Guardian: A politically toxic issue: the legal battles over gender-critical beliefs

@IcakethereforeIam 1993?! Quick edit needed I think 😆

Is the Makareth case finished? The last I read dated June 1993, I think, he was going to appeal. Unless I misunderstood.

The glaring omission in that article is that employers have been "guided" by stonewall et al to discriminate against these women.

It varies depending on the person.

Would the ‘essence’ be biological difference at the chromosomal level?

If so, I am one of ‘those people’. Nothing to do with glittery eyeshadow or preferring toy trains, though.

This article reminded me just how important all these legal cases are. They set the terms for our future!

The article doesn't mention what these women have gone through to do it - the years, the effort, the money, the uncertainty, for some the personal harassment from trans activists. Or the public support that has gone in to raise the money - half a million pounds in donations for Allison Bailey's crowdfunder alone.

Props to all the strong brave determined women who have put these cases forward.

Imagine if we all had to start believing in astrology and putting our star signs in our signatures, and we could be disciplined or sacked for refusing to accept that a person's star sign mattered. Would "lack of belief in astrology" or "refusal to accept astrological beliefs" be regarded as a belief in itself?

When I was reading the Mackereth case EAT judgment the other day, they go into quite a lot of detail on this and interestingly they concluded that a lack of holding a belief is protected under the "belief" protected characteristic as much as the actual belief is, before you even get to having a positive belief that gender identity/astrology was wrong.

I agree with this. Even most TRAs don't pretend biological sex doesn't exist, just that it's not the criterion that should be used for grouping, and should be replaced by some transcendent, ill defined notion of gender identity. That's a belief. The contrary position, that the grouping factor should remain biological sex is similarly a belief, but one which is very strongly supported by very clear concepts, argument and evidence.

Quite. If trans people really were bringing cases where they were told they should be fired, or people were scared of them being in the same building, we'd know all about it.

Some of these people don’t just think people have different bodies and that that matters; they believe people are male and female ‘really’ based on a male / female essence. It’s the same kind of belief (a belief in male / female essences) which some, but not all, transgender people have. They just believe in a different male / female essence. A lot of people think people have different bodies without the belief in male / female essences that some of these people have.

Absolutely right, Amaryllis - it's been quite clear in a number of these tribunals that the claimant is regarded as a terrible human being just for believing in reality. That came across very strongly in the Forstater, Bailey and Phoenix cases.

Imagine if we all had to start believing in astrology and putting our star signs in our signatures, and we could be disciplined or sacked for refusing to accept that a person's star sign mattered. Would "lack of belief in astrology" or "refusal to accept astrological beliefs" be regarded as a belief in itself?

I thought that was a really balanced and thorough article from the Guardian! (apart from that last bit perhaps). And it wasn't something they "had" to report on, they didn't need to write/publish that at all.

could be better, but good to see it in the mainstream media

“The overwhelming majority of employers are not setting out to discriminate; they’re not just thinking ‘well all people with gender-critical views are bad, so we’re just going to get rid of them’,” said Lewis.

The employers who have been found in court to be discriminating did seem to think exactly that. Some of them were more than happy to say so.

Who could forget Kirrin Metcalf's email that Allison Bailey presented a danger just by being in the building? The judge in Rachel Meade's case had to say explicitly that "gender critical" does not mean "transphobic". The ERCC case hasn't been decided yet but part of the evidence that their current CEO said in public that people with such views need to be got rid of.

I prefer to go by what can be proven. I'm not gender critical, it's just that my GCSE biology course informed me it's impossible to change sex. Reality, in other words.

Apart from that, this Graun might be retreating, just a tiny bit?

Im going to copy over my post from the thread I started:

This part isn't wholly accurate though, having read the whole Mackereth appeal judgment only this week. He didn't actually misgender anyone, it never got that far. He wanted to be able to avoid using preferred pronouns, and he resigned on the basis of being told he couldn't. The first ET was prior to Maya Forstater's and he was told his gender critical belief wasn't worthy of respect in a democratic society, like Maya's.

At appeal this part of the case was overturned in the same way it was in Maya's (her successful EAT had already taken place). He was still found to have not been discriminated or harassed by the DWP pronoun policy, as it was considered that it was reasonable to expect him to use the vulnerable service users' preferred pronouns, and it was not very often.

The tribunals have made clear that it is not a free-for-all but a balancing exercise. For instance, David Mackereth – an outlier in that he lost his case based on gender-critical beliefs – was found to have crossed the linee by misgendering service users at the Department for Work and Pensions, making its decision to dismiss him reasonable.

Well, on the one hand, kudos to the Guardian for running this. (It's the first mention I've seen in the national press about the Roz Adams case in Edinburgh.) On the other hand, while it started off well, it descended into the usual Guardian one-sidedness.

The sentence people have already quoted - 'In fact, she suggested there were likely to be a greater number of claims brought by transgender people alleging harm, though many go unreported' - does not have any supporting evidence. I'd go so far as to say it's nonsense. Yes, there have been a few high-profile gender-critical cases, but as we know there are many more cases of gender-critical women being discriminated against that have been completely unreported. So many women don't have the legal resources to bring a case.

I really doubt there are thousands of trans people all over the country bringing discrimination cases when HR departments have universally bought into this ideology.

A decent article would have focused on the relentless bullying and intolerance displayed towards people expressing the perfectly ordinary and unexceptional belief that humans can't change sex.

Ah sorry I didn't see there was another thread!

I think it's more that the Legal Affairs Correspondant has a better handle on the law than they do, so is better able to bat them away. I've seen stuff from him before in the Graun that's struck me as pretty balanced, so it's not a one-off.

They just have got strong alternative views in the workplace and they haven’t known how to navigate through that conflict

This is actually funny! So here is someone who has realised that actually the law courts are saying GC women are not being bigoted or discriminatory to have their views, and are winning their cases, but is desperate to still find a way to lay the blame on GC women rather than their TRA indoctrinated employers, so has found this rather weak argument that all these workplace conflicts must be happening because of all these difficult women’s poor social skills. Uppity women.
The age old misogyny infusing this thinking is blatant.

And on a point of fact, actually our views are the mainstream ones, not the alternative ones.

Good analogy.

Laughing at the idea of the usual staff hibernating with their emotional support penguins.

Well in my organisation if it weren't for this grifting good for nothing HR type (and her colleagues) we'd be stonewalled up to the eyebrows, our women's toilets would have been made gender neutral (not the men's of course), pronouns would be mandatory, and gender would have replaced sex in our policies, because that is what our senior leadership team keep pushing for in order to meet EDI objectives from the Board.

But of course it's always the fault of HR.....ffs

Bot sure why they are comparing number of cases of discrimination against GC beliefs with discrimination against transgender people anyway (even if they are right and there lots of trans people stoically keeping quiet about it). The fairer comparison would be the number of cases where an employee was discriminated against for believing that gender identity was more important than sex, and that number is probably zero.

I'm fine with "belief". The key belief being fought for here is "sex matters", not just that it exists.

Regardless of reality, you can take different positions on "age matters", "race matters", "hair colour matters", "religion matters", "star sign matters", "aura colour matters", and so on.

Reality isn't sufficient for trying to get "matters" into policy. Or strictly necessary, I think.

Thanks for explaining that @Igmum. What bonkers times we live in. I'm grateful that MF and others have had a legal route to fight this madness, but I do worry about the constant drip-feeding that basic reality is just a 'belief' which it's perfectly fine not to agree with.