The chair of the research ethics committee that (I think) was responsible for signing off the research ethics application of Dr Downes and Prof Brewis was none other than Alison Fox.

For those that do not remember (as I do) the 368 signatories to the open letter calling for my then employer to discriminate against me on the basis of my GC belief, Alison Fox was indeed one of them.

So, the quick recap of where we are….

2 of the key people in perpetuating unlawful harassment against me at The Open University (Dr Downes and Prof Brewis) applied for a grant from the OU to study transphobia in employment tribunal even though they themselves had been found acting unlawfully. The OU granted them money. They applied to the research ethic committee and were granted permission to study 27 cases since 2021. My case was in 2024. It appears that no conflict of interest was declared even though there is a clear conflict of interest, especially for Dr Downes who was found to have been a not so credible witness (ie someone who did not tell the truth).

And, it appears that rather late in the day (ie since I submitted a FOI) that the researchers will be excluding the case they themselves were involved in. A further FOI will establish this presumption.

But now, in a completed unexpected (by me) twist, the chair of the ethics committee had, in fact, signed the open letter harassing me.

Is this why the project got ethical clearance? Who knows. What I do know is that something is sorely amiss with research governance at the OU.

The FOI response

On 20 August 2026 the Open University responded to my Freedom of Information request. The response confirmed the following:

The project was awarded £2,523.84 by the FBL Seedcorn Funding Panel on 2 July 2025. The Co-Investigator is confirmed as Dr Leigh Downes. We already knew the that the main investigator is Prof Jo Brewis. No research assistants are named in the application or award documentation. HREC ethics approval was granted on 27 October 2025 under reference 2025-1044-2.

Most significantly, on the question of conflicts of interest, the OU confirmed: “No conflict-of-interest declaration was submitted.”

Ethics approval for this research was therefore obtained without any declaration of conflict of interest by either researcher - as a reminder, both of these researchers were found by an Employment Tribunal to have harassed me, and both of whose conduct in the events being researched was found to be unlawful.

The FOI response also contained a late addition to the conflict of interest answer: the OU noted that “the researchers ruled out any inclusion of tribunal cases brought against The OU.” You may be asking why the response was cases. Remember, the OU had 4 cases against them that were registered in the courts. Mine - which most people will know about. Prof Jon Pike. Dr Almut Gadow. Pilgrim Tucker. The conduct of Dr Downes and Prof Brewis was implicated in Jon’s case as he too suffered harassment and discrimination as being a member of the OUGCRN. However, I am not sure whether their behaviour was directly implicated in the other two cases.

Strangely, this assurance does not appear anywhere in the Data Management Plan I was able to read. I would have expected such a significant exclusion to be mentioned. A note for those not steeped in university research practices and processes. A data management plan is a formal document that exists to tell the employer how the researchers in question are going to manage the data they collect. This means describing what data will be collected (here one would expect not just the nuts and bolts - observations, interviews etc - but more broadly the rules for including this, that or the other case and any notable exclusions), how it will be stored, who will have access to it and how participants identities will be protected. ~Prof Brewis and Dr Downes stated that they were sampling cases since 2021 and that there had been 27 cases. Apart from the fact that there figure is actually incorrect and there have been more than 80 cases, is their noted 27 cases including the four against the OU? Or is it 27 excluding the four (so in reality 31 cases).

I immediately asked the OU a further question: when exactly was this decision made to exclude (presumably) the four cases against the OU, and when was the FOI office informed of it? That question has been registered as a separate FOI request, reference 2026/160, and is pending.

The Vice Chancellor

I also wrote directly to the Vice Chancellor, Professor David Phoenix, setting out my concerns about governance, research integrity and the conflict of interest. He responded promptly, for which I am grateful.

In his first response, Professor Phoenix committed to reviewing the governance questions I had raised and said he would return to me once colleagues were back from summer leave. However, his letter also contained a passage suggesting that online commentary (I assume he meant triggered or written by me) focusing on named individuals (Dr Downes and Prof Brewis) amounted to “trial by media,” and that such commentary risks “increasing tensions and inhibiting free expression.” Yes. I know. Rich, given the fact that I was tried by social media and it was that trial by media and The Open University’s failure to deal with it that led to their humilitation in the employment tribunal system. I might remind readers that this is the same institution, albeit with a new Vice Chancellor, whose Deputy Vice Chancellor placed an article in a trade magazine (WONKHE) on the morning that the tribunal started that claimed that The Open University were…. errr…. “at the forefront of where the discussion goes next” [of '“balancing inclusion with academic freedom”]. Yup. They were but for all the wrong reasons. As a side note, the timing of this article was on the very morning the tribunal started. So as the Deputy Vice Chancellor wrote a post that, in effect, congratulated the university (or at the very least attempted damage limitation), I was getting up after a sleepless and terrifying night wondering what my fate would be.

Anyhow, back to the update. I replied directly and immediately to Prof Dave Phoenix’s email. I pointed out that the Data Management Plan is a public document, that the research itself is intended to be in the public domain, and that presenting a public critique grounded in evidence, argument and legal judgment is not trial by media. I also noted — as directly as I could — that his inference was deeply and profoundly offensive to me given the specific history between me and his institution. The social media activities of the two researchers conducting this project were found by a tribunal to have caused me profound harm. For a Vice Chancellor to compare my evidence-based public critique to that conduct is, at the very least, tone-deaf to recent history. I told him so in those words.

I also made clear that it is not my intention to stop Dr Downes or Professor Brewis conducting their research. Academic freedom includes the freedom to do poor research. My concern is, and has always been, precisely and only governance, research integrity and ethics.

The investigation

Professor Phoenix wrote to me again on 21 August 2026.

He confirmed that my complaint is being considered under the Open University’s Procedure for the Investigation of Research Misconduct Allegations. The Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation has determined that it warrants moving to the initial investigation stage, and an investigator has been appointed. Professor Phoenix committed to reporting back to me at the outcome of the initial investigation and to keeping me informed of any significant changes to timelines.

He also confirmed that the Data Management Plan has been removed from public view pending the outcome of the investigation, on the basis that the version previously published was not the final version of the document.

What, I thought? A draft had somehow made its way into the repository?

Okay, but, I thought, that raises a further question. The version I read — Version 2, dated 17 October 2025 — was the version the OU itself uploaded to its public research repository ORDO, where it remained publicly accessible until after my complaint was made. If there is a final version that differs materially, particularly on the question of conflict of interest, the timing of any such changes will be important. I have submitted a further FOI request asking for the final version of the DMP, the date it was completed, and the date it was first uploaded to any repository or internal system.

Where things stand

To summarise: a formal research misconduct investigation is now underway at the Open University into research conducted by two of its employees, both of whom were found by an Employment Tribunal to have harassed me. The DMP has been removed from public view. A second FOI on the timing of the decision to exclude OU tribunal cases is pending. A third FOI on the final version of the DMP has now been submitted.

I will report what I learn.

By Jo Phoenix

In March 2024, The Open University issued a public apology to me. It settled my employment tribunal claim. To remind readers, the employment tribunal found that I had been constructively dismissed, suffered direct discrimination, harassment, and post-employment victimisation on grounds of gender critical belief.

I have since discovered that the same institution has funded via its Faculty of Business and Law seedcorn funding, a research project led by two former colleagues (whose conduct the tribunal examined and found wanting) into the experiences of trans and gender non-binary ‘witnesses’ in the employment tribunal system. I took to X as I often do when stunned by something.

To summarise that X thread: On 22 July I posted a thread on X setting out what I had discovered about a publicly available Data Management Plan for Prof Brewis and Dr Downes’ research project. This plan was filed on the Open University’s own research repository. The thread revealed that two of my former OU colleagues — one with a direct role in my harassment and constructive dismissal, the other a signatory of the open letter the tribunal found constituted harassment — are conducting OU-funded research into gender critical employment tribunals. In the thread I named Dr Leigh Downes and Professor Jo Brewis, shared the data management plan, and quoted its framing of gender critical tribunal respondents as victims of organised transphobia. I noted that I have long been wary of the criticism that social scientists research themselves but that it was difficult to avoid thinking this given that Dr Downes was an official named respondent in my employment tribunal. I questioned the plan’s undefined categories of hateful and dehumanising content (of social media posts), the unequal treatment of different categories of social media posters (those posting hateful comment would not be paraphrased or anonymised, and the example given was JKR), the legal illiteracy in the researchers’ claim that trans and gender non-binary employees and respondents were compelled to take part in court proceedings and were vulnerable witnesses, and finally, I quoted the tribunal’s findings that Dr Downes and Prof Brewis had acted unlawfully. I ended by saying I await the publication of the research with interest — to see how its authors have rewritten their own past.

The Principal Investigator, Professor Jo Brewis, signed the Open Letter against me — the letter the tribunal found constituted harassment. The Co-Investigator, Dr Leigh Downes (back then Leigh went by Julia - before she came out as non-binary), signed the same letter. Dr Downes also published it. The tribunal found, at paragraphs 213 and 214, that Dr Downes’s evidence about her role in the Open Letter was “evasive and not credible,” that she had put it on Google Docs so others could sign it, and that her signature was first on the petition as a result. Prof Brewis was one of the first tranche of signatories and I suspect but cannot prove that Prof Brewis was responsible for the journal of Gender, Work and Organisation making a statement on its journal webpage that the network I founded was transphobic and called on my then employer to discriminate against me on the grounds of belief. The tribunal found Dr Downes’s evidence not credible on multiple occasions. It found she used her role as FASS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead to create a hostile environment for me. It found her conduct was unlawful.

Their project, titled “Exploring the lived experiences of trans and non-binary witnesses and individual respondents involved in protected belief employment tribunals in the UK,” covers gender critical tribunal cases since the Forstater EAT decision of June 2021. The Data Management Plan (DMP) says that there have been approximately 27 such cases. My case is almost certainly among them given that mine was an early case and a high profile one.

The DMP characterises gender critical tribunal claimants as conducting “organised transphobia.” It frames respondents — i.e. the people found to have acted unlawfully — as vulnerable victims. Let’s remind ourselves, there has been a phenomenal success rate in the employment tribunal system of finding against respondents. From the data plan, it would seem that Prof Brewis and Dr Downes will to resolve ethical dilemmas about obtaining consent to use social media data by determining whether posts are “hateful or dehumanizing” (American spelling; I note this in passing). The people who will make that determination are the same people whose conduct in these proceedings was found by a tribunal to be unlawful. There is a further question I have: how on earth is an analysis of social media posts going to say anything about the “lived experiences” of trans and non-binary employees who have been accused of transphobia?

The conflict of interest

Research ethics frameworks in the UK, including the OU’s own and the UK Research Integrity Office code of practice, require researchers to declare conflicts of interest at the point of making a funding application and in ethics approval applications. A conflict does not have to be financial. A direct personal stake in the outcome of the research area is sufficient.

As I noted above, both researchers were found by an Employment Tribunal to have harassed a gender critical claimant. Dr Downes was found to have given evasive and not credible evidence in that tribunal. Both of these researchers have a direct personal stake in the outcome of the research they are proposing to do - or as I suspect have already begun. What is the stake? To relitigate and exonerate their own unlawful behaviour by extension if not by direct analysis of the case they were involved in. We have a phrase for what happens when conflicts of interest like these are not declared in funding applications, or in the associated ethics approval applications. That phrase is research misconduct. To put it in stark terms, not declaring the personal stake in this research is arguably research misconduct because Prof Jo Brewis and Dr Leigh Downes may well have obtained seedcorn funding and ethical approval to conduct this research on a lie (in this case of omission).

