Right Here. Right Now.

Another stunning technical victory for the Good Law Project shows that sanity is being restored to the public debate about gender identity, slowly but ever so surely.

On 27 March 2026 I received the welcome and to be honest not entirely expected news that the Bar Standards Board was not going to investigate further the complaint of the Good Law Project against me on behalf of trans identifying man Euan Weddell, aka Sophie Molly/Sparkles.

This complaint has a long and unpleasant history. It was initially made by Weddell in March 2024, complaining that my calling him a man had ‘reduced him to tears’. This complaint was eventually rejected, despite the best efforts of an legally illiterate ‘reviewer’ who opined that because some teachers had been held to account for ‘misgendering’ their students, I might owe a similar duty of care to a grown man on the internet with whom I had no professional or personal relationship.

By August 2025 the complaint had enlarged somewhat and the Good Law Project were now making it on his behalf, describing publicly my social media posts as ‘harassment’ which was so unpleasant that Weddell tragically had attempted to kill himself on an overdose of anti histamines. Jolyon Maugham decided to defame me a few days later so I am now suing him. Good times!

It took the Good Law Project several months to draft their complaint and this was done with the help of several no doubt very expensive barristers.

Even the massively gullible donors to the GLP various ‘trans rights’ fund raisers might have expected a little more bang for their bucks given the time and care spent on this project. The team of barristers toiled over many months to excavate 52 examples of my perfidious social media commentary and I set them out in this post, along with my urging the BSB to at least provide me with some outline of timescales for their investigation. The coruscating quality of the complaint can be summed up by the attempt to argue that a comment by me that Sophie Molly resembled Eddie Izzard was ‘harassment’.

It is clear, as barrister Barbara Rich noted, that if Maugham genuinely believed that Weddell had been a victim of ‘harassment’ then his primary remedy was an injunction in the civil court and/or a criminal prosecution under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997. The weaponization of the regulatory process was to cause me maximum embarrassment and reputational harm and establish some watered down notion of ‘harassment’ with no risk of legal costs to the Good Law Project. I have no idea how much money and time has been wasted on this pantomime but it is certainly far too much. But Maugham must have hoped that he would prevail and to be fair, that wasn’t an unreasonable expectation based on what we have already seen from the behaviour of a variety of regulators in the gender wars.

It is a testament to our current Good Times that despite the contemptible risibility of this complaint, I was not entirely confident that the Bar Standards Board would reject it. This is because the relentless Stonewallifcation of law and policy over at least a decade has fixed an immovable belief in our elite professional classes that any attempt to challenge, criticise or mock the nonsense that is gender identity ideology is a moral outrage. They have grudgingly had to accept that our belief that sex is real, immutable and it matters is a protected belief but any attempted manifestation of that belief is unacceptable. The seeds of this were of course sown long ago and have captured individuals and institutions at the highest level.

For example, in R (C) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2017] UKSC 72 Lady Hale gave the leading judgment in a case recording sex on benefit records and an argument that this discriminated against a trans identifying man who had obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate. The claim failed, but Lady Hale leaves readers in no doubt from the opening paragraph, how special and sacred she considers gender identity to be.

But it does not take much imagination to understand that this is a deeply personal and private matter; that a person who has undergone gender reassignment will need the whole world to recognise and relate to her or to him in the reassigned gender; and will want to keep to an absolute minimum any unwanted disclosure of the history. This is not only because other people can be insensitive and even cruel; the evidence is that transphobic incidents are increasing and that transgender people experience high levels of anxiety about this. It is also because of their deep need to live successfully and peacefully in their reassigned gender, something which non-transgender people can take for granted.

By 2025 Lady Hale had ‘evolved’ further and was thrilled to report that some doctors at a dinner party had told her that biological sex didn’t actually exist - something I thought she might have questioned when she was lauded as the first female judge in the Supreme Court or, I dunno, when she gave birth to her daughter.

So the roots of this poison tree go very, very deep indeed. Both positions of Lady Hale are indefensible as actively harmful to women and to our fundamental rights of free speech. A trans identifying man may indeed yearn for the ‘whole world’ to agree he is a woman, but the ‘whole world’ will not and cannot be lawfully compelled to believe this nor lawfully prevented from speaking about it.

Those of the gender critical persuasion had of course hoped that the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment in April 2025 had knocked this bullshit on the head, but nearly a year later we are still waiting for the Government to approve the EHRC guidance, so maybe not.

So you can understand why I was not optimistic that the BSB would respond firmly to the GLP complaint. As ever, I am very glad to be wrong. I got the response this afternoon and I set it out below. It is a most excellent letter. It puts Mr Weddell and his activities firmly in context and recognises the high degree of protection I have in the exercise of my protected political speech. I sense a polite degree of scepticism that the man who urged a crowd to shit on JK Rowling’s head was inherently vulnerable to social media posts from others.

I think this goes way beyond mere personal vindication and gloating, although that is very important and enjoyable of course. It is a very clear rejection of what has hitherto been the elite position regarding ‘gender identity’ as a sacred thing and thus criticism of it must be profane. But the rights of women and the safety of children are every bit as important as the deep desire a man may have to invert his penis and ‘live as’ a woman. We must be allowed to discuss openly the obvious tensions between the need to protect sex as an organising category against the wishes of those who want to claim a ‘gender identity’ which may be in denial of their actual sex.

I am still struggling to understand precisely how ‘gender identity’ became the one great untouchable ideology and I sadly suspect that a significant part of this has been because many of the professional elites that worship it, have children who have fallen into this social contagion and medically ‘transitioned’. It must be very hard to admit that as a loving parent you have allowed something irreversible to happen to your child, for which there is no compelling evidence of benefit and to which they cannot possibly consent.

Jolyon Maugham has three daughters, two of whom now believe they are his sons. In the response of the Good Law Project to my letter before action regarding defamation, I was warned that Maugham was contemplating his own legal action for my ‘defamation’ in this regard. I will await his action with interest.

Truth is an absolute defence to defamation and the only thing that will get us out of this mess. I am glad that today saw recognition and respect for the truth, sad only that this has taken so long, demanded so much energy and caused so much harm along the way.

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Letter from the BSB 27 March 2026