Jolyon gets dragged by a minor local journalistic outfit known as The Times.

That’s gotta sting.

Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.

Mr Justice Swift on Friday dismissed a legal challenge brought by the project against Britain’s rights watchdog over a now-removed update on its website, which said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services such as shops and hospitals. The same applied for trans men using men’s lavatories.

Yes, but trans men are not a potential threat to men the way trans women are a potential threat to women.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published the update in April last year, just over a week after the UK’s highest court ruled in April that the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 referred to a biological woman and biological sex.

…

Jolyon Maugham, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, said after the judgment that “the judiciary can’t be trusted always” in a reaction that critics have dubbed “Trumpian”.

The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal. Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

One has to admit, they’re good at the grifting part. Results, not so much.

In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

Hey it’s just a typo. Nobody knows how that “not” got in there. Must be the intern.

The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”

The letter said any “uncertainty or complexity” around the Supreme Court judgment last year was “compounded (if not directly caused) by the dissemination of false information, such as that now promulgated by the Good Law Project”. It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

Ouch. That’s harsh. I hope Joly is reading it over and over and over…