I have submitted Freedom of Information requests to establish whether conflict of interest declarations were made, who approved the funding in the absence of a permanent FBL Dean, and what governance authority they acted under. I have also written to the Vice Chancellor, Professor David Phoenix, expressing my serious concerns about this research project.

I will report what I learn.

The institutional contradiction

I will defend the right of academics to research what they will, within parameters of course. We have funding review systems and ethics approvals processes to guard against the worst excesses of academic curiosity. I mean imagine a criminologist that decides to do participant observation of criminal courts by murdering people. We might need to know whether deterrence works and how better than to experience it in order to understand it? I say this because I think there is an institutional problem that The Open University - specifically its Vice Chancellor and perhaps Research PVC - might want to grapple with. Is giving funding to, and thereby approving this research project, something it really wants to do given that to do so seems to be opting out of its apology to me? Perhaps I am being overly sensitive but there does seem to be something of a contradiction between accepting legal responsibility for the conduct of these two employees and then giving those same employees institutional resources to produce a counter-narrative.

Irony upon irony

The curiosity in all this is that the first conflict between Dr Downes and myself occurred when Dr Downes was trying to get the screening of film cancelled. The film was a critical take of the prison system in England and Wales. One would have thought that a critical criminologist such as Dr Downes would be for a film that exposes the wrongs of incarceration. Nope. She wanted the film cancelled because the man who made the film was a convicted lawbreaker and Dr Downes had, in a Judge Dredd sort of way, decided that the man was not contrite enough for the crimes despite his jail time. Dr Downes went on to write a blog about the episode which I highly recommend for those wishing to see what punitiveness in the name of queer feminism looks like. (For those who manage to make it to the end of the blog - it was me, dear reader, who said that cancelling the screening of the film because questioning the motives of the film maker would “set a dangerous precedent in academia”.)

Oh the irony of adjudicated lawbreakers, such as Dr Downes and Prof Brewis, doing research that, at its heart, is an attempt to re-write via a mostly unhinged conceptual framework the past as part of a Great Conspiracy of Organised Transphobia! Irony upon irony.

Bringing the university into disrepute

It is an old fashioned phrase but one that has been brought to mind since I discovered just what my former colleagues have been up to. For the uninitiated: most university employment contracts contain a provision requiring staff not to bring their employer into disrepute. In plain terms, this means that an employee can face serious disciplinary consequences (up to and including dismissal) if their conduct, whether inside or outside the workplace, is of a kind that a reasonable person would regard as damaging to the institution’s reputation. It applies to published research, public statements and social media activity, not just behaviour in the office. The connection to employment does not have to be explicit: an academic publishing research under their institutional affiliation, funded by institutional money, on subject matter directly connected to their employment history at that institution, falls squarely within it, I think. I cannot help but think that the Vice Chancellor of The Open University might want to take into account the following, partly as a cautionary tale of what happens in an organisation when the appropriate checks and balances are not operating… errr…. in the manner expected.

Amnesty International, July 2026

The deleterious consequences of employees labelling gender critical activity as “organised transphobia” and naming organisations accordingly are not hypothetical. On 8 July 2026 — this month — Amnesty International UK published a report titled A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, branding over a hundred gender critical charities, grassroots organisations, victim support services and evidence-based medicine associations as “anti-rights” actors. The named organisations included For Women Scotland, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance and the Lesbian Project — the very organisations that prevailed at the Supreme Court in April 2025. Within two days, following formal letters of challenge from the named organisations and a legal intervention from J.K. Rowling over the inclusion of Beira’s Place — her sexual assault support centre — Amnesty withdrew the report entirely. It admitted the document had bypassed its own internal accuracy checks, issued an apology, opened an internal inquiry and referred itself to the Charity Commission.

Tribunal Tweets and the meaning of open justice

I accept that the only publicly available document about this research project is its Data Management Plan, but even here the DMP frames the live reporting of gender critical employment tribunals as part of the organised transphobia ecosystem it sets out to document. It treats social media commentary on tribunal proceedings as data to be analysed for its hateful content. It does not appear to consider that this commentary might simply be open justice in action. Nor does it reflect on the fact that nothing stops trans rights activists doing the same as tribunal tweets.

Tribunal Tweets is a collective of volunteer citizen journalists who attend and report employment tribunal proceedings in real time, with the permission of the presiding judge, in the name of open justice. They covered my tribunal. Their reporting — along with that of journalists, academics, lawyers and members of the public who attended — is part of the public record that holds institutions to account. Permission has to be granted and where Tribunal Tweets are given permission, that permission comes directly from the Judge. To cast this as part of organised transphobia means that the researchers are starting from the position that the courts themselves are part of the conspiracy against trans and non-binary people they are attempting to document. This is not good scholarship. It also raises a question – at what point does an employer decide that its employees (who have been found acting unlawfully) really should not go around defaming organisations (including the court system) in the manner that Amnesty’s recent report did.

Back to bringing the university into disrepute. The relevant question is not whether the institution is actually damaged. It is whether the conduct is of a kind that would reasonably be regarded as damaging. Publishing research that contradicts your employer’s public apology, reframes the person your employer apologised to as a participant in organised transphobia, names public figures as exempt from needing the protections of consent when harvesting their data, naming citizen journalist organisations as part of organised transphobia and does so using your employer’s own funding … call me silly but I sort of think that a reasonable person might have a view on that.

On one level, I do not care one teeny tiny bit about a piece of research that starts from such poor scholarship. On another level, I do care if the research is made possible by either research misconduct or the failure of the OU functionaries in the posts meant to guard against research misconduct to do due diligence. Ultimately, if we discover that due diligence was done and the research proposal and ethics approval forms did pass muster (how on earth this is possible I have no idea), then I very much look forward to the publication of their results and the opportunity to comment upon the quality and merit of their social scientific skills and scholarship.

Until then, let’s see what the Vice Chancellor of The Open University makes of my email and what the Freedom of Information Request turns up.

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I’ve been a criminologist for more than 3 decades. For the last few years, I’ve also been a cautionary tale — the academic who got “cancelled,” who fought a tribunal, who became, depending on who you ask, either a fighter and campaigner or a problem to be managed. Now, so many years after my first cancellation, I’ve made my peace with both versions.

What I haven’t made my peace with is watching good books die before they are even born because commissioning editors get nervous, or marketing departments get cold feet, or a sensitivity reader flags a sentence that was simply true and inconvenient. I’ve watched it happen to other people’s work as often as my own, and I got tired of it being someone else’s problem to solve.

So being someone who likes to blow up roadblocks, I’ve started a publishing house.

Phoenix Publications Ltd exists to publish the books that traditional presses are too frightened or nervous to touch. Works on sex, gender, crime, culture, and the war currently being waged against honest argument. PPL is interested in work by people who’ve done the thinking, have the evidence, and have simply run out of patience with mainstream publishing companies.

Our first title, Sex: One Woman’s War, written by me and Pat Carlen, is out now — part memoir, part sociology, about academic freedom and the personal cost of saying things people would rather you didn’t. But I want to be honest with you: the book is not really the announcement here. The book is proof that this can be done properly — typeset, edited, distributed, sold — outside the gatekeeping structures that have failed so many writers.

The real announcement is that Phoenix is open for business, and open for proposals.

If you’ve written something — or are writing something — that mainstream publishers have been too cautious to take on, I want to hear from you. Full submission details are on the website. I can’t promise to publish everything that lands in my inbox, but I can promise it will be read by someone who understands exactly why you wrote it and exactly why someone else was too nervous to publish it.

This is a small press. For the moment, it will stay deliberately small until we can set up the distribution systems and other infrastructure to handle capacity.

You can find me at phoenixpublicationsltd.co.uk. Follow along here and on X for updates on new titles, open submission windows, and the occasional dispatch from the front line of independent publishing.

Thank you for being part of this from the start.

Jo

I would like to celebrate the anniversary by making available a couple of documents. These documents formed part of the cross-examination either of myself or the many Open University witnesses. First up is the Open Letter that appeared more or less five years ago today. If you want to see exactly who signed that no infamous letter, have a look!

Open Letter With All The Signatories

1.06MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

It is worth remembering what the Employment Tribunal said about this letter:

Next up is the first time I made a complaint to the university about the open letter - and especially about the conduct of the then Faculty EDI lead who, at that point, went by the name Julia Downes but is now Leigh Downes. If you want to remember just how bad things on X were around that time, please have a look. If you want to read the bilge that academics from the LSE wrote about the OUGCRN, please have a look as well. But, before you do, I want to remind you of what the Employment Tribunal had to say about several of the academics they encountered in my hearing:

Complaint Email With Screen Shots And Lse Letter

3.05MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Just to finish this short anniversary post, I might remind you about what the Employment Tribunal said of Leigh Downes:

The summer of 2021 was an awful summer. The actions of my colleagues - academics most of them - changed the entire course of my personal and professional life. Now, though, all these years later I am still amazed that I had enough support from everyone to make a stand that resulted in a judgement that still gives me a deep sense of pride and joy.

Saturday morning, I was walking my dog in Chippenham. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and it was Pride weekend. I knew this because the High Street had placards on every lamp post — just like the one pictured here. They were not hard to miss, printed in the brightest colours a printer can render. I struggled with what I saw: a cartoon lion — soft, round-faced, with the oversized eyes of a cuddly toy — peered over a rainbow, and beneath him, in cheerful bubble lettering, the words Everyone Welcome, a heart in place of the “o”.

On its surface, it is the most unobjectionable image imaginable. Who could argue against the sentiment — especially in these days, when tech-bro billionaires and corrupt or populist (often both) politicians seem hell-bent on promoting the politics of exclusion and division? I live nearby, and I want Chippenham to be a place where everyone really is welcome. And a cartoon lion? What on earth could be wrong with that? Yet the banner stopped me in my tracks. It made me feel sick.

I spent the rest of the day wondering why I had reacted so strongly — and trust me, when I say I felt sick, I mean a mixture of revulsion and abjection. Here are my thoughts.

Design is never neutral. Every formal choice a designer makes is made with a specific audience in mind, and every choice is about conveying meaning.

This Pride image was not aimed at me. I am a 62 year old lesbian who came out when I had no formal legal rights. I marched on Lesbian Strength marches and Gay Pride marches when these were not celebrations of diversity but political protests aimed at securing our equal right not to be discriminated against on the basis of our sexual orientation. Back then, Pride was always — err — shall we say, “a little edgy.” Why? Because every one of us on those marches, men and women alike, knew we were there because we wanted to have sex with members of the same sex. Boil it down however you like: sexual orientation is inevitably, necessarily and essentially about sex — what you do, and who you want to do it with.

And there is more. I was marching in the 80s and 90s. Women were coming out and saying, loudly and proudly, that our sexuality did not need men. Gay men, meanwhile, were dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Pride was sex-saturated — not the biological kind, but the physical-pleasure kind. So much so that when the celebrations shifted in the mid-90s to — if memory serves — Clapham Common, we got a little narked that so many straight people, with children, were joining in.

Fast forward thirty years — and the Equality Act 2010 — and I stood in the centre of Chippenham realising that whatever PrideFest in Chippenham now is, it was not aimed at me. The baby-faced animal, the peekaboo pose, the toy-aisle palette belong to a single, well-understood visual language: the language of early childhood. This is the grammar of nursery walls and pre-school television, the register used to reach children of three, four, five. It is not the aesthetic of an adult political movement addressing other adults. It is the aesthetic of something being sold to the very young.

