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A co-founder of LGB Alliance was reduced to tears during cross-examination on the definition of the word lesbian on Thursday, prompting the court to adjourn, during a legal challenge to the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the organisation.

The meaning of the word lesbian has been analysed on several occasions during five days of court hearings triggered by a challenge brought by the children’s trans rights charity Mermaids.

Kate Harris, a co-founder of LGB Alliance, was invited by Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, to reflect on whether some people would have a different understanding of lesbian from the definition given by her organisation.

“That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” she asked.

Gibbon responded: “Putting it in a more neutral way, that lesbians can include someone who is a woman as a result of gender reassignment.”

Harris, who is a lesbian, was distressed by the exchange, and the judge called for a short adjournment. Gibbon later apologised if he had “raised something inadvertently upsetting”. Harris said: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”

She added: “A lesbian is attracted to another biological woman, full stop.”

Mermaids argues that LGB Alliance was created as an anti-trans organisation, set up to undermine the work of Mermaids and other charities such as Stonewall which advocate for trans rights. It questions whether LGB Alliance meets the legal threshold for charitable status, which requires its purpose to be “exclusively charitable for the public benefit”.

LGB Alliance contests that it is promoting the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, based on its position that there are only two sexes and that gender is a social construct, and rejecting the decision of most LGBTQ+ organisations to move towards a more interchangeable use of the words sex and gender. Harris said her organisation was created to protect children from a “dangerous and confusing gender-identity ideology”.

Mermaids’ counsel questioned Harris and LGB Alliance’s chair of trustees, Eileen Gallagher, on the “combative” and “confrontational” language used by the charity in tweets and campaigning literature, including accusing Mermaids of child abuse and of spreading lies. He said Mermaids took the safeguarding of children very seriously and questioned whether it was LGB Alliance’s place to criticise the national lottery and Starbucks for choosing to fund Mermaids.

Gibbon asked Gallagher about the balance between LGB Alliance’s political lobbying and its charitable work, asking for details of its commissioned research and plans to launch a helpline.

Harris rejected the suggestion that the charity had an anti-trans agenda. “People like us and JK Rowling and thousands of others have been called anti-trans for the simple reason that we say biology is real and that there are two sexes,” she said. She added that the use of terms like anti-trans and transphobic were “lazy shorthand” used to avoid dialogue.

The hearing, which was due to end on Friday, has been adjourned until November.