Transwoman wins employment discrimination case against NHS for being treated differently from women in changing room

On the nod not on the bid a few posts up. Stupid auto carrot.

Getting changed in a changing room is not voyeurism or exhibitionism.

Then why didn't this person change in a cubicle as them had previously agreed to do?

Are you an employment barrister, out of interest?

They might identify as one?

Don't be barristerphobic!

As for RMW (who pops up here now and again) lurkers might want to Google their career and especially reviews of their book.

"We aren’t allowed freedom from exhibitionism/voyeurism."

Getting changed in a changing room is not voyeurism or exhibitionism.

Sorry. I meant whether or not the incident happened wasn’t determinative. It was simply accepted on the bid that there has been a complaint to that effect, which the managers were aware of.

Got it, that makes sense. Though as you can see I'm shook by the way in which the EJ interpreted the managers' response to it.

Women aren't allowed to want transwomen to put their dick away.

There we have it.

Women aren’t allowed boundaries. We aren’t allowed privacy from the male sex. We aren’t allowed freedom from exhibitionism/voyeurism.

And we aren’t allowed to be distressed or angry about this situation; we aren’t allowed to express our feelings about it - unless perhaps we do so in ways that are at all times respectful of and deferential to the penis-owners who are taking our boundaries away.

This is 2022. This is the state of women’s “rights” in 2022.

Women objecting to a male person being naked in female changing rooms was used as evidence that they were discriminating against said male, by an Employment Judge. You may be correct that 'can be used as evidence against you in an Employment Tribunal' != 'not allowed' but I feel that's splitting hairs.

Sorry. I meant whether or not the incident happened wasn’t determinative. It was simply accepted on the bid that there has been a complaint to that effect, which the managers were aware of. The truth or otherwise of that complaint wasn’t at issue.

(Sort of analogous to the approach to the abusive notes, actually. Whether they were real or not wasn’t the issue. The issue was how management dealt with the complaint about them.)

Thank you.

I agree that the comparator is important here.

However I do not think that this judgement, which boils down to ‘you would not have asked a woman these questions’ is the same as ‘you are not allowed to complain about males being naked in female changing rooms’.

Are you an employment barrister, out of interest?

Here you go:

it didn’t impact meaningfully on the decisions before the tribunal.

By my reading it did, in precisely the wrong way. The fact that this person's colleagues were concerned at this behaviour is used by the EJ as evidence that they were discriminating in the formal meeting where underwear was mentioned.

Women aren't allowed to want transwomen to put their dick away.

It’s para 150.2. It’s mentioned in passing because, as @lookleft rightly says, it didn’t impact meaningfully on the decisions before the tribunal.

I agree with lookleft. I can’t find an actual account of the claimant being naked in the changing room.

The claimant was questioned about whether she normally wore underwear, and about whether she had been naked in the changing room. This line of questioning was found discriminatory. As far as I can tell the questioning was not in relation to actually being naked in the changing room, but rather a propos of the rather odd conversation, initiated by the claimant, that she was so hot she had taken her underwear off.

Then there was the claimants account of the conversation in the changing room that she overheard, which mentioned (I paraphrase) that the claimant had been naked and the women in question didn’t like it.

This conversation was agreed, for the purposes of the hearing, to have happened.

No actual person has admitted having that conversation. It is unclear whether the conversation was referring to an actual or hypothetical occurrence of the claimant being naked.

Just because this judge made this judgement doesn’t mean that the same Tribunal, indeed the same judge, couldn’t also have found that the women were discriminated against by not being given a single sex space to change in. No woman made such a claim, so no such question was asked.

I agree it's not the central tenet of this case.

For many of us who've been in this discussion for quite a few years, we may be more interested in the wider picture this very detailed tribunal gives.

And there's an elephant in the room, in terms of patterns of behaviour, that none of us can name on this forum for 'reasons', but we're recognising the elephant and some posters may be breaking it down to focus on its tail, foot, or changing-room trunk.