And the banner does not stand alone. Chippenham’s PrideFest programme this year included, in its own words, a “Pride Lion window trail for children,” and a meet-and-greet with Bluey — the pre-school cartoon dog whose audience is, by design, two to seven years old — booked into the town’s Waterstones. These are not events that families with children happen to wander past. They are events constructed for small children, addressed to them directly, so that they too can take part. There was also a “drag brunch,” in which some local children did some dancing, interspersed with a drag act (I know, I know) and a bit of flag-waving.

What’s Wrong with Drag Brunch, a Pride Lion, Flag-Waving and Bluey?

I have never believed that drag has any place in children’s entertainment. The history of drag is long and specific, and it was always about in-jokes, gay male culture and sex — no matter what may be said of it now in the language of “performance.” It could be, and was, also incredibly misogynistic, no matter what RuPaul and others may say. But I want to leave aside the fact that the Pride committee in Chippenham seems to have lost its marbles in thinking that a daytime drag performance surrounded by children from a local dance school was anything other than wrong. I leave it aside because my objection to drag turns on whether it is ever appropriate to mix children’s entertainment with something that is, at heart and in essence, sexual. I take it as read that I do not need to convince you of that, reader.

Instead, I want to be precise about a different objection. A window trail, a cartoon dog, a cuddly lion and primary colours are not obscene, and anyone who claims otherwise has handed our opponents an easy win. Leaving the drag brunch to one side, the question is what the committee decided to do in the name of Pride.

They decided to use the most powerful tools we possess for capturing the attention of small children — a cuddly mascot, a beloved television character, saturated colour — to attach those children to a contested adult identity movement. We restrict advertising to children precisely because we accept that the very young cannot evaluate what is put in front of them; they absorb the affect and the symbol without the apparatus to question either. To deploy those same techniques on behalf of an identity-political cause, in shared civic space, addressed to an audience that cannot consent and whose parents hold every shade of view, is not “inclusion.” It is marketing — and marketing to pre-schoolers is something we usually have the sense to be suspicious of. To cap it off, local children were enlisted in the flag-waving whether they liked it or not: the children from the dance troupe had little choice but to take part, since they were still — err — waiting to finish their performances.

One might argue that there is a defence.

Children of same-sex parents exist; children who will grow up gay exist; and friendly imagery, the argument runs, tells them they are ordinary and safe. This is not nothing, and only a hard heart would dismiss it. But notice what this defence does and does not justify. It justifies a culture in which a child meets, without fuss, the fact that some families have two mums. It does not justify enlisting Bluey to build brand loyalty to a movement — any more than the existence of churchgoing children would justify a council booking a cartoon character to evangelise toddlers on the high street. Exposure to the ordinary diversity of human life is one thing; the deliberate, professionalised courting of pre-schoolers is another. And the friendly surface is precisely what makes the second so easy to wave through as the first. Make no mistake: Chippenham PrideFest was far more about trans pride than about the L, the G, or even the B — as the photograph below amply demonstrates.

And there, on the bill, was Helen Belcher, a trans-identifying male. Say no more. Well — no — let’s say a little more.

Belcher is the Director of TransActual, a Wiltshire councillor and a former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for this very constituency. TransActual is the organisation that, in its published response to the Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling on the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act, accused the country’s highest court of taking “the anti-scientific, Trumpian line that sex is clearly binary” (TransActual, Response to the Supreme Court ruling, 16 April 2025). Let that sit for a moment. Sexual dimorphism — the basic biological reality on which my own existence as a lesbian depends — recast as anti-science, by the organisation whose director was a featured name at a family festival. This is the same Belcher who, as a councillor, dismissed the watering-down of an LGBTQIA+ motion into a “bland, everyone matters” form as “disgraceful” (BBC News). And there we all stood, beneath the banner reading Everyone Welcome. The irony writes itself.

So, in primary Technicolor, the assembled children and parents of Chippenham and environs were folded into a contested adult identity politics: one whose flagship organisation treats the recognition of biological sex as a “Trumpian” delusion, and which casts the deeply held — and, since Forstater, legally protected — gender-critical beliefs of women like me as something close to bigotry. Those are, I should be clear, my conclusions about what that worldview amounts to. But the words in quotation marks are theirs, on the public record, and you can check them for yourself.

Perhaps I have lived too long. I was deeply sickened by the choices made on behalf of the good folk of Chippenham — by the council, by the police (see Sarah Phillimore’s recent posts on X about this), and by the PrideFest committee.

Whatever one thinks of Pride in general, we never confused it with children’s entertainment. The cartoon lion is not a continuation of that older tradition — of being a visibly proud sexual minority in a context of criminalisation, stigmatisation and discrimination based on same-sex attraction. PrideFest in Chippenham is a monstrous reinvention aimed at three-year-olds. The people responsible for these choices need their motivations, and their judgment, examined.

For my part, I am happy to say it plainly and proudly. A town centre is not a nursery wall on which adults may impose their political ideologies — or their sexual orientation — onto children. And as for “everyone welcome”? The welcome owed to adults — lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual, whatever — has never depended on, and should never depend on, the enrolment of children.

I am not going to tell the full tale of Lorna Young v Manchester City Council in this blog because, having attended the tribunal yesterday, I have been obsessing over one small exchange between two MCC employees. One was Lorna Young’s line manager, the other was someone Lorna line managed.

A bit of background context first: On 2 February 2022, the Council passed a motion called *Trans Rights Are Human Rights*. It affirmed, by unanimous vote and without an Equality Impact Assessment, that “trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are non-binary and trans rights are human rights.” It then committed the Council to auditing its services for trans accessibility and supporting trans and non-binary employees.

So far, so Stonewall vibe.

Another context: This is not one of the ‘ordinary tales’ of GC harassment and bullying. This is a tale about what happens when there is a GC individual in a management position within the EDI machinery of an organisation. And it is worth paying attention to for that reason.

Okay, on with the tale. About two months after the motion was passed, Sarah Herdan, someone who Lorna Young line managed (so by definition was part of the EDI machine) made a complaint to Lorna’s boss Jo Johnston (also part of the machine) that Lorna was a witch. How did Sarah Herdan know this? From the fact that Lorna liked a few tweets.

Sarah Herdan and Jo Johnston followed up their conversation with an email exchange. What follows below I transcribed from the bundle.

[extracted from Sarah Herdan’s written complaint and specifically from the ‘impact on me’ section] …I know not everyone is fully versed on the debates around trans people, especially the ones playing out on twitter, so this may seem like I am making a mountain out of a molehill — but I have witnessed first hand how such attitudes harm people within our communities. Many trans people especially younger ones are actively engaged online and will be fully aware what those likes mean about Lorna’s views. I am ashamed to be associated with someone holding those views in the position that Lorna is on.

Before I go further, yet more context. Sarah Herdan was making a complaint about Lorna’s X activity.

Jo Johnston replied:

I just wanted to follow up on our conversation yesterday and say thank you for trusting me enough to bring this to me. What you did took a huge amount of courage and you should be really proud for raising this. I want to assure you again that MCC is an inclusive council and I will definitely support you to make sure you feel valued and that this is a place you want to be ... I’ve put this in writing so you can hold me to account for everything I’m saying without disclosing too much that might compromise the confidentiality of our conversation.

Even before we get to the cross-examination, this exchange is jaw dropping. The entire raison d’etre of both of these individuals’ jobs is the Equality Act 2010. You know, that Act that provides the framework within which gender critical views are protected beliefs? Perhaps they didn’t get the memo…..?

If the written exchange was not bad enough, the cross examination revealed so much more. Lorna Young’s barrister is Nathan Roberts. (As an aside, watching Nathan Roberts was deeply satisfying. He is clearly a barrister who is incredibly committed to the law – not as an abstract concept, but as a living thing that helps bring about justice for individuals).

Mr Roberts asked Jo Johnston a simple question. Did she think that the sentence Sarah Herdan wrote about being ashamed to work with someone “holding those views” was an awful thing to say. She says no. He asks whether it is problematic. She says no. She says this was Sarah Herdan writing about the impact on herself of [checks notes] liking a handful of tweets. Admittedly these were tweets by [shock and horror] Julie Bindel and JKR.

However, back to the hearing. Jo informed the court – without the slightest hint of irony – that Sarah had the right to say this.

Well. The next set of questions was pretty much game over.

Mr Roberts asked Jo Johnston whether she thought a sentence like “ashamed to be associated with a Muslim” was awful or problematic? No came the reply. What about a gay man? No, again.

I was fairly tired when this part of the cross examination was taking place, but I could have sworn I heard the distant sound of a trap door opening and its victim falling through the floor.

On a more serious note, it was not the first that I wondered how and why such craven bullying and prejudice is allowed to run rampant through our public institutions and organisations – and it is not Sarah Herdan’s visceral prejudice to which I refer.

Jo Johnston characterised that prejudice and malice as something to be proud of, that took courage and then gave permission to Sarah Herdan to hold her to account. What is that if it is not a promise to burn the witch.

As time was to tell, Sarah Herdan eventually resigned (along with a co-conspirator which I will blog about another day). Yet she had not quite finished with the witchhunting. She rootled out Lorna’s anonymous X account and what she found was eventually used to get Lorna sacked.

I stayed on to have dinner and drink with Lorna afterwards. I hope she won’t mind me saying this. Despite everything that has happened to her – and her story is like a montage of all the worse bits of all our cases combined into one - she remains a remarkable woman. Strong. Determined. Very centred. It is clear to me that she sees through the bullshit. She is no witch. None of us are. That’s the whole point.

Today’s blog is about a single phrase, on page 56 of the judgment.

“Irrelevant considerations.”

That is the phrase Mrs Justice Lieven uses, at paragraph 271, to describe the chilling effect on academic freedom and the stress and anxiety inflicted on academics. Irrelevant. Not ‘relevant but insufficient’. Not ‘present but outweighed’. Irrelevant. To breach the academic freedom principle, the judgment tells us, an academic must be in jeopardy of losing their job. Not in jeopardy of disciplinary process. Not at risk of psychological injury or even at risk of unlawful harassment and discrimination. Not subject to a chilling effect “however harmful that might be.”

Reader — I lost my job. Arguably Prof Stock also lost her’s the moment the police informed her that she ought not attend campus.

We lost our jobs - here is the legal phrase that Lievens seems to have missed - constructively. Speaking just about myself, I won at tribunal. But the mechanism by which I lost it was not that dissimilar to mechanism that happened at Sussex and the mechanism at play in my unlawful blacklisting and cancellation from Essex university. Yet it is these things this judgment now files under “irrelevant.” Years long campaigns of harassment. For me, the instruction not to discuss my research at departmental meetings. The being compared to a racist by my line manager. For Prof Stock the posters, chants, hostile enivronment, the villifying and decrying, the ostracism. In short, the harassment and bullying. But there is also the chilling effect, comprehensively documented, on every other gender critical academic watching what was happening. None of that, on this reasoning, would have engaged the academic freedom protection the regulator exists to enforce.

So what is relevant?

The judgment protects Sussex from a regulator that overreached. It does not protect the gender critical academic from the institution that harasses her. The judgment endorses a Stonewall-template policy as compatible with academic freedom on the basis that the institution’s safeguarding clauses must be assumed to work and the institution must be assumed to act lawfully. It offers, as a worked example of a “less intrusive means” of balancing rights, the pre-vetting of a gender critical feminist lecture by the university because someone has objected. Read that sentence twice. In 2021 Akua Reindorf KC, reviewing the cancellation of one of my own talks at the University of Essex, found that asking the speaker to submit her talk in advance was unacceptable, and noted the Joint Committee on Human Rights view that such pre-vetting is not a reasonable condition to impose. Five years later the High Court has now floated that very practice as a reasonably practicable accommodation in a free speech judgment. That is the protection on offer. A potentially unlawful practice in the face of students’ sensibilities in the absence of actually hearing the lecture.

