One of the worst interviews I ever took part in was at the Belfast Film Festival. A man who could not have cared less about me or Father Ted asked questions handed to him by audience members because he clearly didn’t think anything of the show himself. I thought at the time it was just bad programming — one of those things you chalk up to experience and forget. But no. It’s just who they are. A bunch of elitists who sneer at the people for whom they are given the honour of curating events.
On 8 March, Belfast Film Festival will screen The Matrix at the SARC Sonic Lab in Dolby Atmos. The screening will be accompanied by a presentation from Olivia Ó’Ríada, who will be “diving into the oft-misread queer context of The Wachowskis’ breakout film, attempting to reclaim ‘the red pill’ from 25+ years of misunderstanding.” The event is part of BFF’s Sparks 25 project, funded by the BFI through the National Lottery — your money, in other words — and focused on reaching what the programme calls “underserved areas of the audience.”
A bit of film analysis, a bit of outreach. Perfectly pleasant — in the way that a middle finger is just a finger. Here’s what’s really going on. March 8 is International Women’s Day, and the BFF just spent a fortnight in an employment tribunal explaining why it destroyed a woman’s career.
Sara Morrison was Belfast Film Festival’s Inclusion and Audience Development Coordinator. She’s a single mother whose adult son identifies as trans. In April 2023 she attended a Let Women Speak rally in Belfast and spoke about the fact that people can’t change their biological sex, a subject obviously close to her heart, given the harm the ideology has already visited upon her family.
What happened next is the same thing that happened to me, to Allison Phillips, to Maya Forstater, to Jo Phoenix, to Kathleen Stock, to Rosie Kay, to Jenny Lindsay, to Rosie Duffield, and to countless other men and women across the woke west. Trans activists came to destroy her life, and the people who should have defended her instead fed her to the mob.
Sara made her speech, and the footage circulated. The organisations Morrison had criticised in her speech — women’s sector groups who long ago decided to betray women in favour of crossdressing men — leaned on BFF. And the BFF folded like Imane Khelif in a fair fight.
Well, maybe not that fast. In the early days they were helpful enough to print out the online abuse she was receiving so she could report it to the police. Then, board chair Mark Cousins stepped in. He emailed colleagues to say Morrison had shown “no hint of regret” (for what, exactly, Mark?) and suggested she be “removed from queer and trans projects.” His co-chair Laurence McKeown — an ex-IRA hunger striker, because Belfast — helpfully compared Morrison’s attendance at a women’s rights rally to “sharing a platform with dissident republicans advocating armed struggle.” He walked that one back fairly sharpish under cross-examination.
BFF brought in an external PR firm. They brought in an external HR firm. They revoked Morrison’s access to work systems, took her keys, reset her email password but sent it to her work address rather than her personal one, which is like changing someone's locks and then posting the new key through the letterbox of the house they can no longer get into. Stupidity or cruelty? With gender ideology, it’s often both. It’s a belief system that tends to bring out the Dickens villain in people who presumably believe themselves beyond reproach.
Michele Devlin, the festival director, put out a public statement reassuring the activist groups that BFF “passionately supports your values.” She then attended Belfast Pride in a t-shirt bearing the words “TRANS INCLUSIVE FEMINIST” in block capitals, just in case the mob might mistake her for her awful feminist colleague.
Morrison went on sick leave. Her grievance was rejected. Her grievance appeal was rejected. She resigned in November 2024 and filed a tribunal claim for discrimination based on gender-critical beliefs and constructive dismissal.
The hearing took place in November 2025 at Killymeal House in Belfast. It did not go well for BFF. Cousins was forced to explain under cross-examination why he’d said Morrison should be removed from “queer and trans projects” but not the women’s sector work — thereby undermining BFF’s entire stated rationale for the investigation. When asked whether he believed people could change sex, he offered examples from botany.
The tribunal was further enlivened when Morrison’s legal team filed a recusal application against the entire three-person panel. One member, Professor Deborah Boyd, had run an organisation on the other side of the argument and hadn’t thought to mention it. Observers in the gallery reported her making hostile facial expressions during cross-examinations. She eventually stepped down citing “health reasons.”
The verdict is pending.
Like most of those with luxury beliefs, Cousins is a man who cannot defend his position when it’s tested in open court. And when you can’t defend your position, you have two options: you can admit you were wrong, or you and the other mean girls of the BFF can start doing what you’re best at, namely, passive aggressive trolling.
Which brings us back to International Women’s Day.
That Matrix event on 8 March isn’t just a film screening. The presenter, Olivia Ó’Ríada, is a co-director of the Trans Image/Trans Experience Film Festival in Dublin. That festival’s producer is Head of Film Programming at Outburst Arts — the Belfast queer arts organisation that was part of the network that pressured BFF over Morrison. BFF’s own director, Michele Devlin, previously ran the GAZE International LGBT Film Festival, where another of Ó’Ríada’s co-founders now works.
Innit a small world!? The same people, circling the same venues, drawing from the same pots of public money. And now one of them is giving a talk at BFF on International Women’s Day, a film whose trans reading was retrofitted years after its release, after both directors, veterans of LA’s BDSM scene, began crossdressing.
This is what trans activism is really all about. Nothing to do with a marginalised community seeking acceptance but a coordinating, connected power structure asserting dominance over the lower orders. BFF isn’t celebrating women on International Women’s Day. It’s celebrating the ideology that was used to destroy one particular woman’s career, rubbing every other woman’s nose in it, while being rewarded with public money.
When your ideology requires the suppression of women’s speech as a condition of its existence, then every platform you take on a day set aside for women is an act of supreme misogynistic trolling. I doubt there is an email on which they were foolish enough to write “let’s programme this specifically to humiliate Sara and any other uppity woman” but there doesn’t need to be. BFF staff are embarrassed and angry that Sara humiliated them in court and revealed their misogyny to the world. This is a nice little bit of revenge that they can pass off as inclusion. (And if you still need convincing, this unit is the other act they’re serving up on March 8.)
Sara didn't deserve this. And neither do the women of Belfast who support single-sex spaces and women-only sports — positions so ordinary they shouldn't need defending at all. But at least it serves as a reminder that trans is not a liberation movement. It is a form of trolling, an assertion of power over the people it wishes to dominate,
Mark Cousins and the BFF are a pack of misogynist trolls. They took the one day of the year that’s supposed to be about women, and they made it about men. All for spite and petty revenge.
Thanks Graham. You mean "International What About Men Day"? ;) I guess they finally found a way to make that day all about them as well. After all, isn't every day (in their heads) supposed to be about the so-called marginalised and under represented trans people?
As usual, a superbly written and reasoned piece.