Heterosexual LGB Alliance founder resigns after failing to ban trans women from women’s spaces
Ann Sinnott has resigned from her role as director of anti-trans charity LGB Alliance. (AnnMSinnott/twitter)
Former Labour councillor Ann Sinnott has resigned from her role as a director of anti-trans charity the LGB Alliance.
Sinnott, a heterosexual woman who is one of the four founders of LGB Alliance, resigned on the same day that LGBT+ charities united to appeal against the Charity Commission’s decision to register the LGB Alliance as a charity.
Sinnott, 71, quit Cambridge council in 2018 because it brought its policy in line with the Equality Act 2010 to make it clear that trans women should use women’s bathrooms.
Sinnott maintains that trans women, with or without legal gender recognition, should always be excluded from women’s single-sex spaces.
In May 2021, she was refused permission to bring a judicial review against the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) guidance for service providers on interpreting the Equality Act, which says that trans people can only be excluded from single-sex spaces if it’s a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
Sinnott argued that this guidance is wrong and that – because it is her view that trans women are “men” – any women’s space with trans women in it is “mixed sex”.
Mr Justice Henshaw, sitting in London’s High Court, said Sinnott’s case was “unarguable” and that its interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 is “wrong in law”. She had crowdfunded £97,000 to pay the legal costs.
On 2 June, Companies House shows that Sinnott resigned as director of the LGB Alliance.
That day, LGB Alliance also announced five new trustees on Twitter, although none of the five are yet listed on the charities register entry for the LGB Alliance.
They are Kathleen Stock OBE, Eileen Gallagher OBE, Conrad Roeber, Robert Wintemute and hereditary peer Lord Young of Norwood Green.
Stock, a philosophy professor at Sussex University, was given her OBE in January 2021. The decision to give her the award was immediately condemned by 600 of her academic peers, who said they were “dismayed” that the British government chose to honour her, given her “harmful rhetoric” about transgender and gender non-conforming people that “reinforces the patriarchal status quo”.
In an open letter, signed by more than 600 philosophers, the academics said they were concerned about a “tendency to mistake transphobic fear-mongering for valuable scholarship, and attacks on already marginalised people for courageous exercises of free speech”.
Kate Harris, director at LGB Alliance, told the i that the charity is “moving ahead with our important work”.
“Today we announce our new Board of Trustees. They are drawn from broadcasting, academia, Parliament and business and we look forward to calling on their expertise as we continue to grow,” Harris said.
The LGB Alliance did not respond to a request for comment.
