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The LGB Alliance

This email template has been written by members of the artistic community to protest the announcement on Monday 11 April that the LGB Alliance has received ÂŁ9,400 from Let’s Create’s Jubilee Fund. Please find more details below and consider copy and pasting the letter and emailing it to the following addresses: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

If you would like to change anything in the template or add your own comments, please feel free to do so.

RE: LGB Alliance receiving Let’s Create Jubilee funding.

To whom it may concern,

I have recently been made aware of the Arts Council England and London Community Foundation’s decision to fund LGB Alliance’s project ‘Queens’, a short film which has been awarded a grant through the Let’s Create Jubilee fund. I object to this group being granted public money and I want to highlight my concerns particularly with the discrimination, harassment and bullying that the LGB Alliance have enacted against transgender people, a group protected by the Equalities Act 2010.

As a group, LGB Alliance are outspoken in their hatred of trans people in the UK, and actively discriminate against and target them in online and public spaces. While the group presents themselves as promoting the rights and lives of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, their methods to do this rely on campaigning against equality for transgender people. They are invested in spreading false narratives around gender identity, the process of medical transition in this country, and the interests and goals of transgender people, leading to over fifty of the largest LGBTQ+ organisations condemning them. The group use their reach to create an unsafe environment for transgender people, through their campaigning, use of social media, and behaviour encouraged amongst their members and supporters.

Below are some links with more information about their antagonistic and discriminatory status.

There is a tribunal appeal being brought forward by transgender charity Mermaids on the charitable status of the LGB Alliance in May 2022. The chief executive of Ofcom said that it is ‘entirely inappropriate’ to quote the LGB Alliance on trans issues. There is video footage here of members branding transgender comedian Jen Ives a “pervert”. The Trans Safety Network have also put together a document summarising the transphobic and discriminatory actions of the LGB Alliance, their founding members and their membership at large. The LGB alliance violated rules against discriminatory language on Twitter. They have used claims that ‘lesbians are going extinct’ to put forward discriminatory practises against transgender people.

In the Charity Commission’s review into awarding charitable status to the LGB Alliance, the potential issues found with the group were their contribution to a discriminatory and unsafe environment for transgender people, particularly through social media. Despite the group promising as part of this procedure to review their use of social media and the discriminatory views that they put out as part of it, they have continued to use Twitter as a platform to express hostility, suspicion and to encourage personal, targeted discrimination towards transgender people. Through these tweets, the group create the intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment that they stated they would not in response to the Charity Commission’s findings.

Two very recent examples of these are below:

In a tweet from March 2022, the LGB Alliance show themselves explicitly campaigning against self-identification, which is a discriminatory practice against transgender people. https://twitter.com/ALLIANCELGB/status/1504472788827971589?s=20&t=SzSqMj5sHZPxpzQcULGClw

In another from March 2022, the LGB Alliance refers to a transgender man, the “legally male” figure referenced in the tweet, as a “young woman”, through which statement they are denying the transgender man’s gender identity and discriminating against them. https://twitter.com/ALLIANCELGB/status/1505901286964797444?s=20&t=SzSqMj5sHZPxpzQcULGClw

Awarding a grant to this group puts public money towards these incendiary, highly targeted and discriminatory activities, which contribute to creating an unsafe environment within the UK for transgender people. I am deeply concerned that you are supporting this group, about the harm that a film being made by them about LGBT history could have, and the message this sends to transgender people in this country. This seems fundamentally contradictory to the London Community Foundation’s remit as focused on “improving the lives of the most disadvantaged people in London”.

There are clear grounds for worry at a lack of due diligence that took place during the selection period, as this information is freely available. If research was done on this group then it worries me even further that ACE, the UKCF, and LCF are open to endorsing their tactics and aims by funding a project from the LGB Alliance.

I request that you withdraw this funding from the LGB Alliance. I also call on you to provide reasoning as to why this group has received funding, its implications with regards to the Arts Council’s Let’s Create Equality Objectives, and how this relates to the gender and equality principles of London Community Foundation. I ask that you provide evidence that research was done on LGB Alliance before awarding them public money, and that you commit to fully investigating any organisations before supporting them financially, to prevent similar incidents in the future.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Update as of Mon 11 Apr 8pm: