ARTICLE – Daily Mail
CLAUDIA CONNELL – 19 JUNE 2023 – DAILY MAIL
- Denise Fahmy quit her role after 15 years working for the Arts Council England (
- ACE is a government and National Lottery funded agency that supports the arts
Denise Fahmy calls them ‘the army of the cancelled’. A growing roll call of mostly older women either driven out of the jobs they loved, or whose professional lives have been made unbearable, because of their views on biological sex.
Denise, 54, can now add her name to that list. After 15 years working for the Arts Council England (ACE), she felt she had no choice but to quit her role following what she believed was a targeted campaign of bullying and harassment.
Things came to a head when a petition was circulated to all staff on the company’s intranet objecting to ACE employing people like Denise, who held so-called ‘gender critical’ views — views many of her colleagues declared to be ‘transphobic’.
Put simply, Denise thinks biological sex is immutable and that women do not have penises.
Over the course of many months the situation escalated to such a level that she was left feeling terrified, and fearing that her home might be targeted or that she would be attacked in the street.
Denise took her old employers to an employment tribunal and, this week, a panel, led by Judge Jim Shepherd, ruled that Denise had been harassed due to her beliefs, which are protected by law stating ‘in all circumstances, the unanimous judgment of the tribunal is that the claim of harassment related to the protected characteristic of religion or belief is well-founded or succeeds’. Her claim of victimisation was dismissed.
A thrilled Denise said: ‘This judgment will make a difference in the arts — organisations, arts leaders and colleagues can no longer get away with spurious allegations of transphobia against those who believe, as the vast majority of the country does, that biological sex matters.
The days of bullying, name calling, cold shouldering are over. My case illustrated how deeply intolerant the arts have become, even at the highest level of the Arts Council of England.’
ACE is a government and National Lottery funded agency that supports all aspects of the arts. Denise’s rather wordy job title was Relationship Manager for Visual Arts in the North, based in Leeds.
She managed ‘a portfolio of organisations who are regularly funded. I worked with galleries, studios and individual artists’.
It was a job that Denise, a mother of two daughters, aged 29 and 18, loved until gender ideology started infiltrating the organisation.
‘For a long time it was a good organisation, it was progressive, and they were good to working parents. My kids were young when I started to work there and I found them to be excellent employers. It was a positive and happy place to be,’ she says.
It was in 2018 that Denise noticed a shift. She explains: ‘At a team meeting a member of staff said we should all start to use our pronouns on our correspondence. At that stage, most of us in the office didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘Next a colleague, who I had always respected and worked well with, announced that she was a ‘they’.
They said they felt very upset at being misgendered and I absolutely took their side. Others suggested we could benefit from trans awareness training, and I thought it was a good idea because I didn’t understand the debate at all.’
It was suggested that staff should read material from two charities that specialise in diversity training — Gendered Intelligence and The Proud Trust, which Denise gladly did, quickly becoming very disturbed by what she saw.
‘None of it made any sense,’ she says. ‘One piece of guidance was that before any meeting I should aways check every participant’s chosen pronouns. I tried to imagine doing that and it was idiotic.
‘The more I read, the more upset I became. This idea that biological sex isn’t real. I felt let down that female colleagues were supporting this; it felt like a betrayal of all we’d achieved as women.’
Familiarising herself with the trans awareness training material had the opposite effect intended. Instead, Denise started to look into trans activism and the impact it was having on women.
While scrolling through Twitter, she noticed an app that charted women’s menstrual cycles (and that she had installed on her phone) had got rid of the word ‘woman’ and was instead using the phrase ‘menstruating people’.
Outraged, she tweeted the company saying ‘app deleted’.
Those two words were enough for Denise to find herself targeted by activists. She says: ‘I had my workplace in my Twitter biography, which led to a number of trans activists contacting the Arts Council to say I should be fired.
‘Someone inside my organisation contacted the director as well to say I should be sacked. She did it anonymously, but I found out who it was.’
ACE management contacted Denise to say the tweet was causing a nightmare for the communications team and asking if she would delete it — which she agreed to do, to keep the peace.
However, Denise’s interest in the gender identity debate had been well and truly piqued.
When, in 2021, ACE changed how it collected data from grant applicants, Denise wrote to the executive board to express her concerns. Application forms now have five possibilities under sex and seven in a section on gender identity.
‘Not only was it confusing, it could encourage bias in grant-making decisions,’ says Denise.
Then, shortly afterwards, she met an artist who had been driven out of the studio she helped set up because of her beliefs.
‘She was identified as gender critical due to the things she posted on her social media pages,’ says Denise. ‘The whole of the studio turned against her and they had her evicted.
One day, she went into work and her space had been decorated with trans flags. She was a woman my age, she was never aggressive or personal. She said to me it was because she dared to say that women don’t have penises. In the end, she had to move away and start all over again.’
