Cruelty as a hobby

Meet James Billingham, a straight male trans rights activist who is one of the worst abusers of women online

You’ll no doubt be shocked to discover that a man with a history of abusive behaviour appears to be the driving force behind the latest disruption of Marion Millar’s perfectly legitimate crowdfunding of her legal costs to defend herself against accusations of sending homophobic and transphobic tweets.

This is James Billingham, a man who has numerous sock accounts online, such as Kilgore Sprout, Sprout of Wrath, the only Sprout and Oolon, who appears to have a burning hatred of women who are invested in safeguarding women’s or children’s rights.

Billingham spends an inordinate amount of time doing the dirty work of some of the creepiest and most dangerous gender identity extremists. He minimised the vicious assault by a large man on Maria McLachlan as a slap ‘on the shoulder’ and suggested that McLachlan, a pensioner, was ‘by far the most violent person there’, an assertion completely contradicted by footage of the attack, for which Tara Wolf was convicted.

Billingham notably expended a lot of energy on diverting attention away from the Challenor scandal when it broke in August 2018. Billingham’s sock du jour even referred to David Challenor’s victim, who had been raped, tortured and imprisoned by him as a 10-year-old, as ‘the abused kid in the David Challenor thing’. Like Aimee and David Challenor, he is also the creator of a block list which automatically blocks accounts on Twitter which appear on a crowdsourced list of ‘trolls, abusers and bigots’, many of whom were revealed to be women asking polite questions about gender self-ID. Billingham even appeared on Newsnight to discuss his ‘Block Bot’, although only the introduction to the segment and a screencap of Billingham seem to have survived. The Block Bot likely formed the basis of Terfblocker, which is allegedly the work of at least one of the Challenors.

Billingham takes great pleasure in infiltrating or encouraging others to infiltrate feminist groups on Facebook. He then reveals out-of context messages, leaks membership lists or doxxes members in order to cause maximum distress and disruption. The wonderful Man Friday campaign for single-sex spaces ended after screenshots that outed some members of the group were leaked and publicised by a Sprout sock account via #TERFleaks. More recently, he set up a domain name almost identical to that of the LGB Alliance, which was linked to Stonewall’s site. The LGB Alliance tracked Billingham down and raised a dispute with Nominet Dispute Resolution Service, which they won.

Christian Wilton-King is an Autism specialist educator who works with autistic children and young adults. Stephanie Hayden is a serial litigator and aggressive trans activist, (who has seemingly just launched a new case against Louise Moody despite failing to comply with court directions in a case currently ongoing with myself). King asked people to respond to Hayden’s argument that there was no free speech in the UK.

Billingham edited out the middle response and the context so it looked like Wilton-King was encouraging a pile-on, based on Hayden’s appearance.

Christian told me: “It didn't matter. All the TRAs saw Sprout's doctored version and thus pursued me and accused me of inciting harassment. When my 6-month probation review came up, my line manager who had previously given me a solid, good 3-month review, with one or two outstanding features suddenly marked me down in certain areas with little or no evidence as to why.

My professional hearing, which was triggered by my failed probation, was delayed by COVID and so I endured 18 months of hell, where my union dropped me at the last minute due to further screenshots being sent to them by someone who'd infiltrated a small private group. We lost all our savings, I've never taught since and we've really struggled.”

I had a glowing career in teaching. I was an advanced practitioner. I got good stuff out of my autistic students with fantastic feedback from parents. And now I'm out of the role I was making a difference in. I was improving autistic people's lives. And now my career is trashed....and for what? Because I laughed at Hayden's eyebrows?”

Billingham’s speciality is revealing the identities of those who have to remain anonymous for work or safety reasons. He is thought to have been responsible for exposing a perfectly respectable anonymous Twitter account as belonging to Professor Michael Biggs, an Oxford academic who has researched the use of puberty blockers, leaving him open to abuse and potentially endangering his career. Billingham appears to have abused the password recovery function to find the email address associated with the account, a technique allegedly used by Aimee Challenor to identify Miranda Yardley and eject him from Twitter.

Billingham appears to be a married father with a job and hobbies. It’s a mystery why he is so invested in silencing women in favour of abusive and dysfunctional incels.

This is from an archive of Oolon’s blog, which contains the following advice on trolling:

Billingham, as Sprout, also defended the Kiss My Genders art exhibition at the Hayward gallery, which was accompanied by a training session from Gendered Intelligence for teachers about how to introduce the work to young children. The exhibition contains imagery associated with BDSM, fetish and porn and includes a close up of an erect penis and video footage of a mock gang rape scene.

Billingham/Sprout is a straight, married man who has made cruelty his hobby. He managed to have Marion’s crowdfunder taken down merely by spreading confusion and doubt. He wants to demoralise and confuse both Marion and the women who support her. So don’t let him win.

You can donate to Marion directly using her paypal at marion.l.millar@gmail.com. Please do so with confidence. And if you were targeted by Billingham, please send me your story.

(UPDATE: I’ll put all new information in a future post but I just had this from a subscriber.

Did you know he got permabanned from twitter because he set up a fake account pretending to be Lisa Muggeridge? I have screenshots of him admitting to it. Loads of his alt accounts got banned around the same time (I also have screenshots of these) but he seems to have an infinite supply of accounts so it didn't really make a dent on his behaviour

Nonetheless, people might want to report Billingham to Twitter for evading a ban.