‘Arts Council hounded me for not toeing line on gender issue’
Senior grants officer takes cultural body to tribunal in row over withdrawal of grant to gay rights activists
THE ARTS Council England created a “toxic” culture of “fear” for staff who dared to question transgender views, a senior grant officer has said as she accuses the charity of harassment and victimisation.
Denise Fahmy claims Britain’s biggest arts quango risked “closing down free speech” after a grant was withdrawn from a charity that campaigns for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights.
Ms Fahmy, 54, who has worked for 15 years as an Arts Council England (ACE) grant officer, says she was targeted after she questioned why £9,000 of funding was withdrawn from LGB Alliance.
She has now resigned but is taking ACE to an employment tribunal because she claims she was harassed and victimised for her support for the “gender critical” belief that someone’s sex – whether male or female – is biological.
Last April, LGB Alliance was awarded the grant to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee to celebrate how the lives of gay men had improved under the monarch’s reign. But it was withdrawn amid claims the alliance was transphobic, an allegation the charity denies.
At an ACE staff meeting held a few days before the cash was pulled, Simon Mellor, ACE’s deputy chief executive, said the LGB Alliance was “a divisive organisation with a history of anti-trans exclusionary activity”. He said it was a “mistake” for it to have been awarded the grant through a second body, the London Community Foundation.
At the meeting, Ms Fahmy said she was “shocked” by Mr Mellor’s remarks which she felt demonstrated “worrying “bias” affecting funding of the arts.
Ms Fahmy, who oversaw the development of the visual arts in the north of England, afterwards complained about Mr Mellor’s comments to the council’s chairman Sir Nicholas Serota and wrote to the then culture secretary, Michelle Donelan.
But a petition which appeared on the Art Council’s staff intranet was set up accusing LGB Alliance of being a “cultural parasite and a glorified hate group” whose supporters were “neoNazis, homophobes and Islamophobes”.
Arts Council England, funded by the taxpayer and the National Lottery and overseen by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, insists it was not involved in the decision to withdraw the funding from LGB Alliance.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms Fahmy told The Sunday Telegraph she was “sad” to be leaving the “really hard working organisation” in which she had “never seen bias in grant making before”.
“The statement made at the meeting seemed to me to be a really worrying turn of events,” she said. “It can’t be right that a leader of a public body distributing taxpayers and lottery players money, can let their personal or political views shape funding decisions.”
“I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious allegations of transphobia, especially in the wider arts community.
“If it was toxic for me in the office, I could only imagine what it’s like now for gender critical people and ‘the wrong kind of gays’ working in galleries and theatres across the country.
Ms Fahmy is using a crowdfunding website called “Fighting bias at the top of the Arts Council” to raise £50,000 for her legal team to fight her case at an employment tribunal hearing in May.
A spokesman for Arts Council England said: “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 the UK Communities Fund and its 44 member bodies.”
‘I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious transphobia allegations, especially in the wider arts community’