Allison Bailey sues TRA vets

Well done Allison and a good result. It’s interesting as I expected a bit more of a smoking gun type comment somewhere regarding the difference in beliefs, but there was no such thing. If there was such a comment there would probably have been a settlement to be fair.

It should be a warning to organisations who pussyfoot around a small number of employees who hold strong views and try and pull strings as a result. I expect there are quite a lot of those who should take note!

Well done Allison. I’m a lawyer and we do tend to be direct (barrister probably more so). I have a vague question whether her race also played an issue, there are some grim tropes about angry black women.

For the lawyers amongst us, the opening line of the judgment “Jonty is an Airedale Terrier” has wonderful echoes of Lord Denning.

Keep those difficult wins coming, Difficult Wims! 💜

Well done to Alison.

I imagine there was a considerable element here of her being assertive being misread as being aggressive. I imagine too that I'm not alone on having experienced that too.

This was one the best judgements to read though. The judge has a fabulous writing style.

this will be a wake up call for most organisations.
They’ve been lied to for years and years by pressure groups and actively encouraged to ignore the law.
They truly believed their positions were bulletproof.

I completely agree. I’ve been told I’m sometimes strident and direct but I bet a man would just be seen as confident.

I also suspect that sometimes “legitimate criticism” is dismissed as “rudeness” out of defensiveness or a desire not to have to address the issue at hand.

I think she was asking for £25,000

I think this case is another illustration of how 'directness' in women is interpreted as rudeness. I'm so over having to dress up perfectly straightforward and reasonable requests with fluff and gratitude as if I'm asking a huge favour. Men don't. They just ask. And get.

Bang on.

I don’t expect to have to pass a ‘Miss Congeniality’ audition to access essential goods and services.

The judgment is a cracking read.

Hats off to the judge who appears to be a shrewd and sensitive human being. And an excellent judge of character.

As an aside, I found the stuff on memories, how plastic they are and how they get rewritten on every recollection very interesting.

Just seen this, fantastic!

I'm going to read the judgement later.

Thank you Marie.

He's probably too busy 😆

I’m shocked that Chris hasn’t been back to rage against the findings….

😁

We changed vets recently and there was no 'termination letter' - just a few emails and phone calls to confirm that we were ending the practice plan for wormer etc, and where to send the records. They booted AB because they wanted to.

Well done, Allison. It takes a lot of grit to follow through a case like that.

Well, the story took an unexpected turn half way through the judgment narrative!

So much disingenuous "don't remember" or "wasn't aware" or "don't have an opinion on the matter" - the parallels with the previous Garden Court case are such that I'm amazed no-one reversed into a bin...

It's a good job that how 'nice' someone is has absolutely no relevance on whether you can discriminate against them because of their legally held beliefs 🙄

Allison Bailey has probably had decades of being doubted and disrespected, so I don't blame her if she can be a bit tetchy. She is brave and honest.

Sharon D Clarke to play Allison Bailey in the future West End musical...

"After all, we're just monkeys in shoes."
😂😂
Love it!

Gah where is the laugh reaction when I need it!

I am so happy to hear this - congratulations Alison.
I thought we would need to wait years for cases to come through to get all this settled, but of course I had forgotten of the whole raft started 2 or 3 years ago which are all arriving at the GC station - woo-woo!

Yes, at best AB is direct with low tolerance for what she perceives as incompetence (and to be fair, small vet practices can be frustrating to deal with and this one seemed like it had a poor management culture), but I do regard her as something of an unreliable narrator with poor self-awareness and a tendency to create drama. That anecdote she told about Keir Starmer last year was bizarre.

But the vet practice didn’t behave well either, although no suggestion they would expel a pleasant client with GC views. I guess the lesson is, always follow your own policy.

That seems a reasonable summary, having read the judgment as well.

As a vet, she does sound like a client who is difficult to please and perhaps rather quick to get upset when things are less than perfect. It sounds like the only other clients they’d got rid of were much worse. There are many, many mildly aggravating and difficult clients and very few are told to leave. I strongly suspect the judge has made the right call and that if she had been someone else, that letter wouldn’t have been sent, especially as she was leaving anyway.

It also seemed to me there were various tensions in the practice as well. It reminded me of some of the more toxic places I’ve worked in. The idea of working in a toxic practice with added genderwoo is making me feel happy I’m no longer in practice.

If she was already leaving them, then sending her a termination letter was unnecessary. Most vet practices would simply heave a sigh of relief and hope the awkward client didn’t decide to return, I should imagine. Sacking her as a client, when she had already indicated she was leaving seems like an act of spite. I wonder how much it will cost them.

Having read the judgment, AB doesn’t come out of it in a particularly great light. And the vet practice doesn’t strike me as a hotbed of trans activism, but rather they failed to follow their own policies, and dislike of AB was likely intensified among a couple of key staff because of her GC views, which they lied unconvincingly about when cross examined.