Disclaimer

I AM NOT A LAWYER. TAKE THIS WITH A HANDFUL OF SALT. I am also not British, and know next to nothing about legal systems in the UK. I am just a layperson who is rooting enthusiastically for Allison. If you see anything wrong in this writeup, please let me know so that I can fix it! If anyone wants to chime in with additional information, feel free to comment and I'll add that, too.

Short Summary

Here's a very short summary:

• Allison Bailey is a lesbian woman who shared her pro-LGB beliefs at her workplace.

• A bunch of trans rights activists got mad at her for the tweets and tried to get her kicked out of her workplace. Also, she made a lot less money at her job after she first expressed her pro-LGB beliefs at her workplace. And some other not-fun stuff happened.

• She is suing two (2) different parties at once, because of their roles in these events: 1) Stonewall and 2) her workplace, which is called Garden Court Chambers.

Medium Summary

Here's the medium-length summary I gave u/CancelPower the other day. If you want Allison's somewhat-brief summary, start at the header "Stonewall (a registered charity) throwing its weight around & trying to police & silence its critics" on this page.

Longer Summary

Buckle up, there are a lot of acronyms.

• Allison Bailey is a lesbian woman who helped set up LGB Alliance.(1) Allison is a barrister, which is a specialized type of lawyer.(2)

• As a barrister, Allison is technically self-employed, but she belongs to this association of other legal-y people called a set of chambers. The group she belongs to is called Garden Court Chambers (GCC for short). She's been there for over 10 years.

Context: Within Chambers

Here are some relevant pieces of information about how this chambers association works:

• In a chambers, there's a bunch of supporting staff people called clerks. A clerk's job is to connect the barristers to the organizations that want to hire the barristers for doing legal-y stuff in court.

• In Garden Court Chambers, the clerks all work in one big room.

• There's some sort of internal governing board group that helps run the chambers. They are volunteers, they're not paid. They are called the Heads of Chambers (or HoC if you like abbreviations), and they are all barristers.

• There are these "interest groups," of a sort, within the chambers, which barristers can choose to participate more or less in. Trans Rights Working Group (TRWG) was/is one such group within GCC.

Context: Between Groups

Here are some relevant connections between LGBT organizations:

• Stonewall is associated with Garden Court Chambers because Garden Court Chambers joined the Diversity Scheme.

• Stonewall has a subdivision called the Stonewall Trans Advisory Group (STAG). This group answers directly to Stonewall.

• A person working for Stonewall's STAG group was also working for a different LGBTQ org called LGBT Consortium.

• Michelle Brewer, one of the Heads of Chamber of Garden Court Chambers is associated with an organization called the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI). She is also associated with an organization called Gendered Intelligence (which I don't know much about).

• A bunch of the people in GCC, including a clerk who was supposed to be sending Allison work, were associated with TRWG-- unbeknownst to Allison.

• Garden Court Chambers hosted several events for TELI starting in 2016. On social media and on TELI's website, the two were suggested to have an official relationship.

If you want even more context on the relationships between all the people involved, go look at Allison's full witness statement. It's actually kind of fascinating, to see the web of connections.

What happened

So I started trying to write a summary of what, exactly, happened, but then I realized that it's probably just easier to read Allison's account of what happened. Her public witness statement is available here. Yes, it's 160 pages. No, I did not read this giant document, thank you for asking.

All right, so here's a still-incomplete but longer summary of what happened, as best as I can piece it together.

• Diversity Champions Scheme. In December 2018, Garden Court Chambers-- the organization overall-- joined Stonewall's Diversity Champions scheme.(3) An email went out to all the barristers that GCC had joined it. Allison did a reply-all on the email and wrote that she was concerned about this move. One of the Heads of Chamber barristers (the one associated with Gendered Intelligence) did a reply-all and strongly dismissed Allison's concerns.

• Lack of support in 2019. Allison noted that she was contacted by the clerks for work much less often in 2019. Her earnings took a massive hit that year. Also, when she was contacted by the clerks for work, it was for work suitable for someone much more junior in their career than she was. I think one of the clerks working with her had also been working closely with the Head of Chambers who had dismissed Allison's email about Diversity Champions.

• Allison's October 2019 tweets. Allison made several noteworthy pro-LGB tweets in October 2019. One, she tweeted about the launch of LGB Alliance.(4) Two, she tweeted about the disgustingly homophobic "Cotton Ceiling" concept.

• Upset reaction from TRAs. A bunch of TRAs harassed and threatened Allison for the tweets. They also sent in a ton of complaints, anonymous and otherwise, to the Garden Court Chambers Twitter account.

• Announcement from Garden Court Chambers about investigating Allison. Garden Court Chambers officially announced on Twitter that they were investigating Allison for a breach in professional conduct.

• Internal secret Garden Court Chambers communication about what to do about Allison. GCC actually met with Stonewall to discuss Allison's "transphobic" gender-critical views (i.e., her posting about LGB Alliance and the existence of two biological sexes in humans). People in that meeting apparently told other people who were variously associated with GCC about it... and one of those people-- a guy associated with both Stonewall and LGBT Consortium-- posted on an internal, private message board hosted by Stonewall that Michelle Brewer (a Head of Chambers of GCC) wanted people to post complaints about Allison. A bunch of complaints came in about Allison.

