Britain’s equality boss: ‘We treated people who disagreed with us as stupid and wrong’
"You would hardly know it from her unruffled air, but Mary-Ann Stephenson finds herself in the crosshairs of a savage cultural maelstrom. While she has only led the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for eight months, she has already endured the political equivalent of 12 rounds in the boxing ring.
As if it were not galling enough to be declared unsuitable for the role by two parliamentary select committees, stacked with Labour MPs who appeared obsessed with militants’ spurious claims that she was “anti-trans”, she has had to move the equalities watchdog out of its former Vauxhall offices after trans activists smashed windows and daubed the building in pink graffiti. Could she have imagined, when she took the job, that a single issue would dominate debate to this degree? “You’d have to be pretty stupid not to realise,” she sighs.
Having worked for 30 years in the realm of women’s rights, Stephenson has acquired layers of psychological armoury. And yet in these tinderbox times, her job of leading the EHRC – the quango responsible, among its many duties, for turning the Supreme Court’s judgment on the immutability of biological sex into statutory guidance – has become not just fraught, but downright dangerous. Baroness Falkner, her predecessor, was so terrorised by sections of the trans lobby that she had to vary her route to work.
“It’s something you do have to be conscious of, because there are people with extreme views,” says Stephenson. As an illustration, we are meeting at The Vault, a bustling café in the shadow of the glorious spire of Coventry Cathedral, since it would be too much of a security risk for her to be interviewed at home...
Branching into academia, she has said, was a choice reached partly because she was sick of being asked if she was Mrs, Miss or Ms. “I just thought ‘Dr’ would be a better answer.” Since then, she has been unabashedly supportive of women’s right to privacy and dignity in bathrooms, changing areas, sports, prisons, refuge centres or any other spaces segregated by sex for very good reasons.
“Women don’t want single-sex spaces because they are bigots,” she says. “They want them because there are situations in which they are vulnerable, or where they need time to heal and to be safe.” So far, so eminently reasonable, you might think. Except by refusing to bow to ideologues, or to parrot the fallacy that trans women are women – a notion directly contradicted by the highest court in the land – she has been treated as a heretic.
To highlight how ludicrous the scrutiny of her EHRC appointment became last summer, Peter Swallow, a Labour MP, decided to grill her on the fact that she had once donated to the legal fund of Allison Bailey, a barrister who took her chambers to court after it asked to remove two gender-critical tweets, and who was found by an employment tribunal to have suffered discrimination after clerks gave her less work. The grand total of Stephenson’s donation? £25.
“This was a case of a black, working-class, lesbian woman being discriminated against for legally-protected beliefs,” she says, sipping a decaf iced latte. “I thought it was wrong. And she won the case. So, it was really unhelpful to use that as an indicator I was going to come in and not care about the rights of trans people.” Sanguine though she had to be, the experience upset her. “It was bruising. I wouldn’t have applied for this role if I didn’t think I was qualified.”
As far back as her early childhood, Stephenson was in touch with her feminist side. There is the story of how, as a little girl, she had a favourite purple T-shirt featuring a picture of Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip and the character’s famous statement: “I’m a new feminist!”
Due to her father’s travels working for Ford, she grew up until the age of seven in Greece. It was a middle-class upbringing, with the families of Ford employees forming an expat enclave, but it took place under the Regime of the Colonels, the military junta that ruled the nation from 1967 to 1974. Although she was too young to be aware of the dictatorship’s brutality, manifested in mass arrests and a surveillance state, her mother asked her, while she was studying the idea of utopias: “What happens to the people who disagree?”
It was her maternal grandfather, after all, who had been on Cable Street in 1936, when the people of the East End mobilised to halt the march of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts through Stepney. “She would tell me what her father had said to her: ‘If you call everyone you disagree with a fascist, then you’ve got no word to describe the actual fascists when they turn up.’”
Such wisdom endures, given the fad for caricaturing even a vaguely Right-of-centre position as “far-Right”. It is a tendency against which Stephenson has long railed, to the point of signing open letters denouncing the suppression of free speech on university campuses. In 2015, she was one of those who lamented the emergence of the sinister “no-platforming” trend, condemning calls by Cambridge students to withdraw a speaking invitation to Germaine Greer on the grounds she was guilty of transphobia. “I didn’t know there was such a thing,” the Australian shrugged at the time. “Arachnophobia, yes. Transphobia, no.”
