What the failed smear campaign against Dr Mary Ann Stephenson tells us about equality
When Mary Ann Stephenson was announced as the government’s preferred candidate to take over from Baroness Falkner as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, every feminist I know was delighted. With three decades’ of experience, working for organisations including the Women’s Budget Group, the Fawcett Society and Liberty, plus advising the British Council, the UN and the TUC on human rights, Stephenson was the perfect pick — a serious candidate, with serious, in-depth knowledge across multiple areas of interest. Who — other than someone who objected to the existence of the role altogether — could possibly object to that?
And yet some people did. Within days of the announcement, a petition was launched against Stephenson’s appointment. To be fair, it was hardly surprising at a time when anything which delights feminists tends to be considered a dogwhistle for hate. According to the petition, Stephenson’s history “includes making anti-trans statements and associations with groups advocating for the curtailment of trans people’s human rights”.
It’s a topic about which Stephenson would be grilled at a joint pre-appointment scrutiny hearing led by the Women and Equalities Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The two organisations would go on to write a letter to Bridget Phillipson MP, questioning Stephenson’s suitability for the job. “The role description,” they argued, “calls for ‘the ability to lead and manage a high-profile organisation, including chairing the board, providing effective challenge and support to the Executive’”:
Dr Stephenson did not provide sufficient evidence to convince us that she has yet acquired the skills and leadership experience necessary to carry out these functions.
As the independent policy analysis group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie noted in their review of the letter, Stephenson seemed to be being held to a vastly higher standard compared to the previous four EHRC chairs. “There was,” they wrote, “little indication that [Committee] members had looked in detail at her CV”. While the sex and gender issue — the prompt for the petition and much online raging — had taken up plenty of time in the actual hearing, it was only vaguely alluded to in the letter itself. Instead there was an insinuation that Stephenson’s ample experience in the area of women’s rights meant she had an insufficient “depth of understanding of enough issues facing groups with other protected characteristics including race and disability”, leaving her unable to “enforce the rights of everyone”. As MBM observed, such an argument forms a “striking contrast […] with the treatment of David Isaac’s long association with Stonewall, which was seen as a simple positive”.
Women’s rights are the one area where it is permitted to suggest that if you care about them a little too much … then that’s all you care about
The double standard is striking indeed, though not unexpected. No one was going to put down in writing “we do not want this woman because she recognises the political salience of sex”. Instead, there’s that workaround with which all feminists have become familiar in recent years. Women’s rights are the one area where it is permitted to suggest that if you care about them a little too much — so much that you won’t allow sex to be overwritten by gender — then that’s all you care about, to the detriment of all other rights for all other groups. In the case of Stephenson this couldn’t be further from the truth. As for her detractors – I’m not sure what they care about at all.
I have a particular interest in this because Stephenson was kind enough to allow me to interview her for my book Hags. Our conversation was not about “the trans issue”, but about the relationship between sex-based and age-based discrimination (age being another protected characteristic, albeit not one Stephenson’s critics have seen fit to mention). I felt — rightly — that Stephenson’s position as director of the Women’s Budget Group would give her particular insights into the cumulative nature of sex-based inequality. We discussed how women fall behind men due to lifecycle experiences, the impact of which are intensified due to factors such as race, class and disability. It was a conversation which acknowledged that sex matters, but only as a starting point. Of course, to anyone who has bought into gender identity ideology, such a conversation is only ever a flimsy excuse to hate on trans people, never to be taken at face value.
The more I think about this conversation, and the smears to which Stephenson has recently been subjected, the more it highlights to me the way in which contemporary trans activism demands a completely different understanding of how we approach equality. There is an approach that is relational, which understands that who we are and where we stand depends on our relationships with other people, and that making the world fairer for all is not a simple matter of stating “I am who I say I am” and forcing everyone else to agree. It’s an approach that recognises the importance of bodies, the threat of violence, and the value of supposedly “lowly” work. It’s one that recognises the rights of all by acknowledging our dependency — socially, politically, physically, linguistically — on one another. Anyone who maintains this fundamentally intersectional approach will, like Stephenson, end up being called a terf, not because they have the slightest interest in “advocating for the curtailment of trans people’s human rights”, but because trans activism prioritises an individualistic validation of the “true self” over a relational, shifting understanding of selfhood.
I am not convinced that those Committee members who objected to Stephenson’s appointment actually believed that she was insufficiently experienced or too single-issue focussed. I suspect what they wanted was someone just like her, only not, you know, an actual terf. After all, there are plenty of people in DEI roles who embrace gender identity ideology. The trouble is that such an embrace is an obstacle to any serious engagement with inequality in all its forms. If you believe that anyone who focusses on the needs of women — not least as a prerequisite to addressing the needs of marginalised subsets of women — is only doing so to make others feel left out, your problem is not their exclusionary tendencies. It’s your own narcissism.
Thankfully, despite the objections, Stephenson has been confirmed as the next EHRC chair, starting in December. This is a promising sign for anyone who cares about actual progress. The confirmation has, as expected, prompted the usual expressions of disappointment from people who believe themselves to be on the side of the angels. They’re not, though. If they were, they’d be tarred with the terf brush too. Maybe one day they’ll understand what equality means and come and join us.
