Jenny Watson Feuds With LGB Alliance
L Community founder and former LGB Alliance darling has run afoul of the anti-trans activist organization for, she alleges, reporting sexual misconduct.
by Aly Gibbs
Remember Jenny Watson?
It’s okay if you don’t, it’s been a while since we talked about her. I first wrote about her plans for a lesbian bar that excluded trans women in April of last year, then two months later about her plans for a lesbian social app that excluded trans women. Jenny’s bar only got as far as a lemonade stand on the sidewalk in the rain, and the social app wasn't exactly a rousing success. Back in July, I wrote an update recapping Jenny’s failures and reported on some accusations that she had scammed the people who donated to her nonexistent gay venue, with no expectation that I would ever write about Jenny Watson again.
That changed when I recently discovered that infighting with Watson in the gender critical community has reached a bit of a fever pitch, and Jenny herself has gone scorched earth on her former allies, making allegations of sexual harassment and stalking and reporting anti-trans activist group LGB Alliance to the UK Charity Commission.
This is a complicated one, so I’ll try to make sense of it for you all as best I can.
Starting in September, Jenny posted a series of lengthy diatribes on her Substack detailing how she was pulled into the GC movement and, in particular, her association with LGBA. She explains that association with LGBA was always detrimental to her own plans, earning her attention from “activists” without offering tangible help with her projects.
“Facing the truth was hard: to admit that nearly a decade of work had been wrecked for their vanity, and that I was now on my own,” she said of her experiences working with LGBA. “They raised my visibility, then walked away. The circuit was clear: donations in, spin a story, more donations out. None of it touched infrastructure. It was never about building. It was about performance.”
Jenny says she disclosed a safeguarding failure to LGBA’s CEO, Kate Barker, in September of last year, and that they began a smear campaign against her almost immediately. She claims that LGBA “weaponized” her “medical history and sexuality,” and alleges that, in doing so, they violated UK data protection laws, the Equality Act 2010, and the Charities Act 2011.
Jenny claims that LGBA’s Media Liaison, Robert Jessel, alongside “insider” Jo Bartosch coordinated public harassment against her on social media, branding her an “unstable woman” to “drown out the record of what they had done.”
She even singles JK Rowling out for publicly supporting LGBA, saying, “Rowling trades on 'believe women' while backing trustees who leaked medical data, ran retaliation, and buried safeguarding. Her brand is built on ‘I was poor, I was a survivor, I know what it means not to be believed’ and ‘I stand up for women who tell the truth.’ But her name is being used as the mask for a cover-up where a working-class lesbian woman nearly dies at a conference she endorsed.”
“Rowling lends her brand because without it LGBA is exposed,” she says. “[A] hollow, unsafe shell already under investigation.”
While Jenny never names her abuser, she maintains in her writing that she is the victim of sexual assault, harassment and stalking by somebody closely associated with LGBA, and that they have worked to protect and enable him, as well as covering up his actions. A commenter on one of her Substack posts noted her lack of concrete details, saying, “At some point, your withholding of meaningful details crosses the line into deceiving and misleading the reader.”
“What’s published isn’t for entertainment; it’s evidence, released in stages,” Jenny replied. “It has to be documented now so the record already exists when the regulators make their announcement. This ensures there’s proof of what happened, in my own words, before anyone tries to rewrite it. Legally, this is as far as I can go without prejudicing the investigations.”
On X, Jenny’s spent most of the last few months posting almost daily about the infighting between her and other GC activists, alongside more vague discussions about her harasser. She’s even spoken out against GC activism in general, ranted about class-based hierarchy in misogyny, and compared her GC enemies to Ghislaine Maxwell.
It’s unclear what the truth behind Jenny Watson’s allegations are. With criminal accusations supposedly in the hands of the police and a report against LGBA to the Charity Commission apparently underway, it seems unlikely that she’ll speak clearly on either situation until the information has been made public by other people.
Watson doesn’t seem to have learned much of anything good from this betrayal, unfortunately. She still talks about being “peaked” (becoming a transphobe, essentially) and rails against trans women in her Substack posts, and she hasn’t recanted any of her transphobia. She has, at best, wisened up to the “hollowness” of groups like LGBA and its leadership.
These people are chiefly seeking money and power, and scapegoating trans people as a means to an end. The Jenny Watsons of the world are so blinded by their hatred of trans people that they’ll always fail to recognize their bedfellows for what they really are:
Monsters.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
