hostile anti-trans activism and not (as it claimed) on the promotion of lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.”

Case is Dismissed

A two-judge panel at the General Regulatory Chamber in London ruled in a brief online hearing on Thursday that the appeal was dismissed.

Judge Lynn Griffin said: “The appeal in this case is dismissed. We have dismissed this appeal because we have decided that the law does not permit Mermaids to challenge the decision made by the Charity Commission to register LGB Alliance as a charity.”

LGB Alliance describes itself as a charity that promotes the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people “on the basis of sex rather than gender and believes that gender transition is largely driven by homophobia.”

In a statement, Mermaids said that it was taking legal advice on whether to appeal.

“In the meantime, our focus remains on channelling all of our energies into the urgent, critical challenges facing trans young people today,” wrote Mermaids.

“This includes demanding access to timely healthcare and robustly challenging forthcoming trans guidance for schools which, if reports are true, could have devastating consequences not only for trans children and young people, but any young person who doesn’t conform to gender norms,” it added.

In a statement, a Charity Commission spokesperson said:

“We welcome this judgment. As the judges confirm, it is not the Charity Commission’s role to regulate public debate on sensitive issues on which there are deeply held, sincere beliefs on all sides. Our role is to apply the law, and we consider that we did so in registering LGB Alliance as a charity.

“All charities, ultimately, must deliver on their purposes for the public benefit. We understand both charities hold opposing views, but when engaging in public debate and campaigning, they should do so with respect and tolerance. Demonising and undermining those who think differently is not acceptable behaviour from any charity on our register.”

Mermaids

In December regulator the Charity Commission announced it was opening a statutory inquiry into Mermaids.

This was due to newly identified issues about the charity’s governance and management. On Tuesday, a Charity Commissions spokesman told The Epoch Times that the inquiry into Mermaids “remains ongoing.”

The charity has been at the centre of a series of scandals.

An October investigation in The Telegraph alleged that the charity sent chest-flattening devices to children as young as 13 and 14 against their parents’ wishes or behind their parents’ backs.

A breast-binder is a body brace device for girls who want to flatten their breasts to appear male.

Top British paediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, who wrote the interim Cass Review, on the now-closed transgender clinic for minors, Tavistock, said that binding processes used to conceal the breasts of those suffering from gender dysphoria were “painful, and potentially harmful.”

The investigation also claimed that staff with no medical training were found to have given advice to users as young as 13 and that puberty-blocking drugs were being promoted as “safe and totally reversible.”

After the publication of the story, the Charity Commission received and assessed a number of complaints about Mermaids.

A few days after it was revealed that a trustee who sat on Mermaids’ board quit after it emerged that he spoke at a conference for an organisation that was founded by a convicted child rapist.

Jacob Breslow, associate professor of gender and sexuality at the London School of Economics, gave a talk to U.S.-based B4U-ACT in 2011. B4U-ACT was co-founded by Michael Melsheimer, a paedophile and convicted sex offender.

The administration, governance, and management of the charity by the trustees including its leadership and culture is being examined.

Gender GP

Last November chief executive of Mermaids, Susie Green, quit the charity after six years in her post.

Mrs. Green is now part of the online clinic Gender GP. The company was set up by Dr. Michael Webberley and Dr. Helen Webberley. While no longer with the company, Dr. Michael Webberley was struck off the medical register, its most severe sanction, last May for wrongly prescribing treatments such as puberty blockers to patients with gender dysphoria, some as young as nine years old.

Puberty blockers, also called GnRH analogues, are drugs that are used to postpone puberty in children. Increasingly, brakes are being put on such physical interventions to treat children diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the UK, Sweden, Finland, and France.

Dr. Helen Webberley was convicted in 2018 of running an independent medical agency without being registered.

She was also unable to practise medicine since last year after a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel found she committed serious misconduct.

However, in March she won a High Court appeal against her suspension as a doctor and can now work again.

PA Media contributed to this report.