Mick Hartley

Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project lost their appeal in the High Court last week against the EHRC’s single-sex guidance. That’s not how they tell it, though. Jolyon claims that the ruling means that Equalities minister Bridget Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces.

Some lawyers have had enough of his nonsense:

Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.…

Jolyon Maugham, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, said after the judgment that “the judiciary can’t be trusted always” in a reaction that critics have dubbed “Trumpian”.

The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal.

Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

The lawyers said: “Nowhere in his judgment did Swift J conclude that ‘service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services’. The phrase ‘gendered spaces’ is absent from the judgment and has no legal meaning.”

The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”…

It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

Some of those supportive of the project’s aims have also started to question it.

Posting on a popular pro-transgender forum, one user said: “Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.”

Letter here.

As it’s to Phillipson, nothing will be done. It’ll sit in her in-tray, gathering dust