When you build it back up, it's still the very familiar elephant we all know- he's sitting there, in the corner, all grey and wrinkly.

We see it.

Lol lol lol at robin moira white being quoted. 😂😂

I've now read the full judgement. Good grief.

The claimant was looking for problems from the start, before they even started working. They sound like a complete nightmare, even aside from the wringing knickers conversation.

I feel very sorry for the management staff having to deal with them.

The claimant absolutely does not sound like the victim in this case.

@Clymene I've read this post a few times now - I'm fairly sure I'm being insulted, but beyond that can't see what point you are making. Is part of your first paragraph quoting another post? Would you mind clarifying?

I would draw your attention to remarks by employment barrister Robin White:

😂

I would draw your attention to remarks by employment barrister Robin White:

RMW has a tendency to interpret the law as RMW would like it to be. A bit like Stonewall.

I just want to paste the part of the judgement that relates to this person telling colleagues about their underwear, as that's being minimised upthread in a particularly ridiculous comment. Let's allow everyone to make up their own minds about this person's behaviour.

Mrs T said that the Claimant approached her on 10 June 2021 in the servery and asked for a word in private. Mrs T took her to the disposable room, which was the nearest empty room. The Claimant told her that she did not feel well. She was hot and sweaty and it was making her feel ill. Mrs T was not authorised to send the Claimant home, because there was a manager (Mrs H) on site. Mrs T knew the Claimant only had an hour of her shift left, so she suggested she take five minutes, have a drink of water and then finish her shift. At that point the Claimant told her she was so hot she had taken her underwear off, and made a wringing motion with her hands. Mrs T again suggested that she have a cold drink. Mrs T went to see Mrs H, because she had authority to send the Claimant home. Mrs T recounted the whole conversation to Mrs H, including the suggestion that the Claimant had taken her underwear off and made a wringing gesture.

I substituted initials for names as I think this site has a lot more Google visibility than the Employment Tribunal judgements repository.

Most of the other nonsense in that egregious comment is already refuted.

I am just going to point out that 152.1 - 152.4 are not "reasons the judge found for the claimant", they are (unremarkable) findings of fact. The reason is, as said so many times in this thread already including the title, the judge's belief that a "cisgender woman" would not have been asked the same questions, and that this contravenes the Equality Act because a "cisgender woman" is the appropriate comparator.

I did read it, but I accept that my previous comment wasn't well worded. My point is that a potentially naked TW in the female changing room isn't the subject of the case. The fact that the manager had previously received a report of the TW being naked was only raised incidentally in the judgment as a potential reason for the manager overzealously questioning the TW on their underwear. Nothing in the case depends on whether that was true, and nothing in the judgment affects whether or not that would be acceptable in a single sex space. The headlines that are being generated from this are really misleading.

Eh? I don't recall reading anywhere that part of the Equality Act was aimed at ensuring men who say they're women should be able to legally use all women's spaces.

Rightfully so, the Equality Act protects those going through gender reassignment don't experience harassment or discrimination in life {though what classifies as 'going through a gender reassignment process' has become incredibly nebulous following Stonewall et als 'trans umbrella' of what trans is defined as - including cross dressers).

But the detail of the EA doesn't magically put those people who'd rather be seen as the opposite sex into that sex - another protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

Men who say they're women may have been inserting themselves in spaces designed for women for years without consent from a lot of the women in those spaces.

Which is concerning in itself.

That doesn't mean that they should be in those spaces, or that there was laws in place previously that mandated their access to those spaces. (Referencing your comment that transwomen have 'legally been using those spaces for years')

Nor does it mean that those who drew up the Equality Act thought 'Well, we could stop this apparently legal thing (that doesn't actually exist) happening by 'a ban' but hey, let's just ignore it'.

They put elements in the Act that explicitly allows services to exclude males, including those who say they're women!

You've been hoodwinked if you think anything else is the reality.