And then, on cue, comes the Orwellian turn. Sussex’s Vice-Chancellor — the same institution where Kathleen Stock was hounded out, where the policy at issue today was operated for years, where the events that triggered this entire investigation happened on her predecessor’s watch and on hers — emerges to present the University as a bastion of free speech protecting universities from regulatory overreach and vindicated by the courts. The institution that lost a professor, that ran the policy, that has spent four years and considerable public money defending the policy, now claims the mantle of academic freedom because the regulator was found to have approached it with a closed mind. This is what victory looks like when the language has been captured: the place that did the harm celebrates the judgment that says the harm was irrelevant. I cannot help but think of the blog post written by the Deputy VC on the day my tribunal started claiming “While we’re not alone in facing the challenge, we will be at the forefront of where the discussion goes next, with a high-profile employment tribunal due to start today.” That blog did not age well. I hope that Sussex’s VC’s gleeful delight ages just as well. I truly hope the Office for Students appeals this judgment.

At paragraph 269 the judgment goes further. Public bodies “must be assumed to be intending to act lawfully unless there is very clear evidence to the contrary.” I nearly fell off my chair when I read that sentence. I have been tracking the employment tribunal, County Court and Judicial Review wins from gender critical employees and organisations. There are an awful lot of them! We win about 85% of claims brought. The evidence is not absent. It is voluminous. Where gender critical matters are concerned it would seem that assumption that public bodies are acting lawfully is … I am struggling for the right word … oh, let’s just go with utterly delusional. It is the entire jurisprudence of the last six years. And we are told to assume universities act lawfully unless shown otherwise — as if each of us, individually, has to re-prove from scratch what the courts have established collectively, repeatedly, for half a decade.

I am tired of legal architecture designed as if the worst case is hypothetical. The worst case is not hypothetical. It happened to me, and to Kathleen Stock, and to so so so many others. Whatever we think of how OfS conducted the investigation, the protection is it meant to offer is for the harm that actually occurs. But no, such harm is now…

Irrelevant.

The word should burn.

This blog is written for academics and those interested in the conditions in which academics currently labour. The observations I make come from general observations and conversations with colleagues across the sector. Any resemblance to specific people or institutions is coincidental. The point of the blog is to trace the changing meanings of a word that most academics hold dear – that word is collegiality.

Nearly a decade ago, Pat Carlen and I wrote a chapter warning about the rise of what we called “corporatist research culture” in universities (Carlen and Phoenix, 2017). We argued that something quiet and consequential was happening: university managements were increasingly shaping researchers’ understanding of their role — away from producing new knowledge and towards bringing in large grants, generating measurable “impact[1],” and serving the corporate interests of the institution. We suggested that this corporatist culture was more concerning than the market culture it fed off, precisely because it operated without noise — taken for granted, unspoken, making everyone in a department complicit. No one could opt out. We warned that the people most affected would be early career academics, who were being — in the words of Hillyard and colleagues that we quoted — “brutally socialized” into “a conformist corporate culture” as the price of getting a permanent post (Hillyard et al., 2004: 382).

Since writing that chapter, I have watched on as the work allocation we academics received from our ‘line managers’ or Heads of Department/School each year includes a nebulous category called ‘citizenship’ or ‘collegiality’. And I have been thinking and about a question we didn’t quite reach.

We described the structural mechanism — how the REF, the impact agenda, the grant economy, and the ethics committees in universities all worked to narrow the space for critical, qualitative, and theoretical research. But we didn’t fully name the interpersonal mechanism — the everyday vocabulary through which that silent corporatism is transmitted between colleagues, dressed up as professional virtue. I want to name it now. The word is “collegiality.”

“Collegiality” used to mean something quite specific. It meant that scholars — people who had spent years acquiring expertise, who understood their fields in ways that administrators typically could not — had the right to govern themselves. It meant collective decision-making among equals. It meant that unique type of authority present in a university, one derived from knowledge, not from occupying a position in a management hierarchy. Weber (1922/1978) analysed it as a principle for limiting monocratic power. Waters (1989) formalised it as an organisational form parallel to bureaucracy — characterised by formal egalitarianism, professional autonomy, consensus decision-making, and peer scrutiny. Freidson (2001) built an entire theory of professional life around it, arguing that professionalism constituted a “third logic” irreducible to either the market or the bureaucracy, with collegial control by the practitioner community at its heart. For centuries, the collegium was a defining feature of the university: a body of experts who decided, together, what should be taught, who should be hired, how research should be judged, and what standards should be upheld.

That meaning has largely been lost. And the loss has been so gradual, so complete, that most people in British universities these days are, I suspect, unaware it happened. I always knew I was the last of a generation. I worry that I am the last of the generation that remembers these other meanings of the word.

Here is what “collegiality” tends to mean now, in institutional practice. It means: don’t question the restructure. Don’t object when the committee you sit on turns out to have no real authority. Don’t point out that the “consultation” was a fait accompli. Don’t note, in a meeting, that the Dean’s or Head’s or Deputy VC or other administrator / leader / manager’s strategy contradicts the available evidence. And don’t say anything that might embarrass the institution or make your colleagues uncomfortable. If you do these things, you risk being labelled “uncollegial.” You may encounter that word in your annual review, in the notes from your probation panel, in the quiet conversations that shape promotion decisions. You won’t find a clear definition. But you will find consequences.

The American Association of University Professors identified this drift in 1999 and issued a careful warning (AAUP, 1999/2016). They noted that “collegiality” was increasingly being added as a fourth criterion in faculty evaluation — alongside teaching, research, and service — and that it was being conflated with expectations that academics display “enthusiasm,” “dedication,” a “constructive attitude,” and, most revealingly, “an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion.” Their description of what a university full of uncritically agreeable academics would look like remains striking: “a college or university replete with genial Babbitts” — the sort of place to which “society is unlikely to look for leadership.”

In the UK, the shift took a different form — less through formal evaluation criteria and more through the dismantling of the structures through which collegiality had actually operated. The Jarratt Report (1985) recommended recasting vice-chancellors as chief executives and reducing the authority of senates. The post-1992 universities were designed from the outset along managerialist lines. The older institutions gradually followed. I remember that around 2011 there was a concerted effort by the then Vice Chancellor of Durham University to turn Senate from a powerful governing board into little more than an academic board that approved educational programmes and the like. The result was that the infrastructure of collegiality — the committees, boards, and senates through which academics exercised collective authority — was progressively weakened. But the word survived. And into that emptied-out concept, the workplace changes that accompanied managerialism in university inserted an entirely new set of expectations.

“Collegiality” in a contemporary UK university now typically means: mentor your junior colleagues (unpaid). Review manuscripts (unpaid). Second-mark assignments (without complaint). Sit on the working group (which may well be ignored). Attend the away day (and be positive). Demonstrate “good citizenship” in your promotion application. Do the things the institution needs but declines to resource — and do them willingly. Fleming and Harley (2023) offered a useful theoretical frame for this. Collegiality, they argued, has become a form of “concertive control” — a mechanism through which universities extract labour that doesn’t formally “count” by appealing to professional norms that academics hold dear. You can’t easily refuse to review that thesis, because doing so would feel uncollegial. The institution gets the work; you absorb the cost.

This is where our chapter’s argument about corporatism connects. Pat and I described how impact coercion operates silently — how researchers make project and publication choices based on what will have a non-academic wider ‘beneficial’ effect without anyone having to issue an explicit instruction. The demand to “be collegial” is, I think, the interpersonal face of that same quiet coercion. It is how the institutional logic of corporatism gets translated into something that looks like a personal shortcoming. You’re not being managed; you’re being uncollegial. The structural pressure recedes from view, and what remains visible is a deficiency — yours.

There is a harder edge to this too. “Collegiality” can also function as a disciplinary instrument. I know this not only from the literature but from experience of what happens when a university decides you are not being collegial enough. What is usually meant, in practice, is that you are not being compliant enough. This came out in my employment tribunal against The Open University when one of my main harassers suggested that I was not collegial. There are far more examples and I have heard academics bemoan that they are accused of being uncollegial when they raise questions that others find uncomfortable. This can be research questions. Or it might be when you are declining to pretend that a policy which may be unlawful is perfectly acceptable. In most of these circumstances, “collegiality” ceases to be an aspiration and becomes a warning.

Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist (2016) have coined a useful term for the institutional version of this: “collegiality washing.” Universities create elaborate consultative procedures — staff surveys, town halls, working groups, task-and-finish committees — that look like collegial governance but which often serve to legitimate decisions that have already been taken. The appearance of shared decision-making is maintained. The reality of centralised control is left undisturbed. Pat and I described something analogous in our chapter: how senior academics who sit on REF assessment panels end up clothing the exercise with the very professional legitimacy it lacks — “they know the emperor has no clothes so attempt to kit him out with their own.” The same dynamic applies to collegiality washing. Academics who participate in consultative governance structures lend their credibility to processes that may have little genuine influence on outcomes. And if you draw attention to the gap between form and substance, you are the one creating difficulties.

What makes this so effective is that academics genuinely care about collegiality — the real thing, not the institutional version. I know I do. I genuinely care about our colleagues – those at Reading and outside. As a professional group, we want to be supportive. We believe in shared intellectual endeavour. And it is precisely this commitment that makes the inverted concept so hard to resist. As the CUNY Faculty Senate observed, “imposing ‘collegiality’ as another criterion makes willingness to work with colleagues turn into agreeing with colleagues.” You are not being told to comply. You are being told to be collegial. And it feels churlish to refuse.

I think most about the people Pat and I were most concerned about in that chapter: early career academics. We described the impossible position of senior colleagues who must advise them. If they encourage young researchers to follow the corporate logic — pursue the large grants, choose the safe topics, produce the measurable impact — they compromise the professional ideal of independent inquiry. If they encourage them to follow their intellectual convictions, they may be placing their careers at risk. The expectation of “collegiality” is woven into that socialisation. It is the warm, reasonable-sounding language through which institutional conformity is presented as professional development. Be a good departmental citizen. Be collegial. What this often means, if we are candid, is: learn to accommodate the institution’s requirements quietly, or your prospects here will be limited.

This matters because what is being described is not collegiality. It is, in an important sense, the opposite. Real collegiality — the kind that Weber analysed, that Waters formalised, that Freidson identified as the organising principle of professional life — was a claim against managerial authority. It said: we govern ourselves, because our work requires judgements that only we are competent to make. The version now current in our institutions is a claim for managerial authority, expressed in the language of professional community. It asks academics to be agreeable, to be helpful, to be uncomplaining — and, above all, to be quiet.

I would love it if we could reclaim this word, or at the very least be more precise about what we mean when we use it. Because a term that once described the right of scholars to govern themselves has come to denote the obligation of employees to comply. And unless we can name that transformation clearly, we will find it very difficult to undo.

References

AAUP (1999/2016) ‘On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation’. Policy Documents and Reports. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Carlen, P. and Phoenix, J. (2017) ‘Alternative Criminologies, Academic Markets and Corporatism in Universities’ in P. Carlen (ed.) Alternative Criminologies. London: Routledge.

Fleming, P. and Harley, B. (2023) ‘Collegiality as Control? How Uncounted Work Gets Done in the Neoliberal Business School’. Academy of Management Learning & Education 23(1): 243–262.

