JOANNA Cherry has been named on the board of trustees of a charity one SNP MP previously called a “hate organisation”.
The LGB Alliance, which advocates for gay, lesbian and bi people but has been criticised for its exclusion of trans people, announced Cherry’s appointment to its board on Monday.
It said the KC, a former chair of Westminster’s joint committee on human rights, would bring “unique political experience to augment LGB Alliance’s public affairs capabilities”.
Cherry said: “LGB Alliance is a beacon of sense and sanity at a very dark time for lesbians, and I’ve always been a passionate supporter of its work.
“The tide, however, is turning, and I look forward to contributing to many more victories for lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the years to come.”
A former SNP frontbencher at Westminster, Cherry was a vocal critic of the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which was passed by a majority of MSPs but then vetoed by the UK Government.
Cherry has previously drawn criticism from within the SNP for her links to the LGB Alliance, for example after attending the charity’s first conference in 2021.
Kirsty Blackman, the SNP MP for Aberdeen North, said the “LGB Alliance is a hate organisation holding a hate conference,” adding: “Nothing I've seen before or since has suggested otherwise.”
Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, Cherry said she would have sued the SNP had they blocked her from speaking at the conference.
John Nicolson, who was the SNP’s culture spokesperson before he lost his Westminster seat in the 2024 General Election, supported trans rights charity Mermaids in its bid to have the LGB Alliance stripped of its charitable status.
In his submission to the case, Nicolson said that the “denigration of individuals who support trans rights” had been “one of its core activities since its foundation”.
He wrote: “I am just one of LGB Alliance’s many targets. They have a right, of course, to disagree with me and others about this issue. As a politician I am well used to robust debate and criticism.
“However, I consider that they have crossed the line beyond this into posting abusive and hateful comments that neither advance nor inform the political debate.”
Eileen Gallagher, the LGB Alliance chair of trustees, said that “no one in British politics has done more than Joanna to fight the rise of gender identity ideology, which has so seriously undermined LGB rights in the last decade”.
“She stood up for lesbians and for LGB Alliance at a time when it was not only deeply unfashionable, but seriously detrimental to her career in the SNP,” she added.
The Mermaids case, heard by the General Regulatory Chamber in London, is thought to be the first time in the UK that a charity has sought to have the charitable status of another removed.
Mermaids had argued that LGB Alliance had been “concerned with promoting ‘anti-trans ‘gender critical’ beliefs’, lobbying for legal change in favour of their views, and pushing back against organisations who advocate for ‘trans-equality'”.
LGB Alliance described itself as a charity which 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”.
The tribunal’s two-judge panel said it had decided Mermaids did not have a legal right to challenge the commission’s decision to register LGB Alliance as a charity.
