A family law barrister says the UK should criminalise prescribing puberty blockers to under 16-year-olds to protect children from harmful gender ideology.
The lawyer, co-founder of the campaign group Fair Cop, also said queer theory should be removed completely from classrooms, claiming it blurs the lines between age and sex.
In an interview with BTL’s Lee Hall, Ms. Phillimore said: “Children need protected—they are children—when they’re very little, they depend absolutely on their adult carers to stay alive.
“As they grow, they need guidance and support, they’re not capable of making decisions about their fertility or their ability to orgasm at the age of 11, as many people seem to think, and that’s a really scary thing.
“When you see the argument being that at a younger and younger age, children should make these decisions because the kids know who they are. And that’s, I’m afraid, very neatly tied up with queer theory, and the blurring of all boundaries around age and sex.”
The barrister said the blurring of age and sex protections is dangerous as it opens the door to other, more sinister elements.
“These apparently are just social constructs there to inhibit and they should be got rid of, well, you don’t need to look very far to see who is the group of people who would most like to see age and sex-based protections removed from childhood, the paedophiles.
Transphobia
Ms. Phillimore, who was subject to a police complaint over her gender-critical views on social media, also talked about the abuse of the UK’s hate crime laws.She said that in the past, the “malicious and time wasters” have used the legislation to silence gender-critical views, with “transphobia” lumped in with racism.
She said: “I think there are lots of noble aims behind the current law, to help those groups who historically have been very vulnerable and oppressed.
“But because they’ve allowed it to be hijacked by just one particular group who then sucked all the oxygen out, that’s the danger. Because that particular group are not being attacked unreasonably because of something they can’t help. They are being challenged rightly, because they promote a political ideology that puts children at risk of very serious and irreversible harm, and also denies and is contemptuous of the rights of women.”
Speaking about her own case, the barrister said she discovered that she had been subject to a police complaint for posts made on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The lawyer said she only became aware of the police investigation after her accuser “gloated” about the complaint on social media.
After making a subject access request to police, Ms. Phillimore discovered the complainant had provided officers with 12 pages of her tweets, including one with a picture of her dog. “Under the heading of hatred against transgender individuals, there was a picture of my dog, which I put on Twitter, and I was joking around with some friends, and I'd said my dog would call me a Nazi for cheese,” she said.
“Now, there is no conceivable way that picture and that comment could reasonably be held to be a complaint about transgender people.
“But at the time, of course, the police were operating on the perception-based recording. So somebody had simply searched for every time I’ve mentioned Nazi and reported this to the police as transphobia. “
Dictatorship
For over two years, Ms. Phillmore was recorded in police databases as a “barrister posting hate.”She successfully challenged her inclusion in the database in a judicial review which in 2021 found that the hate crimes guidance in its current form allowed “perception-based” recording of “hate” without any investigation or attempt at applying an objective standard was unlawful.
The court also found it permitted a breach of Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights and should be revised.
In January 2022, the House of Lords amended the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would confer power on the secretary of state to issue a code of practice about the processing by the police of personal data relating to a hate incident, other than for the purposes of a criminal investigation.
“So, two quite important state agencies were led by the nose by a malicious time waster,” Ms. Phillimore told BTL.
“But they had no intellectual heft with which to challenge it. And of course, their own guidance said you can’t, you mustn’t, you must never challenge the victim.
“So it’s an open door to the malicious and the time wasters. So I’m really glad that we’ve changed the law. And I hope the police stick to it because it kind of free up a lot of their time, if they’re just allowed to exercise common sense.”
Ms. Phillimore was also reported to her regulator by “vicious” trans activists over her views, but the complaint was not upheld.
Speaking about trans rights, she told Mr. Hall that she doesn’t believe transgender people don’t have any.
She said: “What rights are they after that they do not already have?
“They can’t be sacked for being trans, they can’t be assaulted or beaten up for being trans—it’s a hate crime. I think we’ve got to drill down to that a little more and remember that what they’re actually asking for, is not rights, it’s supremacy.”
Ms. Phillimore said there should be no hierarchy in human rights.
“It can only be the right for my perception of reality to utterly subsume yours, and for you to be punished if you disagree. Now, that’s not a right.
“That’s a dictatorship—that’s totalitarianism.”
