Update from Maya
Sex Matters is five years old and this is our 229th weekly memo!
Thank you to everyone who has supported us since we started. It is your donations that make it possible for Sex Matters to do the work it does, and your acts of integrity and defiance that make it worthwhile.
Sex Matters is a small team trying to shift a big system. Working with others, we aim to help you speak up, use the law and take action in your own life, workplace and organisations.
This week in the podcast, Helen and I talk about the genesis of Sex Matters. It was dreamt up on a trip I made to Edinburgh in 2020 with lawyers Anya Palmer and Rebecca Bull, who went on to become two of our trustees. There we met Nicole Jones, who now works as our head of creative and social media (the picture above is from that trip).
We also discuss Sex Matters’ strategy, which I boil down to three areas where we fight back against the capture of institutions by gender ideology – single-sex services, protecting children and fixing the data – and three ways of working – Plan A, Plan B and Plan C.
Plan A is where we started: from my case and what it represented. It shouldn’t take courage to say that sex is real and sex matters. If we can make it safer and easier for people to speak up at work, they will be able to do their jobs with integrity and take back their organisations.
Plan B is to influence laws and policies. Gender ideology has been imposed from the top down, and we need to address its causes at the top by lobbying government and powerful institutions and by bringing legal cases to make the law clear at the highest level.
Plan C is “We’ll see you in court!” This means showing that organisations will be held accountable. We can’t fight every battle in court, but we can pick strategic cases that demonstrate that the law is clear, that everyone has human rights and that organisations should follow the law and risk real costs if they don’t.
The three approaches are interlinked. But we don’t know which one will work in any situation. Last week we heard that the puberty-blockers trial had been halted. We thought this was Plan B and Plan C working: legal pressure and perhaps politicians stepping up.
It turns out it was Plan A: one brave man stood up and did his job. Professor Jacob George, the chief medical officer at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), refused to “live within the lie”. He raised issues about the safety of the trial and asked to reopen discussions with the research team. Retribution was swift. He has been recused from playing any part in overseeing the trial and had his good name besmirched across the media.
I wrote a letter to the MHRA pointing out that this scandal undermines trust in medical regulation in the UK. It is also unlawful, contrary to the MHRA’s legal duty not to discriminate against or harass employees on the basis of belief.
How did Professor George find his courage? I think it is in no small part because, as a professor at the medical school in Dundee, he will have followed the case of Sandie Peggie closely. He is clearly appalled by what it demonstrated: medical professionals willing to claim publicly that they do not understand the basic facts of life and to bully and harass those who do.
Because one brave nurse stood up on Christmas Eve 2023 and said No to a man undressing in the women’s changing room, a brave doctor stood up at the heart of the medical establishment in 2026 and said No to sterilising yet another cohort of gay, confused and troubled young people.
Because I stood up in 2019, both Professor George and Sandie Peggie knew they had protection against belief discrimination.
And because For Women Scotland fought a battle through the courts to establish that sex in the Equality Act really means sex, we all know that the edifice of institutional gender ideology was built on legally faulty foundations.
Because of your support and your acts of integrity and determination we are able to keep going. It may take another five years, or another ten, to get back to organisations routinely recognising and respecting sex-based rights. But no matter how long it takes, I am sure that working together we will get there.
Maya Forstater
A small charity with outsize influence
Sex Matters turns five!
In this week’s podcast Maya and Helen look back at Sex Matters’ origins. They reflect on how much easier it has become to speak out about sex-based rights at work – although shocking cases continue, such as that of Professor Jacob George, who was recused from oversight of the puberty-blocker trial for lawful, factual views on sex and gender identity.
Case briefing updated
Following the judgment in the case of Bethany Hutchison and others v County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, we have updated our case briefing. Updates to other case briefings and briefings on cases we have not yet covered will follow.
In the news
With news space squeezed by world affairs, the top story on our patch this week was the recusal of Professor Jacob George from the puberty-blocker trial after a handful of his posts on X dating from before he joined the MHRA, one of the regulators involved in oversight of medical research, were dredged up to suggest that his “gender-critical” views made him unsuitable to be involved.
A Sunday Times piece on the story by Ben Spencer and Shaun Lintern that made much of Professor George’s posts and which quoted clinicians associated with an unquestioning approach to “gender affirmation” included a short quote from Helen, pointing out that Professor George’s views are mainstream and that there is no reason for him to be recused from assessing the puberty-blocker trial.
Hayley Dixon for The Telegraph broke the news that Maya wrote to the MHRA on behalf of Sex Matters calling on the regulator to reinstate Professor George to his role in the trial.
Sean O’Neil for The Courier covered Sex Matters’ intervention along with the local angle: Professor George had been based at Dundee University.
Maya’s letter was also quoted by Joan Smith in UnHerd, in an article arguing that the real scandal is the witch hunt and overreaction by organisations to the expression of perfectly normal beliefs.
It’s not too late to come to our lobby day
Registration has now closed. While you won’t receive information and briefings if you didn’t sign up before registration closed, you can still attend Parliament on 10th March and lobby your MP. We will be there all afternoon, outside the public entrance to the Houses of Parliament and inside, in Westminster Hall. Anyone can go through security and, once inside, can send a message to their MP asking to meet. There will be volunteers in Westminster Hall to help you do this.
The Westminster Hall debate on the puberty-blockers trial has been moved to 23rd March, so we want people to ask their MPs to attend. Even if you can’t come to Westminster on the 10th, you can email your MP about the debate on the 23rd.
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