A local offshoot of the Free Speech Union was forcibly excluded from a public house when a speaker raised objections to the teaching of gender ideology in schools.
The evening meeting at the Southern Belle pub in Brighton and Hove was scheduled for Tuesday, September 17th, after Free Speech Brighton booked a room and brought in sound equipment for the speakers to use. When the first, a retired teacher in her 50s, argued that parents should question the teaching materials, the landlord called in private security staff to remove her microphone and begin ejecting the 50 or so attendees from the room.
Group chair Laura King described on Facebook “a rush of [five] security guards coming into the room and demanding that we left.”
Remarkably, when a smaller group of around 10 people tried to reconvene informally at a different pub, employees of the same security firm, which some sources have named as Pagoda and others as Paragon, intervened to prevent this from happening.
In a public post on Facebook, attendee Julie wrote:
Tonight we went to a Free Speech Union meeting at the Southern Belle pub in Hove, a private meeting in a hired room. We were quiet and well-behaved. (Even me!) Less than an hour in, a private security firm … made us leave because we talked about gender reality. They then followed us to our next meeting place in a pub and made us break up the regrouping of maybe ten people. Absolutely amazed at the reality of thought-policing in this country right now.
Free Speech Union director Toby Young responded:
Legally, the landlord doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He cannot evict customers just because he disapproves of their perfectly lawful beliefs, particularly if those beliefs are protected by the Equality Act.
The issue of ‘gender ideology’ in schools—which can include the idea of a child’s ‘sexed soul’ being ‘born in the wrong body’—is increasingly controversial, not least on child safeguarding/welfare grounds.