Freidson, E. (2001) Professionalism: The Third Logic. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hillyard, P., Sim, J., Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2004) ‘“Leaving a Stain upon the Silence”: Contemporary Criminology and the Politics of Dissent’. British Journal of Criminology 44(3): 369–390.

Jarratt Report (1985) Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. London: Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals.

Sahlin, K., & Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (2016). Collegiality in modern universities – the composition of governance ideals and practices. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2016(2–3). https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v2.33640

Waters, M. (1989) ‘Collegiality, Bureaucratization, and Professionalization: A Weberian Analysis’. American Journal of Sociology 94(5): 945–972.

Weber, M. (1922/1978) Economy and Society, edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[1] Research Excellence Framework defined impact as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.

Ash Regan’s private members bill, the Prostitution (Offences and Support) Bill, goes to a Stage 1 vote in the Scottish Parliament on 3rd February. It comes as no surprise that the same old arguments about decriminalisation and the harms of criminalising the purchase of sex start to circulate in the press. One such example was Kate Lister’s “Today’s sex workers, like their Victorian sisters, don’t want saving”. This is my attempt to debunk a few of the ideas because, on the surface, Lister’s arguments have a certain popular appeal. But, as this blog demonstrates, the arguments are not based in the realities of law making or prostitution.

Kate Lister’s article, “Today’s sex workers, like their Victorian sisters, don’t want ‘saving’”, opens with flourish and certainty. It is rhetorically confident, morally positioned, and politically legible. What it is not, however, is analytically careful. The opening paragraphs present anecdote as evidence, anaolgy stands in for argument, and certainty replaces scrutiny and analysis.

One of the most striking features of Lister’s piece (and, sadly, the evidence she cites) is its reliance on what I would describe as confirmation bias. The article begins with a set of claims that are already ideologically settled — sex workers do not want intervention; legal reform which is not full decriminalisation is paternalistic; criminalising the purchase of sex has caused harm — and then selects only those examples of research that confirm that position. It is in her very definitions. Sex work is everything that is not sexual exploitation — as though the sex industry is neatly and clearly bifurcated.

Leaving the myth of good and bad prostitution to one side, there is a problem that Lister - as someone who has done research on the history of prostitution - never acknowledges. It is a problem endemic to prostitution research. Researchers tend to conduct research which confirms their pre-given ideological position. It is inherent in prostitution research because all research starts with definitions. Someone who believes that sex work is different from sexual exploitation will define what they are studying as any form of commercial exchanges of sex for money that does not involve exploitation. They will then design a piece of research that can only ever end up confirming that ‘the real problem’ of prostitution policy is that it is not treated as legitimate work, with all that means.

Let me put it extremely blunt: the research that Lister cites is tainted and far from ‘objective’. In this sphere of research, many academics have an axe to grind. The claims of the harms of the Nordic model have not been proven. Apart from anything else, it is assumes that any changes to the experiences that women in prostitution have were a simple cause and effect result of criminalising the purchase of sex.

But, back to Lister. What is absent in this short piece is any sustained engagement with counter-evidence, structural constraint, or law. Women ought to be given choice to engage in sex work and criminalisation of any aspect of sex work is harmful. Full stop.

Let me be clear: I am not disputing what she says about how some women working in the sex industry do, indeed, articulate their experiences in terms of choice, autonomy, or resistance to intervention. Of course they do. What makes her claim problematic and rhetorical is the leap from some voices in some locations to a general claim about sex work as such, and the further leap from that claim to the assertion that any form of criminalisation of any aspect of prostitution is therefore illegitimate. That is not careful. It is selective listening and biased argument.

Plus, making law does not work like this.

We do not draw the line between the lawful and the unlawful “in consultation” with those affected in the way Lister’s argument implies. If we did, most criminal law would collapse overnight. I sometimes call this the “turkeys should be consulted about Christmas dinner” fallacy: the idea that the legitimacy of law rests on the consent of those whose conduct is being regulated. That is not how law functions, nor how it ever functioned.

The real question to me is not whether those currently selling sex want the law to change, but why the law looks the way it does, whose interests it has historically served, and who has borne the burden of its enforcement.

Our current prostitution-related legal framework in England and Wales is rooted in the Wolfenden Report (1957) — the same report often celebrated, rightly, for recommending the decriminalisation of sex between men. Wolfenden famously drew a distinction between law and morality, arguing that there must remain “a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.”

Prostitution, the Committee decided, fell into this category — unless it was visible.

This is the origin of the profound asymmetry that continues to shape prostitution policing today. Prostitution was treated as a matter of private immorality, not criminality, unless it occurred in public space. The legal response, therefore, focused not on the purchasers of sex but on the women whose presence made prostitution visible. Soliciting offences were justified not to protect women, but to manage “public nuisance” and prevent offence to “decent ordinary people.”

The result was predictable and enduring: a legal regime in which the burden of policing fell overwhelmingly on women selling sex, not on the men buying it; where harm was rendered secondary to visibility; and where women’s exposure to criminalisation, surveillance, and stigma was structurally embedded.

This history matters. Yet today’s sex work is work and the Nordic model will cause harm campaigners barely acknowledge the legacy of history.

Instead, we are offered a narrative in which contemporary law is implicitly framed as the product of moral panic or feminist overreach, rather than the legacy of a legal framework that has always prioritised public order over women’s safety. The irony is stark.

To drive the point home further, it is quoting what Wolfenden said about women in prostitution. While the report is rightly lauded for its role in decriminalising sex between males, its treatment of prostitution was, quite frankly, atrocious and blinkered in failing to acknowledge the realities of poverty and male violence.

It would have taken us beyond our terms of reference to investigate in detail the prevalence of prostitution or the reasons which lead women to adopt this manner of life. On the former point we have something to say below in connection with street offences. On the latter point we believe that whatever may have been the case in the past, in these days, in this country at any rate, economic factors cannot account for it to any large or decisive extent. Economic pressure is no doubt a factor in some individual cases. So in others, is a bad upbringing, seduction at an early age, or a broken marriage. But many women surmount such disasters without turning to a life of prostitution. It seems to us more likely that these are precipitating factors rather than determining causes, and that there must be some additional psychological element in the personality of the individual woman who becomes a prostitute. Our impression is that the great majority of prostitutes are women whose psychological makeup is such that they choose this life because they find in it a style of living which is to them easier, freer and more profitable than would be provided by any other occupation. As one of our women witnesses put it—

In short, Wolfenden never took account of sexual exploitation.

The report went on to quote the place of law when dealing with prostitution:

“As a general proposition it will be universally accepted that the law is not concerned with private morals or with ethical sanctions. On the other hand, the law is plainly concerned with the outward conduct of citizens in so far as that conduct injuriously affects the rights of other citizens. Certain forms of conduct it has always been thought right to bring within the scope of the criminal law on account of the injury which they occasioned to the public in general. It is within this category of offences if anywhere that public solicitation for immoral purposes finds an appropriate place.”

And with that, Wolfenden created the legacy of policing we are still dealing with. Women were positioned as sources of disorder rather than as subjects of harm; male demand was taken as a given; exploitation not meaningfully acknowledged.

Against this backdrop, to dismiss calls to criminalise the purchase of sex and support women out of prostitution — including proposals such as Ash Regan’s private member’s bill — as merely another form of moral rescue is historically and analytically lazy.

The purpose of law is to mark the line between what is considered acceptable to a society and what is not. This brings me back to confirmation bias.

Lister’s article repeatedly collapses autonomy and choice into absence of harm. If a woman says she does not want saving, the conclusion drawn is that saving is unnecessary. But decades of research on prostitution — including my own — show that women’s accounts of choice coexist with coercion, constraint, violence, and survival strategies. These are not contradictions; they are social realities produced under conditions of inequality.

To foreground ‘autonomy’ and invoke research that starts from an a priori position that sex work is work while backgrounding law, policing, and male violence is not neutral. It is a deeply political move.

What is missing from Lister’s account is precisely what matters most: how law structures risk; how policing practices shape women’s options; how criminalisation continues to fall on sellers (women) rather than buyers; and how violence persists despite decades of supposed tolerance and reform of law. None of this is engaged with. Instead, opposition is reduced to a straw feminist rescuer, and history is drafted as a rhetorical ally.

It is advocacy dressed as analysis.

I changed my own position on the criminalisation of the purchase of sex not because of ideology, but because the evidence forced me to. After decades of legal reform from the 1990s onwards that left the basic structure intact, the harms did not diminish. Violence did not recede. Exploitation did not disappear. At some point, intellectual honesty requires us to ask whether the framework itself is part of the problem.

This is the conversation we should be having.

I hope that MSPs move beyond a superficial reading of ‘evidence’, see the research that is claimed to show that criminalisation harms women in prostitution for what it is: advocacy dressed up evidence.

Today, January 22, marks the two-year anniversary of my employment tribunal judgment against the Open University. For me, it marked the turning point of my life. A struggle I had been involved in for nearly five years had come to an end. I had risked everything — my job, my reputation, my financial stability and security, my mental health — to establish three things in a court of law.

First, that it is not transphobic to ask how, when, and where sex might matter more than gender identity in social and political life. Second, that it is unlawful to make vexatious accusations of transphobia against academics pursuing that line of research. Thirdly, it is unlawful for university managers to do nothing about harassment, discrimination, and victimisation on the basis of gender-critical beliefs.

Two years on, these principles are not merely established; they are settled. The Supreme Court decision in For Women Scotland v Scottish Government is decisive. Within the Equality Act 2010, sex means biology. For those naysayers who claim the ruling is confusing or limited, I say: you are wrong. The law is clear. Sex in equality legislation refers to sex. Gender-critical beliefs are protected. Women’s entitlement to single-sex services and spaces is not contingent on discretion or goodwill; it is a matter of law.

It is worth remembering that I was part of that first flush of employment tribunals where women lost their jobs for saying more or less exactly what the Supreme Court said - Maya Forstater, Alison Bailey, Rachel Meade, Lizzy Pitts, Roz Adams — and myself. We were discriminated and/or lost our jobs for stating that sex is biological and not to be confused with gender identity, for pointing out that men who identify as women have not, and cannot change sex, and for questioning Stonewall’s diktats on the matter.

Fast forward nearly precisely two years and the following paragraph appears in an employment tribunal judgment of the Darlington Nurses v County Durham and Darlington NHS:

The idea that anything ‘gender critical’ can or ought to be dismissed because it is gender critical is no longer a viable argument. The bubble has burst. The fact that the judge went on to accept, in its entirety, my evidence of the group disadvantage experienced by women by the presence of a biological male who identifies as a woman is also evidence of the distance we have travelled in two years.

What is clear is that the first flush of cases is over. The newer employment tribunals (like Sandie Peggie’s, like the Darlington Nurses) are no longer about whether gender-critical beliefs are protected. They concern something more substantive: the slow, painful unwinding of the effects of organisational implementation of Stonewall law.

What is most revealing, however, is what has not followed my tribunal.

If legal clarity automatically translated into institutional change, conflict should have diminished. Instead, we continue to see high-profile disputes across healthcare, education, and public services. Nurses disciplined for objecting to mixed-sex changing facilities. Professionals sanctioned for refusing to deny biological reality. Employers defending policies that place women in legally untenable positions. Questionable ethics of puberty blocker drug trials. Prison placement policies.

These cases and conflicts are not anomalies. They are diagnostic.

They show that the problem is no longer legal uncertainty. It is institutional resistance.

One consequence of this resistance has been the increasing reliance on litigation as a means of correction. Women are repeatedly forced into employment tribunals and courts to compel organisations to do what the law already requires. This has produced legal victories — but it has also produced a new and troubling pattern of harm.

