Mary-Ann Stephenson, the new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) boss, interviewed by Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:
As if it were not galling enough to be declared unsuitable for the role by two parliamentary select committees, stacked with Labour MPs who appeared obsessed with militants’ spurious claims that she was “anti-trans”, she has had to move the equalities watchdog out of its former Vauxhall offices after trans activists smashed windows and daubed the building in pink graffiti. Could she have imagined, when she took the job, that a single issue would dominate debate to this degree? “You’d have to be pretty stupid not to realise,” she sighs.
Having worked for 30 years in the realm of women’s rights, Stephenson has acquired layers of psychological armoury. And yet in these tinderbox times, her job of leading the EHRC – the quango responsible, among its many duties, for turning the Supreme Court’s judgment on the immutability of biological sex into statutory guidance – has become not just fraught, but downright dangerous. Baroness Falkner, her predecessor, was so terrorised by sections of the trans lobby that she had to vary her route to work….
“Women don’t want single-sex spaces because they are bigots,” she says. “They want them because there are situations in which they are vulnerable, or where they need time to heal and to be safe.” So far, so eminently reasonable, you might think. Except by refusing to bow to ideologues, or to parrot the fallacy that trans women are women – a notion directly contradicted by the highest court in the land – she has been treated as a heretic.
To highlight how ludicrous the scrutiny of her EHRC appointment became last summer, Peter Swallow, a Labour MP, decided to grill her on the fact that she had once donated to the legal fund of Allison Bailey, a barrister who took her chambers to court after it asked to remove two gender-critical tweets, and who was found by an employment tribunal to have suffered discrimination after clerks gave her less work. The grand total of Stephenson’s donation? £25.
“This was a case of a black, working-class, lesbian woman being discriminated against for legally-protected beliefs,” she says, sipping a decaf iced latte. “I thought it was wrong. And she won the case. So, it was really unhelpful to use that as an indicator I was going to come in and not care about the rights of trans people.” Sanguine though she had to be, the experience upset her. “It was bruising. I wouldn’t have applied for this role if I didn’t think I was qualified.”…
Today, the overriding imperative for Stephenson, the woman who has tried to show moderation in the face of trans extremists’ most vicious barbs, is to ensure that the law is upheld. That is proving far more of a struggle than it should. While the EHRC has this month issued its long-awaited guidance, clarifying that single-sex and separate-sex services must lawfully base access on biological sex rather than a person’s gender identity, some authorities are vowing to flout it regardless. Six London boroughs – Lambeth, Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham, Southwark and Waltham Forest – are already resisting, castigating the latest code of practice as an “attack” on the trans community. So are eight major trade unions.
All councils either run by the Greens, or by a Greens coalition.
Stephenson’s intention is to hold the line, cutting through performative protests and reminding rogue institutions that they are obliged to follow the law.
Good luck to her.
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