Stephen Mcnamara spent 15 years as the head of legal services for Bristol city council, but now he has been branded “offensive” by ruling Green Party councillors for asking them to follow the law that bans trans women from using female-only spaces.
The retired solicitor said the council had become a “trans activist organisation” unwilling to accept the Supreme Court ruling that somebody who identifies as trans does not change sex for the purposes of the Equality Act.
About 18 Green Party councillors staged a mass walkout during a public council meeting last month when Mcnamara and two women raised gender-critical questions.
Mcnamara, 70, who was responsible for the lawfulness of the council’s decisions until 2012, asked if it was possible for a council officer in the city to say “that a trans woman is a biological man” without harming their career.
Before he could finish his question he was cut off by Henry Michallat, the lord mayor, who is a Tory councillor and was chairing the meeting, and told to “please be a little bit respectful of people in the room”.
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Emma Edwards, leader of the Green group, then interjected and asked the lord mayor to “reject this question” because he had “the right to refuse offensive questions and quite clearly some of these questions and the rhetoric being used is offensive to people who work in this chamber”.
Mcnamara then attempted to ask whether a women’s running club should have to accept having a “6ft 3in trans woman with a beard” as a member in their female changing room, but was told this question was “vulgar and offensive” by Heather Mack, the Green deputy council leader. Mack told Mcnamara that his gender-critical questions were “clearly intended to divide and hurt”.
Ed Fraser, one of the Green councillors who walked out of the chamber on September 9, later posted a tweet which said there was “a difference between free speech and using an official meeting to deliberately offend a marginalised group”.
Mcnamara told The Times that “closing down debate and defaming those who disagree with you from a position of power is a disgrace”. He said he felt “humiliated and intimidated” by the response from councillors and their behaviour would make others fearful of asking gender-critical questions.
Wendy Stephenson said councillors were trying to silence voices like hers
BRAD WAKEFIELD FOR THE TIMES
He believes the conduct of council leaders would lead “a reasonable person to conclude that any thought crime or expression of a heretical view will result in the cancellation of a contract or detriment to a council officer”.
Wendy Stephenson, 70, said she faced a similar walkout by Green councillors during a council meeting in July, when she asked if the council accepted the ruling of the Supreme Court on single-sex spaces and would “confirm it will only award funding to groups in Bristol that fulfil their obligations under the Equality Act”.
The Supreme Court ruled in April this year that the definition of a woman and man refers to their biological sex under the Equality Act.
Bristol city council and other public bodies are reviewing their policies in light of the ruling but Tony Dyer, the Green council leader, has claimed it “falsely pitted women’s safety against trans rights”. He argued the guidance “risks driving further exclusion and division for some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in society”.
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Stephenson, who until 2018 was chief executive of Voscur, the development agency for Bristol’s voluntary and community sector, said councillors “are trying to silence our voices” by staging walkouts. “It’s like they are sticking their fingers in their ears and going ‘la la la’,” she said. “These are the people who are supposed to uphold the law.”
Bristol city council has been openly aligned with trans activists since it passed a motion in July 2022 to “recognise and affirm trans men are men, trans women are women” and pledged not to take advice from or award contracts “to organisations that promote an anti-trans agenda or propaganda”.
The motion also called for “menstrual care dispensers and sanitary bins” in men’s toilets and for the council to recognise that gender-critical beliefs “can be protected” but “this does not provide the right to express those beliefs and [the council] will not allow this as a lever for hate speech”.
Stephenson said that when gender-critical Bristolians wrote to the lord mayor in 2022 to complain that the motion went against equalities law, the council admitted in private correspondence that the motion was “non-binding and has no legal effect”. They have not said this in public.
Stephenson said this “virtue signalling” by the council has “set the tone and become the dominant culture in the council and the city’s voluntary and community organisations which are funded by it”.
“The council and Bristol’s voluntary sector are part of an ideologically captured, mutually affirming circle, which is so hard to penetrate,” she said.
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She said Bristol Women’s Voice (BWV), the council-funded charity set up to help women in the city, excludes “most of the women in Bristol because it only wants members who will not question the unlawful presence of males in female-only spaces”. BWV membership and activities are open to those who “self-identify” as women and non-binary. After the Supreme Court ruling BWV said its “trans inclusive membership policy relies on self-identification and so remains unchanged”. Stephenson said the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces is law and “we will continue to question the council”, adding: “It may take legal action against the council and its affiliated organisations [to make them comply] but it takes a lot of courage to take on a full council.”
A spokesman for the Green group on Bristol city council said that councillors walked out of the chamber “in solidarity with our trans and non-binary colleagues, who had no chance to respond verbally to comments and shouts of vulgarities that deeply offended them and made them feel unsafe. Everyone has a legal right to feel safe in their place of work.”
Bristol city council has been approached for comment.