In tribunal after tribunal, women are required to disclose deeply personal experiences: workplace bullying, psychological distress, harassment, prior experiences of sexual or physical or emotional abuse at the hands of men. Remote hearings, introduced under the banner of accessibility and so critical important in bringing into the light the ridiculous arguments put forward defending discrimination, have widened exposure of those women’s lives. What was once confined to a courtroom is now observed by audiences far beyond the immediate parties.

Women find themselves narrating the most intimate and often traumatic aspects of their lives to unseen observers — commentators, supporters, critics — subject not only to legal judgment, but moral and political judgment too. Even where outcomes are favourable, the process itself can be punitive if only because privacy is eroded. Dignity is compromised. The costs are unevenly distributed, and they are overwhelmingly borne by women.

This raises a serious question about strategy.

Litigation has been necessary, but it is not sustainable as the primary mechanism for institutional change. It never was and it never will be. Lawfare clarifies rights, but it cannot reform organisational cultures ideologically invested in misinterpreting or resisting the law. Nor should women be required, again and again, to sacrifice privacy and wellbeing to secure compliance with settled legal principles.

The failure of government to issue timely EHRC Code of Practice has made this worse. In the vacuum, organisations invent their own interpretations — often shaped more by reputational anxiety or activist pressure than by law. Some even boast of their refusal to implement sex-based equality. We need our elected government to act and to act now - they need to defend the law.

Meanwhile, misinformation continues to circulate unchecked: from training “experts” who misrepresent the Equality Act, from managers claiming nothing can change until the EHRC acts, from claims that single-sex provision harms transgender people — claims unsupported by evidence and incompatible with law. These assertions function rhetorically, shifting attention away from women’s rights and reframing lawful boundaries as moral failings.

Since January 22, 2024, something else has changed.

The so-called “gender wars” are no longer niche. They are no longer confined to specialist circles. They are now recognised as everyday governance questions.

This mainstreaming matters. Not because it resolves disagreement, but because it reframes the issue. What we are witnessing is not a culture war. It is a systemic failure across institutions to reason clearly, to set boundaries, and to apply the law under pressure.

Seen this way, employment tribunals are not the cause of the conflict; they are its by-product.

My case, and those that followed, reveal something fundamental about this moment: when organisations lose the capacity to distinguish belief from misconduct, law from policy, compassion from coercion, the burden of correction falls on individuals — and disproportionately on women.

That burden cannot remain where it is.

The law is settled. The question now is whether our institutions are willing — or able — to act accordingly.

We have arrived. The question is whether the structures around us are prepared to catch up.

I was online giving evidence to the same committee and heard these words from Dr Sandy. I wish I could say I was floored, shocked, appalled. Sadly I was not because the argument that ‘the real problem’ of prostitution is the stigma that women in prostitution endure and that sex worker is an identity worthy of equality law protection has been circulating for nearly 10 years. The argument reveals a profound misunderstanding of both equality law as well as the nature of prostitution itself. More than that, it contains one of the most anti-feminist propositions I have encountered in decades of research.

The Legal Illiteracy

The Equality Act 2010 protects nine characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. What unites these characteristics is clear: they describe aspects of who someone is, not what someone does.

“Sex worker” is not a personal attribute. It is a descriptor of someone involved in a particular type of economic activity – the commercial exchange of sex (or sexual services) for money. We do not have “teachers,” “doctors,” or “construction workers” as protected characteristics, because what someone does for money is not a protected characteristic. The legal architecture of equality law simply cannot accommodate economic activity.

To say that someone has a protected characteristic is to say that they possess an objective attribute which does not change. We all have a sex, a race, an age and we cannot change these. It is the fact that we cannot change them that provides the basis of our protection by the Equality Act 2010.

The Anti-Feminist Horror at the Heart of This Proposal

But there is something far more insidious lurking within this suggestion. For “sex worker” to function as a protected characteristic within the Equality Act framework, it would have to operate like the other protected characteristics. It would have to be treated as an inherent, fundamental aspect of a person—something someone is rather than something someone does.

This means the proposal implicitly concedes that some women are inherently sex workers. That prostitution is a personal attribute, a fixed characteristic, an essential part of who they are.

This is a resurrection of the oldest, most pernicious anti-feminist ideology about prostitution: that there exists a class of women who are essentially, by nature, prostitutes. That some women simply are “public women,” “fallen women,” “that kind of woman.”

Feminists spent decades fighting this ideology. We argued that prostitution is not a destiny, not an identity, not an essential characteristic of certain women. We insisted that it is shaped by material conditions—poverty, male violence, lack of alternatives, sex and gender based inequality. We demonstrated that women enter and exit prostitution based on circumstances, not nature. We rejected the Victorian notion of the prostitute as a permanent, fixed category of woman.

The protected characteristic proposal asks us to abandon all of this and accept that for some women, being a “sex worker” is as fundamental and immutable as their sex or race. It is one of the most anti-feminist lines of reasoning I have ever encountered.

The Neoliberal Ideology Problem

This essentialism serves a particular political purpose. As I critiqued in Ronald Weitser’s proposals for destigmatising prostitution, treating “sex worker” as a neutral identity category represents “a defence of neo-liberal economic policy on prostitution”—an approach “in which ‘market forces’ become the ultimate regulator of sex work.”

Such approaches treat stigma as if it exists independently of the sexed and gendered, classed, and raced material inequalities that produce and sustain prostitution. They privilege occupational identity over material inequality. Even within its own logic, consider this absurdity: are we to believe that a white university-educated woman selling sex via the internet to business elites and a 16-year-old runaway homeless Black girl selling sex on the streets share some fundamental characteristic that defines who they are?

These women are fundamentally differently socially located. Their capacity to control their working environment, their experiences of safety and violence, are shaped by economic, cultural, and sex and gender-based inequalities—not by some shared essential identity. As I wrote elsewhere, “it is too simplistic to claim that shared occupational status” is “politically and analytically more significant than their differences.”

Who Benefits?

We must ask: who actually benefits from treating prostitution as an essential identity deserving of legal protection? As I have argued, “it is not the women who sell sex, or even necessarily the men who purchase it that will benefit. It will be those individuals and corporations who own and control the industry—like any other capitalist industry.”

If “sex worker” is a protected characteristic—an essential identity rather than an activity shaped by material conditions—then we cannot simultaneously recognise prostitution as exploitation, as violence, or as a harm we should aim to reduce. We lock ourselves into accepting the sex trade as a legitimate industry built around a permanent class of women who are essentially “sex workers.”

The Children We Forget

The protected characteristic proposal forces an impossible question: at what point does someone become essentially a sex worker? Many women currently in prostitution entered as girls—groomed, exploited, criminalised.

If “sex worker” is a protected characteristic—an essential aspect of identity—does a 15-year-old girl being prostituted possess this characteristic? Is this who she inherently is? Of course not. We recognise she is a victim of exploitation.

But if we reject this for children while accepting it for adults, we create an arbitrary line that obscures the continuum of exploitation and circumstance. We suggest that at 18, what was exploitation becomes identity. What was done to a girl becomes what a woman essentially is.

This reveals the fundamental problem: treating prostitution as a protected characteristic requires us to accept an essentialist view that feminists have fought against for generations.

What’s Actually Needed

Protected characteristic status would not help those in prostitution access what they need: housing, exit services, drug treatment, protection from violence. These require investment in social infrastructure, not legal categories that enshrine prostitution as essential identity.

What protected characteristic status would achieve is normalisation of the sex trade as an industry built around a class of women who are inherently “sex workers.” Legal categories shape social understandings. If we accept in law that some women essentially are sex workers, we abandon the feminist insight that prostitution is something that happens to women because of material circumstances, not something they inherently are.

Conclusion

After thirty years researching prostitution, I know this: women in prostitution need protection from violence, pathways out of poverty, and a legal framework that recognises their exploitation rather than entrenching it. They do not need legal categories that treat prostitution as an essential aspect of who they are.

Women are not inherently sex workers. Prostitution is not a personal attribute. And any proposal that requires us to accept otherwise is not just legally illiterate—it is one of the most anti-feminist lines of reasoning I have encountered in my career.

The fact that this argument was made to the Scottish Parliament tells us something important about how far academic discourse has drifted from feminist analysis. It represents the kind of approach that mistakes neoliberal identity politics for liberation and essentialism for progressivism.

I opposed criminalising buyers because more urgent problems demanded action. But I have changed my mind. Despite major legal and policing reforms over the last 15 years, some of the most intractable harms of prostitution and male violence remain unaddressed. Having studied the Bill and the evidence base, I now think its implementation could make things a little better for women caught up in prostitution.

Solving ‘the problems’ of prostitution

All law reform claims to solve a problem. With prostitution, we must ask: what problem, exactly, and how does it fit the realities on the ground? Until the early 2000s, England, Wales and Scotland treated prostitution as a problem of public nuisance. This was established in the Wolfenden Report (the same report that decriminalised homosexual sex between men). At its time this was a landmark report. It said that where prostitution and homosexual sex between men were concerned, the law ought not meddle in matters of private morality. It ought only set limits when private morality creates problems of public nuisance. Wolfenden and his colleagues thus thought that prostitution was ‘just’ a moral question, except where it caused public nuisance.

What this meant in practice was that the police sought only to police the visibility of prostitution – or rather the visibility of women in prostitution.

Policing public nuisance

I started doing research into prostitution in the mid 1990s. Back then it was largely a local “cottage industry”. Women worked from the streets, in saunas and in brothels. Local gangsters and drug dealers controlled many of the street working women and brothel or sauna owners set the economic terms which controlled how much money a woman working within those locations could make. Indoor work was arranged through contact magazines or public phone booth small card ads. Most cities had a red-light district and a vice squad; brothels, massage parlours and saunas formed the indoor scene; escorting was limited. Voluntary support was thin. So in 1993, in Birmingham a local convent offered women support, a sexual health outreach agency used a van to hand out condoms to street working women and occasionally advice (and they made the odd referral), and a probation-run day centre ran a diversion scheme for women criminalised for soliciting or loitering. That was it.

In the summer of 1994, I spent time shadowing the sexual health outreach team in Birmingham and sat in probation run drop-in centre. I met many women and girls. Even those who called prostitution “work” or an alternative to theft, robbery or burglary also described male violence—from families, boyfriends or pimps, punters, and sometimes the police. ‘Consent’ talk felt beside the point then, as now. Choices were made under the force of necessity. Some of the stories of male violence were extreme—kidnapping and days-long assaults, beatings, gang rape, and total financial control. I cannot recall one woman that I met that summer who did not have a history of physical, sexual or emotional violence by men. For some women, escaping a violent man was often a push into prostitution (remember, back then there were very few refuges and no real statutory or third sector violence against women services). For others, male violence was just part and parcel of what happened in prostitution – an occupational hazard. For others still, violence marked their personal relationships. I remain unconvinced that much as changed.

Under-protected and over-policed

The policing asymmetry was stark. Women were arrested for prostitution offences; the men who raped, abused, controlled and profited from them were rarely pursued. In the mid-90s there were nearly 10,000 convictions for soliciting/loitering but only a few hundred for “living off immoral earnings.” The problem was obvious: women and girls were over-policed and under-protected. We already had laws against kidnap, rape, violence and pimping, but they were not enforced for these victims, who seldom reported for fear of being treated as offenders.

