It is dangerous territory making assumptions about a woman’s intentions by the clothes she wears. But it was tempting to conclude that Georgia Bilham was making a point with the outfits she turned up wearing at Chester crown court for each day of her seven-day trial.
Accused of tricking another young woman into sexual activity by pretending to be a boy, Bilham presented an image of what felt like deliberate femininity.
Small and slight, she wore her long blond hair down, her lips and cheeks pink. Her black tops arguably more appropriate for a nightclub than a court of law. Her voice was soft and high, her words often so quiet that the judge kept asking her to speak up.
It all seemed designed to ask a question of the jury: do you really think that I could trick anyone into thinking I am anything other than an attractive young woman?
Yes, was their ultimate answer. But only up to a point. They found her guilty of only one of the 17 sexual offence charges she faced, and it was the least serious: sexual assault by kissing. On Friday she was sentenced to a 24-month community order and will also have to sign the sex offender register. A five-year sexual harm prevention order was imposed..
It was just the latest example of gender fraud reaching the courts after the conviction in May of Blade Silvano, a 40-year-old woman who posed as a man during a two-year relationship with a woman she met online. Seven years ago another young woman from Cheshire, Gayle Newland, was jailed for six and a half years after pretending to be a man to trick one of her friends into sex with the help of a blindfold.
The story of how 21-year-old Bilham ended up on trial began six years ago outside a McDonald’s. That was when Bilham first met the teenage girl she would later dupe into a relationship, posing as a boy called George. But at their first, unremarkable and chance meeting, she was herself: Georgia, a 14-year-old from Alpraham, a village in east Cheshire.
Bilham and her victim had mutual acquaintances and chatted for perhaps half an hour. A few years later, for what she described as “an escape” from her real life, Bilham created a Snapchat account in the name of George Parry. Using a cartoon of a blond man in sunglasses as her avatar, she contacted the complainant, as well as another girl who gave evidence at her trial.
“George” said he lived in Birmingham but that his grandma lived near the complainant, and claimed to be a bad lad mixed up with eastern European drug dealers. They started chatting in 2017 and became friends, meeting just once. It did not go well. Afterwards, the girl announced “there’s something weird about you” (she told the jury she did not know what) and blocked “him” on social media. They had no contact for the next four years, until April 2021, when George got in touch to say he was again in the area.
The two soon rekindled an intense online relationship, with George sending voicenotes in a distinctly Brummie baritone. Eventually, they began to meet up again after Bilham passed her driving test. Bilham would always wear a hooded top covering most of her face to play the part of George. Putting on a deep voice, Bilham would ask the girl to take her glasses off, knowing, the prosecution said, that the girl was so shortsighted that she was legally blind.
On their third meeting, on 11 May 2021, they went out for a drive in Bilham’s mum’s car and had their first kiss. It was that kiss which ultimately led to Bilham’s sole conviction, after the jury decided that the other girl genuinely believed she was kissing a boy.
That one guilty verdict was probably to be expected. Giving evidence in her tiny voice, Bilham accepted that she probably had tricked the girl. But she insisted her cover was blown later that night, after she drove into a ditch and the police arrived.
Bilham was told to get out of the car and show her ID. The girl, when giving evidence, said she had overheard one of the officers refer to “Georgia Bilham” on the police radio. She challenged “George”, who spun her a story about using a fake driving licence because he was involved with Albanian gangsters.
The complainant texted her that evening, asking: “All right little boy? Or girl [laughing emoji].”
She then asked: “Answer this with yes or no: are you a girl? And if you are a girl, why the fuck have you lied all this time?”
Bilham insisted she was a boy – “I ain’t lied to you” – and would prove it. She could not show her passport, she said, because she had sent it off to be renewed. Instead, she sent a series of topless selfies, which she admitted to the jury were actually of a blond boy from her school.
She told the court she assumed from that point the game was up, but continued to pretend to be George after the crash. “I was just trying to protect myself because I got myself caught up in the web of lies,” she said. She could not explain why she had done it, insisting she was not transgender and considered herself straight.
The complainant maintained that Bilham never took her hood down, even when the pair were in bed together, and always made her remove her glasses. But Bilham said that wasn’t true, and that they had often met in broad daylight, walking her dog on a nearby beach.
She denied that when she stayed over at the girl’s mum’s house she left the seat up after going to the toilet, and insisted she had never worn boxer shorts or put a “hard object” down her trousers to mimic a penis.
It was ultimately the girl’s mother who saw Bilham for who she really was. Not nearly as shortsighted as her daughter, she met Bilham and thought she looked distinctly feminine, and said as much. That night, the girl did some online sleuthing, which eventually led her to Georgia Bilham’s Facebook profile.
She confronted Bilham by text, and she immediately confessed. “I never meant to let it get that far,” wrote Bilham. “I hate myself for it & what I’ve done, I wanted to end it I just didn’t know how, I know I should have & I know I shouldn’t have let it get this far & I’m so sorry.”
The girl also contacted Bilham’s dad, Peter, telling him: “She’s a fantasist who needs serious help.”
She added: “I’ll be honest I did fall for this person I thought he was; I’m a young girl who thought she had met a lad who wanted to be with her but I now know everything was a sick lie.”
Ultimately, the jury decided that they could not be sure beyond all reasonable doubt that the complainant did not know Bilham was really a girl for each of their sexual encounters – apart from that first kiss. Her conviction will serve as a warning to anyone tempted to pretend to be someone they are not.