Seething on her behalf, Denise tweeted asking if people knew of any other women in the arts who had been targeted for their beliefs.
‘I heard from 15 women who had been completely bullied out of their profession and were petrified about their future. Most people in the arts are freelance, your contacts and your reputation matter, they’re everything, and yet that can be destroyed by this mob culture that has taken over.’
One of the 15 women had tweeted a link to the Government’s 2018 consultation on reform of the gender recognition act.
‘It was a Government link,’ says Denise. ‘An arts organisation, which we often fund with National Lottery players’ money, named her as a transphobe. She lost her job at a university and her house was vandalised.’
Denise gave her findings to ACE chief executive Darren Henley. ‘I told him I thought we had a bullying problem in the sector.’ He sent what Denise describes as a ‘non-committal reply’.
It was in April 2022, when ACE awarded a grant to the LGB Alliance, that things began to implode for Denise.
The LGB Alliance is an advocacy group and charity that supports gay and bisexual people and was founded in 2019, But because they believe sex is binary and that trans women (those born male) cannot be lesbians, they have been labelled as a transphobic hate group.
The grant was for £9,400 to fund the making of a documentary about how life in the UK had changed for gay men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
As is typical with small ACE grants, the funds were channelled via a third party — in this case the London Community Foundation.
As soon as the grant was announced it caused uproar on Twitter. As a result, ACE deputy chief executive Simon Mellor called an all-staff meeting to discuss the grant. Held online, out of around 700 staff, 411 attended.
Were such meetings commonplace? ‘Not at all,’ says Denise. ‘To give that some context, I was there for 15 years and last year we gave out over £900 million. Huge sums are dished out every day, and I’ve never known an all-staff meeting about one grant.’
During the meeting, Mellor stated that LGB Alliance had a history of being ‘anti-trans’ and pointed out that, since they were under investigation to have their charitable status removed, following an online campaign, the grant should be revoked.
Denise says: ‘The LGB Alliance had the grant rescinded. At the same time, the fund manager at the London Community Foundation, who had made the award, received terrible harassment online. She went off sick and ended up leaving the organisation.
‘At the meeting, I stated my opinion that the LGB Alliance was not anti-trans. It was a very upsetting meeting and I felt horribly exposed. I was the only one who spoke up for them.
‘We have to abide by the law; you have to foster good relations. We have to honour public sector equality duty.
You can’t just say, ‘Well, I don’t like that lot so I’m not going to fund them.’ This is public money we’re talking about; it’s a very dangerous way to run an agency.’
ACE states that the decision to award and remove funding was not made directly by them. A spokesperson says: ‘In April 2022, London Community Fund made the decision to suspend an award from the Let’s Create Jubilee Fund to the LGB Alliance.
The decisions regarding who received funding as part of this fund rested entirely with UK Communities Fund and its 44 member bodies.’
Once again Denise wrote a letter, this time to ACE chairman Sir Nicholas Serota. ‘I stated that we were breaching our duty if we withdrew grants from organisations on the basis of their beliefs.’
Serota appointed a trustee to investigate and the complaint was not upheld.
Three weeks after the all-staff meeting, a petition, visible to all ACE employees, was put on the organisation’s online noticeboard.
Denise says: ‘It was authored by one of the people who’d had a go at me in the meeting. It was stating a formal grievance against gender critical people. I wasn’t named but it was obvious I was the target. Who else could it have been?’
Comments left by staff beneath the petition labelled those with gender critical beliefs as ‘neo-Nazis’. They were called ‘parasites’ that needed to be ‘stamped out’. Meanwhile, the LGB Alliance was likened to the Ku Klux Klan.
‘Half of the people who signed the petition were idiots who didn’t know what they were doing,’ says Denise. ‘But some worked in my office. There was one in particular that I was very close to and had considered a friend. Honestly, at that point, it just made me cry.’
You’d have thought removing an offensive petition from the company’s online noticeboard would be a simple affair but, despite Denise immediately complaining, it remained in place for more than a day, with various departments at ACE passing the buck and claiming it was the responsibility of the other to remove it.
Denise, perhaps naively, still hoped her bosses would have her back in the face of such hostility. But while they agreed the petition was wrong, they didn’t think she had personally been harassed.
By this stage, Denise found going into the office unbearable, and the situation was starting to wreak havoc with her mental health.
‘There was one colleague in particular who wouldn’t even look at me. There are only around 30 of us in the Yorkshire office, and I felt targeted, circled and under pressure. I wasn’t coping and my doctor put me on antidepressants. I was crying constantly; I didn’t seem to be able to stop and I’m really not a crier normally.
‘I felt scared. I love visiting art galleries, but I stopped because, as crazy as it sounds, it just didn’t feel safe.’
In August 2022, Denise was signed off sick and tagged annual leave onto the end of it, meaning she’d been absent from the office for a month…