Hence, when the Nordic model was first introduced in Sweden in 1999, I did not have much time for it. What good would it be to just expand police’s attention from the women to those purchasing sex? How would that address the poverty, the complex social and welfare problems the women had or the male violence they experienced? We needed police and court enforcement against male violence. We needed real protection for the women and girls. We needed services for the trauma women and girls endure and for the addictions that are so common amongst women in prostitution. We needed government action on poverty and the homelessness that funnel women into prostitution. Most of all, we needed to stop criminalising the women and to consistently police and deal with the men who make women’s lives in prostitution a misery. Criminalising clients didn’t seem to touch those deeper problems.

Shifting definitions of ‘the problems’ of prostitution

Everything changed in the early 2000s. In less than a decade 15 changes of law or policy took place – all of them to address violence and exploitation experienced by women and girls in prostitution and set limits to the circumstances in which a person could consent to their involvement in prostitution. Prior to 2000, girls could be arrested for soliciting and loitering for prostitution even though they were under the age of sexual consent. But that year the Department of Health and Home Office issued guidance that said that any girl under the age of 18 years old should not be treated (in the first instance) as an offender. Instead they should be treated as a victim of sexual abuse. Other laws followed which focused on making unlawful other forms of commercial sexual exploitation and other forms of prostitution that were intimately intertwined with exploitation (such as human trafficking). Support for women who experienced violence from clients was put on a formal and official setting when, in 2012, the Home Office and police funded the National Ugly Mugs Scheme which when it was first set up allowed women to report violent punters and become aware of violent punters in their locality. Within a few years after that, new Crown Prosecution Service guidelines were established to deal with commercial exploitation of both women and girls and finally the law changed such that no girl under the age of 18 years could be prosecuted for a prostitution related offence.

This policy revolution had two effects. First, arrests and convictions of women for soliciting/loitering fell sharply in England and Wales. The old revolving door—arrest, fine, unpaid fine, custody, back to the street—that characterised the life of so many women in prostitution in earlier decades was effectively closed. In truth the criminalisation of street working women had already begun to decline by the mid 90s. Elsewhere I argued that this was a result of the mushrooming of sexual health outreach projects that followed in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Table 1: Numbers of records of soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution (adapted from Ministry of Justice figures)

NB: 1985 – 2003 figures refer to convictions for soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution. 2004 onwards are police recorded figures.

Second, “support” often meant little more than referrals to mainstream services. With no statutory duty on local authorities to support women in prostitution, most women still couldn’t access the money, housing, or protection they needed. Sexual health harm-minimisation projects helped many women, but such projects cannot tackle women’s poverty, endemic male violence, or homelessness—nor could they keep up with the rapidly changing forms of prostitution that started to emerge in the 2010s.

By the early 2010s prostitution transformed. A local “cottage industry” became a globalised market. Street work dwindled; indoor work expanded. Contact mags and phone-box cards gave way to internet platforms. The street pimp was replaced by quasi-legitimate, profit-driven third parties, often linked to organised crime. ‘The prostitution market’ globalised, organised and ‘professionalised’ into the multiple billion dollar a year global industry that it is nowadays. We can see this shift in other police recorded offences. There was a dramatic decline in police recorded crime for soliciting or loitering and a concomitant increase in the numbers of police recorded figures for modern slavery.

Table 2: Police recorded figures for the key prostitution-related offence, adapted from Ministry of Justice figures.

What does this mean for Regan’s Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill?

First, de facto, we’ve already decriminalised selling sex while criminalising modern slavery. Women are no longer routinely arrested—whether because the street scene shrank or because forces now divert women into services. Second, we’re only beginning to police child sexual exploitation actively. And despite the very high profile attention that grooming gangs has received recently, there is evidence that policing efforts are improving. Third, policing attention to exploitation of adult prostitution remain stubbornly low. Either such exploitation is rare (highly unlikely), the police are looking away (likely), or such exploitation is now normalised as “business practice” in the globalised prostitution market (most likely). In short, after nearly two decades, enforcement and protection of women in prostitution still lags despite a plethora of very good laws and policies.

Has England and Wales’ informal decriminalisation made women safer?

No. Women First found only 18% of local authorities commission any service for women in the sex trade. Where services exist, they resemble the late-1990s mix: charities, sexual health outreach, addiction services, and the occasional dedicated project. Women in prostitution remain at extreme risk of violence; centuries of research—and today’s homicide disparities—bear that out. The idea that simply stopping arrests delivers a safe, “sex-positive” sexual marketplace is delusional. When did the invisible hand of ‘the market’ ever curb male violence or address exploitative business practices? Those who argue for decriminalisation and those sex-positive proponents of ‘sex work’ also say that to treat ‘sex work’ as ordinary work requires also destigmatizing it as well as stopping the arrests. In fact, one of the acdemics giving evidence on 29th October made the case that decriminalisation works best when ‘sex worker’ is included as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010 (less said about the legal illiteracy of this suggestion then better). What is clear is that if prostitution was to be brought truly into employment laws, the health and safety requirements typical of other hands-on kinds of employment would make it unattractive to many buyers. And if it is not to be brought within employment law, then it would become the wild west of employment practices where anything goes. For me, this is a dystopian vision of neo-liberal market forces regulating the sale and purchase of sex. It is not one I have ever supported or could support.

What’s wrong with a twin-track approach to policing prostitution?

The legacy of the drive to reform prostitution policy to make violence and exploitation in prostitution unlawful has created a ‘twin track’ approach to policing prostitution. Police attention and energy is spent on policing the exploitative and violent end of the market. This has created an intractable problem at the heart of how we deal with the problems of prostitution. In order to prove that the women in a brothel that the police have just raided are, in fact, victims of human trafficking or are, in fact, being exploited, the police have to collect evidence from the women. It means that policing attention is necessarily forced on to the women. It also means that all the same old problems with establishing whether each individual woman consented to what happened to her emerge. And what we know from 50+ years of feminist research on sexual exploitation and sexual violence is that we have yet to rid ourselves of the sexist stereotypes that shape how ‘consent’ is made sense of within the criminal justice system.

It is my belief that because we do have a half decent legal framework that addresses exploitation and violence in prostitution, if we then also criminalise the purchase of sex we may well address the problems of having a twin track approach to policing prostitution. Please note that Regan’s private member’s bill decriminalises soliciting and loitering.

Many researchers and activists who support fully decriminalising prostitution (i.e. removing all the current laws which make it illegal to own or run a brothel, to solicit or loiter in a public place for prostitution and so on) will tell you that criminalising the purchase of sex will have the following effects. Police will try to ‘get to’ the purchasers via the women and thus women will remain the target of police attention. It will drive prostitution underground as purchasers try to evade police attention. I’m not convinced. I remember these arguments being made in Sweden in the early 2000s. I also remember how unevidenced they were.

One final note on policing: as Table 1 above shows, we have a crisis in the policing of prostitution related crimes against women and girls. This is a crisis driven, in my opinion, by the reforms of 20 years ago that emphasized the distinctions between voluntary prostitution and forced prostitution, retained the criminal justice measures against women whilst also paying lip service to addressing the crimes committed against women. I know from my own research into child sexual exploitation that early attempts to treat girls in prostitution as victims of sexual exploitation fell flat because police officers and others focused on the conditions in which the girls were being prostituted rather than the activities of the men. The inability of the police to consistently deal with all girls as victims and all punters as criminals arguably was the precondition for the grooming gang scandals that we are dealing with at the moment. It is my opinion that criminalising the purchase of sex will give police absolute clarity when policing prostitution. All sellers of sex – regardless of their circumstances are not offenders. All purchasers are. It is a simple framework legal framework that may well help the police do their jobs.

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So yes, I support Ash Regan’s Bill. I support it because it puts support for women in prostitution on a statutory footing. I would like to see it located within a local authority’s violence-against-women strategy. Let’s criminalise the purchase of sex to shift policing attention away from the women to the men who create the market and the men who make women in prostitution’s lives a misery.

We tried just criminalising the really problematic end of prostitution. Look where it led: grooming-gang scandals, Jeffrey Epstein, and countless women living with the trauma that money-for-sex brings. We stopped arresting women in prostitution —but we didn’t guarantee support or send a national message that women are worth more than a few quid for a stranger’s gratification. Isn’t it about time we do something more?

Perhaps I am wrong? Maybe some people in some universities do have the time to compile dossiers like this one.

For the Sherlock Holmes out there - you will have to read through the witness statements (uploaded on my substack) to see who mentioned a near 250 page document in their statement. Hint…. it’s a short statement and it is referenced in the final sentence.

The Dossier

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This got me thinking about what happened to me at Essex University - the first of my cancellations and the one that was used as evidence to justify my other cancellations. It got me thinking about the events back in December 2019 - some of which I knew about in real time, others I found out about later. I know I gave many interviews at the time of the publication of the Reindorf Review. I thought however, just as a measure of how far the sector has moved (largely as a result of the struggles of gender critical feminists, I think) it would be timely to put up here my story in the Reindorf Review. This was refered to in my witness statement in my case against The Open University as well as at various points in the cross examination of witnesses like my former Head of School (now Professor) Deb Drake. So here it is. I have only extracted the sections that are my story. The rest of the Reindorf Review can be found here. Meanwhile here is the summary of my story back in December 2019 as retold through the eyes of Akua Reindorf KC. I invite you think about whether this could happen now.

Reindorf Review My Story

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There is also further information if you follow @marziababakarkh on X and #Afgfemalejudges. The point of the campaign is to raise awareness to the need to resettle Afghan Female Judges. Marzia herself was a family court judge in Afghanistan and survived the Taliban’s assassination attempts before seeking refuge in the UK. I will put more links to the campaign and to Marzia’s work once FiLia is finished. I will also link to the video of the panel)

“Since the Taliban returned to power women been systematically excluded from public life. Their policies have stripped women of fundamental rights - banning them from employment, education and restricting their movement.

Female judges, who upheld the law and defended the rights of others, are being especially persecuted by the Taliban. Some have been resettled overseas but many remain trapped and are living in hiding - in fear for their lives.

We call upon the UK government, the European Union, and the international community to take immediate action to establish safe pathways out of Afghanistan and resettlement programs for the Afghan women judges.”

Unofficial VC diary – week 3, July 2025

It’s been a busy time since I took up my VC ship at University of Lezzerton just over two weeks ago. I am slightly regretting taking up the post. I knew that the University was suffering from the same problems as other universities. The day to day workplace culture is riven with what was once called ‘culture wars’ and activism and illogicality have taken the place of rigour and robustness in research, teaching and thinking. I am worried that the Medical School teaches that sex is unknowable without testing one’s chromosomes – but that is a problem for another day. I promised Council that I would turn the culture around. But my goodness I did not fully understand just how hard that job might be.

As I arrived, the Dogs Appreciation Staff Network was up in arms. Apparently, the Cat Lovers Staff Network organised a panel discussion about the implications of the recent Supreme Court ruling that dogs and cats are, and always have been, different species. As if this was not bad enough they did it during animal awareness month. I received several open letters accusing the university of supporting specism. One went as far as to say that we supported segregationism and animal apartheid. They said that they would organise a strike if the University of Lezzerton decreed that the cat litter trays dotted around the university were for cats only. Did I not realise, they asked, that by stopping dogs from using litter trays designed for cats, there would be increased mental health problems for the dog population? After all, no one had banned them from using the litter trays for many years now and no cats ever complained.

Plus, it was clearly an act of harassment against the Dogs Appreciation Staff Network to allow the panel discussion to go ahead during a month designated as appreciating *all* animals and not just cats.

The entire kerfuffle consumed almost every email I read over the last two weeks. Meanwhile, all I really wanted to do was get on with the actual job of being a VC. I wanted to have meetings to discuss strategy and what to do about the impending financial disaster we are facing. But no. Two weeks were given over to dealing with the Dogs Appreciation Staff Network and their upset and distress.