Even for adding her name to standard freedom of expression letters concerning Greer, Stephenson drew hostility from Parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which, alongside the women and equalities committee, refused to endorse her elevation to the EHRC office. Their objections were ultimately overruled by the Government. But she is not the type to be intimidated easily.
She began her career at Article 19, the human rights group promoting freedom of speech worldwide, before becoming director of the Women’s Budget Group, a feminist think tank, and the Fawcett Society, the country’s pre-eminent charity in championing women’s rights. Of late, she has only grown more alarmed by attempts to shut down sensitive areas of discussion.
“When you have difficult, contentious issues, the only way of resolving them is by talking about them,” she says. “The concept that you no-platform people – maybe not even for what they’ve said, but because they’ve been on a platform where somebody else has said something you don’t like – is Orwellian. It’s bad for democracy to do that, because the right to freedom of speech is also the right to hear information. You end up having no arguments. You’re constantly speaking in your bubble, and suddenly you go outside your bubble to be told: ‘That’s ridiculous.’”
Today, the overriding imperative for Stephenson, the woman who has tried to show moderation in the face of trans extremists’ most vicious barbs, is to ensure that the law is upheld. That is proving far more of a struggle than it should. While the EHRC has this month issued its long-awaited guidance, clarifying that single-sex and separate-sex services must lawfully base access on biological sex rather than a person’s gender identity, some authorities are vowing to flout it regardless...
“We are the regulator. We’re responsible for ensuring that the Equality Act is followed. So, we will take action.” It will, she warns, “be a very litigious area for quite some time”. Is there not a part of her that finds all this utterly exasperating? It has been 16 months since the Supreme Court verdict was reached, so why do organisations and the trans advocates influencing them not stop hand-wringing and press on with enforcement? “Sometimes it’s about things that the code doesn’t say, but that they have been told. The most ridiculous and extreme example is the suggestion there are going to be gender checks outside public toilets.”
Nowhere in the EHRC’s 342-page code is this prospect raised, but somehow the most hyperbolic rhetoric has gained traction with MPs such as Labour’s Samantha Niblett, a bisexual politician famous for recommending a “summer of sex”, and, more recently, for recording a video of herself on a sun lounger on holiday to fulminate about “more division and hatred towards trans people”.
Stephenson, drawing on her own experience, believes some common sense would not go amiss. “Lots of women will have had to challenge a man in a public toilet. I was at a train station, in the dark of winter, and as I washed my hands at the sink, a man came in. The woman next to me told him, ‘Mate, you’re in the wrong bathroom.’ Then out on the platform, we saw him hanging around and trying to get back in. At that point, we told the guard, and he dealt with it. I’m not saying, as a result, that every single station should have a guard outside the women’s toilets. But equally, the way you enforce complaints has to be proportionate and serious.”...
Nigel Farage has taken issue with the Equality Act’s listing of nine protected characteristics, which include age, race and sex, arguing that it disadvantages middle-aged white men. Here, Stephenson bristles. “I find that odd. It’s ludicrous. We all have protected characteristics – you do, I do. There have been cases under the Act won by white men.”...
“It would be wrong, for example, to demonise all men because 98 per cent of all sexual offences are committed by men"...
There is a noticeable gap between her stance and that of Baroness Falkner, who observed during her five years in charge of the EHRC that integration appeared to be “failing”...
She concedes that she and some of her colleagues have been guilty of inhabiting an echo chamber, condescending to opponents and sharpening the sense of polarisation.
“I recognise that those of us who care about equality and human rights haven’t always made the case as well as we should, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this position now,” she says. “We have lectured rather than listened. And we have treated people who disagreed with us as stupid and wrong. You have to keep making the case. Human rights require that we think about other people. It requires that we don’t assume, ‘This is me, and I’m the only person who matters.’”
So often, the controversies over migration and women’s rights can be glibly disregarded as “culture wars”, a lazy shorthand that reduces complex conundrums to crude binaries and exacerbates an us-versus-them mentality. Encouragingly, it is an expression Stephenson loathes.
“I’ve never liked it. I see people accusing others of fighting culture wars, and I think, ‘Well, it takes two to have a culture war.’ The idea of what society people want to live in and how they want it to be organised, that’s cultural. When women fought for the right to vote, or when gay people fought for same-sex marriage, were those culture wars? These are things we need to settle as a society.”"
