The creation of LGB Alliance has promoted constructive debate on “difficult and problematic issues” of sex and gender, the Charity Commission told a court on Monday, during final arguments over whether the gay rights group should have been given charitable status.
Iain Steele, counsel for the commission, said there was a public benefit inherent in having charities with different world views, encouraging debate in this “evolving” area of diversity and equality.
Mermaids, which supports transgender, non-binary and gender diverse children and their families, launched an appeal last year against the Charity Commission’s grant of charitable status to LGB Alliance. Mermaids has argued that the group was set up to lobby the government to restrict legal rights afforded to transgender people.
Summing up, Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, said LGB Alliance’s “worldview and objectives are based on conflict and confrontation. This makes its approach fundamentally unpleasant, aggressive and corrosive of public discourse.”
He argued that LGB Alliance’s goals were “quintessentially political” and that the group was working to undermine and impede the work of charities like Mermaids “by promoting the view that they spread disinformation, and by seeking to deprive them of funding,” he said.
The case has focused attention on the conflicting views of two organisations with very different interpretations of the relative importance of sex and gender. LGB Alliance stated in its application for charitable status that its position was that “there are only two sexes and gender is a social construct”.
But Gibbon said the organisation was concealing its “true purpose”. “There is no single statement which sums up LGB Alliance’s views, but we say it is not limited to the abstract proposition that biological sex is immutable. They use such phrases as shorthand for more contentious views,” Gibbon said.
He said LGB Alliance had repeatedly described Mermaids in derogatory terms, accusing the charity of promoting a “gender identity ideology”, of inappropriately medicalising children, “of child abuse, basically”, and of having homophobic views.
The general regulatory chamber will have to rule whether the purpose of LGB Alliance is “exclusively charitable for the public benefit”.
The tribunal has considered extensive new evidence about LGB Alliance, so is not reviewing the Charity Commission’s original decision, but will deliver a fresh judgment on whether it was appropriate to grant charitable status.
Steele set out the law on the granting of charitable status, assessing whether or not the purposes of LGB Alliance were “exclusively charitable” and “for the public benefit”.
“An institution whose purpose is to promote the rights and fair treatment of lesbian, gay and bisexual people will be acting for charitable purposes,” he said. “The issue is whether LGB Alliance was actually established to pursue the pro LGB purposes it set out or whether it really has anti trans purposes.”
Noting Mermaids’ argument that LGB Alliance’s “true purpose” was different from its stated purpose, he stressed that it was unreasonable to expect the Charity Commission to look behind the stated purposes of an organisation, or to “trawl Twitter” for a hidden agenda. Pointing out that the Charity Commission gets about 8,000 applications for charitable status every year, he said: “We would be concerned, as the regulator, about the tribunal adopting an approach that would require us to do that. We can’t have a six-day hearing, every time there is an application for a charity to be registered.”
Steele argued it was helpful, for example, to have discussion of how best to support a young person who identifies as being of the opposite gender from their biological sex, he said, or to consider the circumstances in which someone who identifies as the opposite gender is entitled to have access to facilities such as toilets and prisons provided to members of that gender.
“The public benefits from that debate,” he said. Even if the debate was “conducted in a manner which is perhaps not collaborative” the two organisations would be helping “identify the correct balance to strike on those extremely difficult and problematic issues”.