At first I thought the best approach would be to simply ignore the open letters. But I was informed that doing so would cause further distress and upset. Okay, I said. How about this? Let’s write a statement, put it on the university server that says this:

“To those who expressed distress at the Supreme Court ruling we will be running workshops on dealing with the fact that the law is the law and that regardless of your upset and distress, it is the law of the land.”

I was told this was insensitive. I was told I needed to be more conciliatory. After all it was the fault of the management that the University of Lezzerton let them think litter trays were open access to all animals.

So I suggested another statement:

“Dear Dogs Appreciation Staff Network. We hear you and see you but the law is the law.”

Again I got told this was not sensitive enough.

By the end of the first week, I was beginning to think that being a VC might not play to my skill set. I delegated the task.

During the course of the second week, a response statement was drafted (52 paragraphs long, offering advice on how to deal with distress) and the Dogs Appreciation Staff Network is being reformed as an ‘all animal’ staff network for those who believe that the idea of species is a social and political construct.

And, you can imagine the reaction. The Cat Lovers Staff Network are up in arms because they suspect that the only purpose of the all animals staff network is to harass the Cat Lovers Staff Network. I think they may well be right.

Next hurdle to overcome? Breaking the bad news to the executive that the only real solution for the dogs and cats problem is to abolish staff networks as anything other than social clubs. Then, breaking the bad news to the legal team that Google is not the best source of legal advice on equality policies.

On Wednesday 25^th June 2025, I was scheduled to speak at UCL alongside Naomi Cunningham and Julie Bindel as part of the Pride Month celebrations. The topic? The FWS Supreme Court ruling and its implications for lesbians.

I set myself the following question: what would an employer, say a hypothetical university called the University of Lezzerton, do differently if it was fully FWS compliant in relation to sexual orientation?

My answer: The first thing it would do would be to dismantle the LGBTQI+ staff networks and any women’s network that permitted men to identify into the category women and rebrand them as belief networks. In a radical move it might merge these two networks under the umbrella of gender identity and the belief that identity is more relevant than sex.

If it had the appetite, it might go one step further. It might set up a lesbian network, a gay network and a bisexual network, each of which could be allied to the other – after all lesbians have as much in common with gay men as they have with giraffes – despite the occasional strategic alliance formed by gay men and lesbians over the decades. Or, to make life easier for itself, the University of Lezzerton might just establish a Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN) and deal with all sex-based rights in one staff network.

Let’s go further and imagine that my hypothetical FWS compliant university was also enthusiastic to implement its statutory duty to take active measures to promote freedom of speech and academic freedom – recently clearly defined in the new Office for Students guidance.

The University of Lezzerton would probably structurally realign the staff networks by severing the ties between the top table of decision making and any LGBQIATTTT++ staff network. These networks have spent years compelling others to believe that people can change sex, driving policies based on that belief and decrying those of us who challenge this belief as harmful to trans people and ipso facto transphobic.

What would this ‘realignment’ look like? There would be no LGBQIALLYTTTTTT+ ‘champion’ sitting on the University of Lezzerton executive board. Belief networks, especially ones engaged in proselytizing and compelling belief have no place anywhere near a university executive decision making board.

I imagine a very enthusiastic VC of the University of Lezzerton might even go so far as to stop the constant pride parade, get rid of its LGBSQUATTTTTTTT+ (yes I am getting the acronym wrong on purpose) lanyards of support, discourage staff from putting icons or signage declaring their allyship for gender identity beliefs (or for that matter any and all religious and philosophical beliefs) and maintain a position of absolute institutional neutrality towards all protected characteristics.

In the University of Lezzerton, my sexuality, as well as that of my colleagues, and their gender identities would be utterly irrelevant to everyday conduct, administration and governance. I, like anyone with any protected characteristic, would be protected from harassment, bullying and discrimination. University of Lezzerton would also collect data via equality monitoring forms. Data is important and University of Lezzerton would follow, strictly, the guidance from the Sullivan Report. Data must measure what it sets out to measure.

Sadly, however, on 25^th June, just after the panel discussion started, a group of trans rights activists who were present in the room did everything in their power to stop the discussion.

There were four interruptions of noise and chaos as a misguided group of young people cavorted around the room running away from security staff and other women trying to eject them. They were blowing whistles, holding up banners, shouting shut this down and other juvenile slogans. This was not theatre and nor was it particularly funny. It was what it was – an aggressive planned action to stop (mostly) women and lesbians talking about their rights.

Fortunately, they failed but they did eat up about 40 minutes of valuable time.

So when my turn came, I decided to cut my talk short so that Julie would have time to do what she does best – engage the audience in the telling of real life stories.

Instead of me doing the talk above, I blathered on about lesbians not being (just or only) the canaries in the coalmine of patriarchy and launched into a ridiculous metaphor about lesbians being like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, on the bridge (there is always a bridge in epic adventures), standing firm, protecting his little band of adventurers, shouting to the pending threat “YOU WILL NOT PASS”. After all, I noted, lesbians are the women who have always said no to men. No to men in our beds. No to men in our spaces. No to men who seek to dominate and control women. No to the men who think they are lesbians or think they are women.

And, last Wednesday night, we said no to the protestors who thought it was appropriate to stop women and lesbians talking about matters of importance to us.

Later that night I afforded myself some more imaginings and promoted myself to VC of the University of Lezzerton – well why not? It’s my fantasy.

I decided I would not fly the university flag half mast on Trans Day of Remembrance for the <checks latest figures> one or possibly two trans people who have been murdered in this country for being trans, ever. Don’t get me wrong, I abhor that anyone at all has been murdered for the simple fact of being trans. But, let’s put things in perspective and proportion. VC Phoenix (that’s me) would fly the flag half mast on International Women’s Day to remember the millions of women over the generations and just in this country who through male violence and aggression have died, been burnt at the stake, tortured, been violated or been driven to such despair by male violence, sex based inequalities and injustice that they have taken their own lives.

And I would make sure that all students had to do in person examinations (to deal with GenAI) and that every Thursday at 16:00 cream teas (with proper clotted cream) would be delivered to every employee by a herd of flying unicorns.

So much has already been written about the deliberations in the Supreme Court on 26^th and 27^th November 2024 that I won’t add to the analysis – see Hannah Barnes especially. My reflection here is driven by my experience of sitting in that court listening, not just as an academic or as a lesbian but as one of the early claimants in the employment tribunal for harassment, bullying or constructive dismissal on grounds of GC/sex realist belief discrimination.

‘The Claimants’ crimes

Before I make my reflection though, let’s remember what each of us said or did that prompted our colleagues to harass or discriminate.

1. Forstater referred to a panel of two men and a male who occasionally identifies as a woman as a manel (all male panel).

2. “Maria” asked for evidence of JK Rowling’s supposed transphobia on a Oxfam staff intranet.

3. Bailey strongly objected to her chambers having any formal association with Stonewall, claiming that Stonewall has been “complicit in supporting a campaign of harassment, intimidation and threats made to anyone who questions its trans self-ID ideology”.

4. Fahmy raised concerns about Arts Councils links with Stonewall and Stonewall’s promotion of self-identity, noting attacks against the organisation LGB Alliance and then challenged when a colleague characterised LGB Alliance as an anti-trans group in an open meeting.

5. Ruth tweeted “I do believe that people should be allowed to wear what they want etc., etc… But what blows my mind is the idea that with a heavy five o’clock shadow, a perm and lippy and a bag with gold chains = woman. While us boring biological women get derided if we have one or two faint chin hairs.”

6. Meade made comments on her private facebook page that supported sex-based rights.

7. Esses raised questions about whether gender affirmative medicine and care was appropriate in relation to safeguarding therapy for children with gender dysphoria.

8. Phoenix said that trans women are not women, later that male bodied people do not get pregnant, challenged Stonewall’s ‘no debate policy’ and its impact on universities and set up a gender critical research network.

9. Adams asked questions about how to deal with a service user asking questions about the sex of her support worker.

10. Pitt challenged the idea of a ‘gender-fluid dog’ in an staff LBGTQI network and disagreed with the inclusion of males who identify as women in women’s sports or female-only spaces.

And our lives were derailed for making these statements.

Sitting in the Supreme Court

As I listened to the KCs for For Women Scotland, Sex Matters and EHRC, I thought, well yes. They were saying pretty much the same things we claimants had said (sometimes even almost word for word). They were expressing the same arguments we claimants made.

Yet no Supreme Court judge or member of the gallery stood up, pointed and yelled “TRANSPHOBE! We are unsafe. You are creating a hostile climate for trans and gender non-binary people. Something must be done to stop you saying these bigoted things!” To my knowledge, no grievances were submitted. No shadowy investigation conducted and as far as I am aware, no one from any of the legal teams are about to be disciplined or sacked for doing their jobs last week.

My point?

Yes the Supreme Court was a surreal experience but what happened there does not reflect the everyday realities for many sex realists/gender critical people who are dealing, daily, with the malign impact of a dominant gender identity affirmative workplace culture. For it is in the nature of a gender identity affirmative workplace culture that expressing the idea that sex is different than gender identity is still considered akin to Naziism, transphobia, hostile to trans people or some other crime of high treason in a progressive world.

When O’Neill finished his barnstorming closing comments for For Women Scotland, the woman in front turned around and looked at me. She had tears in her eyes. I know why. O’Neill gave voice in the highest court of the land to what so many of us have been saying for so long: trans rights do not trump women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.

Yet only hours before I had a text message from a friend who said that she had received her first vexatious complaint at work after she expressed, in a perfectly ordinary way, the idea that sex is one category and gender identity another. The previous day I was texting with a different woman who had just submitted a claim against her employer after she was subjected to a disciplinary process for making comments indicative of supporting campaigns to protect sex-based rights on her private social media account. And yet another woman and I were whatsapping about the progress of her own case.

These texts made me think about the gap that exists between the very important legal proceedings playing out in the Supreme Court and the ongoing injustice women experience in the workplace.

Don’t get me wrong. The FWS v Scottish Government case is extremely important. If we win, the victory will be profound and will have a direct impact on the daily lives of women accessing services and on lesbians who want to have lesbian only space.

But, let’s not get carried away. The mess we are in is not one that will disappear overnight if the judgment goes our way because the mess we are in is far bigger than the law.

We need the culture in our organisations and workplaces to change. We need managers, leaders, politicians to tackle the discrimination and bullying of (mostly) women that has grown and spread like a cancer across almost every employment sector. That this has been done in the name of progress and inclusion is as grotesque as it is a perversion of language.

So yes, like everyone else in the room I felt like scoffing out loud at the absurdity of the Scottish Government’s KC using the Forstater ruling to turn my rights, as a same sex attracted lesbian, from being protected on grounds of sexual orientation to being protected on belief grounds. I was moved to tears by Aiden O’Neill KC’s fabulous lecture about how being a woman means being a person with a legal disability in his opening submissions. He was giving voice to arguments we feminists have been making for many decades. I too was quietly saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ when Ben Cooper addressed head on the question about whether a male with a GRC was a woman and he said no.

It felt like history was being made.

Hopes and Realities

I hope we win. But I fear that there still exists a large contingent of people who see sex realists / gender critical fellow employees as nothing more than jack-booted, racist, trans genocidal maniacs giving voice to a ‘first world’ delusion that sex is binary. After all, from the evidence to date, they give not even one fig about the actual law.

Most of all I hope the FWS judgment will wake up the HR departments up and down the country so that fewer women lose their livelihoods for speaking up for women’s rights.

NB: With thanks to © Marjorie Brunet Plaza for the image used.