Lesbians will not be “erased” by advocates of transgenderism who argue that a “man with a penis” is a lesbian “because he feels he is”, a co-founder of the LGB Alliance charity told a court this week.
In the ongoing legal challenge against the Charity Commission’s decision last year to bestow charitable status upon the LGB Alliance, co-founder Kate Harris argued that biological males cannot be lesbians.
The legal challenge was brought against the LGB Alliance by the children’s trans charity Mermaids, which has argued that it was established to “promote transphobic activity” and therefore should have its status as a charity revoked.
During a round of cross-examination at the General Regulatory Chamber on Thursday, the legal counsel for Mermaids, Michael Gibbon KC, pressed Harris on whether some people may have alternative definitions for what a lesbian is than the one used by her organisation.
“That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” Harris, who is a lesbian, asked, according to The Guardian.
“Putting it in a more neutral way, that lesbians can include someone who is a woman as a result of gender reassignment,” Gibbon replied.
“I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world who are lesbians because we love other women… We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is,” she said, adding: “A lesbian is attracted to another biological woman, full stop.”
The case, which is believed to be the first of its kind, having one charity call for another charity to have its status revoked, adjourned on Friday until November.
During testimony on Wednesday, the other co-founder of the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson, who is also a lesbian, warned that the use of puberty-blocking drugs on children “who might otherwise grow up to become gay adults” was “a huge medical scandal in the making”.
“Anti-lesbian prejudice and fear is leading many teens, especially lesbians, to believe that they have ‘gender identity’ issues when they are in fact grappling with their emerging lesbian/gay sexual orientation,” Jackson said.
The legal battle between the two charities comes after the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) announced that the central location for gender identity development services (GIDS) for children, the controversial Tavistock clinic, will be shut down next year.
It was determined that the transgender services offered to children are “not safe“. Whistleblowers had alleged that healthcare officials at the clinic determined that girls were transgender for not liking “pink ribbons and dollies” and other flimsy pretexts. The result has been the number of young girls being diagnosed with gender dysphoria increasing by 5,000 per cent over the past decade.
The LGB Alliance’s Kate Harris said that if she were a child today, she would have “fast-tracked on to puberty blockers, insisted on hormone treatment, and no doubt ended up having surgery” instead of “growing up to become a happy lesbian”.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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