You already know I lost. It’s been a few weeks now, and some of you already know I’m appealing too, so I’ll skip the recap and get to the part that matters: Belfast Film Festival had already conceded my beliefs were protected, and the tribunal still found against me on every count. The concession didn’t matter. The protection turned out to be a line in a judgment rather than something anyone was obliged to act on, and that is the part I can’t leave alone.
So we’re appealing to the Court of Appeal, and my legal team, who are not in the business of flattering a client, think the grounds are genuinely strong. An appeal is a new cost stacked on top of everything already spent getting this far, and it carries a risk the original hearing didn’t: if it fails, I could be liable for Belfast Film Festival’s costs as well as my own. The Free Speech Union have committed to covering a large chunk of the legal costs, and I’m asking, through CrowdJustice, for help with the rest.
To everyone who has already given, and there are over 1,400 of you now, thank you, properly. You funded counsel who specialise in exactly this kind of case, sat with me through a hearing that ran two weeks in November, and waited months for a judgment that wasn’t handed down until August. You did all of that for a woman you mostly know only from a fundraising page.
Here is why I’m not stopping, and it isn’t only about principle. I spent years working in the arts in this city, on inclusion, in good faith. In April 2023 I went to a Let Women Speak rally with friends, entirely as a private citizen, nothing to do with work. I hadn’t planned to speak. I plucked up the courage to take the microphone and talked about the harassment women get for holding views like mine, and about women’s rights being threatened by the idea that anyone can simply declare themselves the opposite sex. Within the hour, my name and photograph were circulating online, and the harassment continued that weekend until the bullies identified my workplace too. I reported it to the police, who spoke to some of the people involved and advised me to put CCTV on my own house. I did. I’m a single mother, and for a stretch of this I didn’t know if I still had a job, and I relied on family and friends to keep a roof over my head. There were days (later, months and two years or so) I couldn’t get through ordinary tasks. That’s what the campaign against me actually cost, before a single lawyer was involved.
Everything went quiet for months. Then in July, my employer asked me, at short notice, to organise a day of film screenings for Pride called Stand By Your Trans. I did it. And a local arts organisation, Outburst Arts, I had worked with regularly and successfully in the past, replied to an invitation email from my employer to say they took exception to any dealings with me, citing the rally by name. Other LGBT+ organisations soon followed, and it became clear a campaign was being run. Emails, texts and tweets described me as an unsafe person to be around and, somewhere along the way, mistakenly lumped my views in with an alleged “anti-gay fascist.” My employer’s response, made publicly, was to tell my online bullies I would be investigated, and to add that they passionately supported their values and would celebrate and defend them.
What followed was worse than the tweet. I was put under investigation by my own employer for attending a rally as a private citizen, not for anything I’d done at work. I was cut off from my email and the shared drive and asked to hand back my office keys, and nobody would tell me when the investigation would end or on what basis it had started three months after the fact. I went off work with stress in July, and I never went back. My grievance and my grievance appeal were both rejected by an external HR company the festival itself had hired, which was about as independent as it sounds. By November I resigned, and constructive dismissal went on top of the discrimination claim, which is why this case ended up running to two weeks in a tribunal room instead of a quiet word and an apology.
In Northern Ireland, that is the pattern, and it isn’t confined to one building or one festival. Look at who runs our arts organisations, who staffs our newsrooms, who decides which views get a platform and which get an investigation opened against them instead, and you’ll find the same instinct: capitulate first, ask questions never, treat the person who spoke as the problem rather than the people who came after them. We built a whole post-conflict identity out of being the reconciled place, proof that peace could hold, kindness as the national brand. That kindness was never as reliable as the branding suggested, and people beyond here are finally starting to notice. In July, Féile an Phobail pulled a Women’s Rights Network NI panel over claims it would “promote campaigns against rights for the transgender community,” despite the subject having been clear from the original application, and it only got wider attention once JK Rowling stepped in to help fund a legal challenge. Same institutional reflex I ran into. The kindness only ever seems to extend to whoever’s doing the pressuring.
The appeal isn’t really about me getting my old job back. I’m past that. I worked with Women’s Aid to re-establish a rape crisis service Northern Ireland had gone without for thirteen years, a long time before any of this, because I believe women deserve services and spaces that take their sex seriously, and that belief hasn’t moved an inch in the years since. What the appeal is actually about is whether an organisation gets to treat a legally protected belief as a disciplinary matter and have a tribunal wave that through anyway, because if it can happen to me, with a concession already on the record, it can happen to the next woman with none of the profile and none of the support I’ve had, and without a CrowdJustice page behind her either.
I know crowdfunding fatigue is real, and I know the word grift gets thrown at anyone who asks for money more than once. I’m not doing this for the goodness of my own health. Three and a half years in, it would be a great deal easier, and cheaper, and kinder to my own life, to let the judgment stand and go quiet. This was never going to be settled by one hearing, not with the state the law is in on gender critical belief in this jurisdiction, and I’d rather spend the money and the time putting that right than bank a loss I know is wrong. Go hard or go home.
Donate if you can. Share it if you can’t, because every share has put this in front of someone who’d never have seen it otherwise.
I’m not walking away from a bad decision. I’m appealing it.
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/belfast-film-festival-discrimination/