So, that's all the obvious points, I think. (Shout it out if you think I missed something big!! I swear I'm forgetting something.)

Contention points

Tribunal Tweets has been doing coverage of the trial by live-tweeting a transcript of the proceedings. It's interesting to read, but it's also a lot to read. Worth mentioning: the trial has mostly focused on the points of disagreement between the two sides as opposed to broad coverage of the total evidence. So if you want to just read about the evidence base, you might be better off just reading Allison's witness statement.

If you don't want to read all the Tribunal Tweets coverage, here are a few of the points of contention between the two sides:

• How much money Allison lost out on during 2019. Arguments over math, over what counts as "days off from work," etc.... Part of the argument was over the fact that Allison received money in 2019 from a case that she completed before GCC joined the Stonewall Diversity Scheme; looking at "income" vs. "earnings" or whatever, for 2019, makes it look like Allison suffered less financial harm or more.

• Whether STAG is technically attached to Stonewall. The respondents tried to say that STAG isn't technically attached to Stonewall.

• Whether Stonewall is actually to blame for the campaign against Allison. One of the TRAs who egged people on to report Allison was also working for LGBT Consortium, which is a different group (I'm like 95% sure, correct me if I'm wrong) than Stonewall. The respondents tried to say that his actions were not performed as a representative of Stonewall, but as a representative of this other group.

• Complaints that Allison's lawyer takes too long with his questions. I'm not sure how legit this complaint is. I do get that they're working with a limited amount of time; I'm not sure how accurate this is, though.

• Suggestion that Allison's tweet content was inherently transphobic/bad/hurtful/dangerous. The more fun part of the trial to read about. Here's an example: post from today about a GCC witness comparing the "Cotton Ceiling" resistance to racial segregation (hey, I haven't read this part of the trial yet!).

I'm forgetting a lot, might add more later.

Interesting/Fun Quotes and Details

Ok... I saved a bunch but I don't currently have the energy to go digging through for the fun bits. I guess these are not all "fun" per se, lol, but I found them interesting for one reason or another and thought you guys might, too.

Here are a few:

• "Rejecting TWAW harms trans community" - witness on May 20th morning session

• The judge's cat made a vocal video entrance. (May 18th session)

• At one point when Allison was being questioned as a witness, the barrister questioning had to remind her that she (the barrister) was the one who was supposed to be asking questions, not Allison. Lawyers gonna lawyer. They both laughed about it.

• Allison, for the record, has stated multiple times that she dislikes the term "gender critical" and only uses it because it's well known. She uses it to refer to her belief in objective biological reality-- e.g. acknowledgment that there are only two sexes in humans.

• Lots of technical issues. Lots and lots. People keep having to ask for page numbers, there are disappearing pages, documents not downloading, etc. I'm glad I'm only reading summaries of it because it sounds like pulling teeth, waiting around on the livestream for the technical issues to get sorted out. Keep in mind, the trial is happening entirely online as far as I can tell. The judge has had to tell people to adjust their video cameras, for example (that's how we got those news pieces from a couple weeks ago about the person who showed up to the trial with their mom and an emotional support dog-- the extra companions were on the video screen with them). '

What's Next

You're still here? How did you make it this far?

So, yeah, that is my summary of questionable accuracy! The trial is still going on. Maybe I should've waited til the end to do this summary, but whatever. I might update this, or do a new post separately.

Questions? Thoughts? Think I missed something? Let me know!

Footnotes

Hah! Footnotes! I don't know if this will actually help with organization, I just thought I'd try it out. (I have a habit of using too many parentheticals. Like this one. So I thought I'd put (some of...) them here instead.)

1. She has stated that she technically wasn't a founder of LGB Alliance, just that she helped it get off the ground.

2. In the US, a barrister is just called a lawyer, the same as the other types of lawyers... I think.

3. The Diversity Champions Scheme is that thing Stonewall is running where an organization pays Stonewall to tell the organization what their LGBT policies should be. Here's a BBC article about orgs leaving the Diversity Champions Scheme. Note that this is not the same thing as Stonewall's Workplace Equality Index, the ranking thing, which Garden Court Chambers (Allison's workplace) did not sign up for.

4. There is a longer story about the founding of LGB Alliance, if I have the energy I'll go try to dig up a link about it... As far as I remember: Allison didn't realize that the other people founding LGB Alliance weren't ready for people to go public about it, and/or she had no idea that her tweet about it would get so much attention.

5. According to GCC's own guidelines, such an investigation is supposed to be kept confidential-- but they just announced it on Twitter. The people on the other side of the case have made several different arguments about this: at one point in the case, they argued that the guidelines regarding confidentiality didn't apply to Allison; at another point in the case, they argued that they had met the confidentiality requirement because someone at GCC tried to call Allison on the phone twice and she didn't pick up, so they just went ahead and publicly posted about the investigation after not being able to reach her.

Edits

• edit1: removed reference to specific video call software. I actually don't know what program they're using to host the trial.

• edit2: fixed couple of minor typos