Maya Forstater hearing starts Monday

[MForstater]

Hi all,

Thank you so much for all your support: emotional, intellectual, financial, spiritual(!) reading the Mumsnet feminism board is where this all started for me!

The case starts tomorrow.

It is all online. If you want to watch you need to email the tribunal for a log in to [email protected]

It kicks off at 10am - the first bit will be "admin" between the judges and the lawyers working out the timings, issues and any reporting restrictions .

Once that is all sorted the judge and the panel will go away to read (probably for the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday)

I will most likely give evidence Wednesday and Thursday.

@tribunaltweets will be tweeting the whole thing (assuming they get permission from the judge)

Links to papers will go up throughout the case at www.hiyamaya.net.

Any other questions I am happy to answer them (apart from the ones where I have to say "that is for the tribunal to hear"...)

I have made a spectators guide with FAQs etc here

Lots of love

Maya

So LE accepts that there was no policy or guidance about the parameters of the debate. He accepts that other topics could be freely discussed. He says that 'delusional' crosses a line, but would he agree that a person who said, 'Vegans who eat meat on the basis that they believe meat is a vegetable are delusional' should be fired? No, he wouldn't, would he?

LE insists that there was no black and white line drawn at CGD, but says that MF's expressed views went 'over the line', but the line being referred to in internal communications is compared to - for example - racial extermination. LE says that wasn't his comparison. Okay, so why does he think her views went over the line? What is so offensive about them, if he doesn't think they (and legally, they don't, because they meet the Grainger criteria and such views wouldn't) are comparable to racial extermination?

Posie parker just blew up on twitter saying she has blocked Maya (check pic). Whats going on?

@sacredfeminina maybe you could ask MNHQ to delete the fake profile you posted, and the lie in it about Maya? This is a live court case.

My bold prediction is it's going to go right down to a handful of "bad words" said by MF on twitter or on the work Slack channel and how these constituted "harassment" or "unethical behaviour" to justify MF losing her job.

Yes nauticant, I agree.

But if it comes down to 'delusional', I don't think that would be justifiable. It's not harassment or abuse to say a view is false to the extent that it's delusional, unless you are specifically calling a colleague delusional (in which case that's arguable).

If it comes down to 'cross-dresser', that's what the individual she was describing admits to being (in essence). If it comes down to 'man in heels', that is what the individual in question is (legally).

Ben Cooper is doing a decent job of presenting a workplace, the London office, where there was a fair amount of argy-bargy over controversial issues in robust terms.

LE: MF's tweets were markedly different from all of that and stood out on their own.

The question, which is yet to be asked, is: what was so special about MF's tweets. LE claims it was the "tone".

LE 'didn't get bogged down in trying to understand the nuance of her belief' - so how can someone who doesn't make decisions about whether it attracts legal protection?

'The question, which is yet to be asked, is: what was so special about MF's tweets. LE claims it was the "tone".'

Bad tone. Naughty tone. He doesn't understand her beliefs, but the tone was very bad.

LE doesn't want to agree that there are two sexes and doesn't want to agree that that's a material reality.

One weakness being exposed here is that LE didn't bother at all to engage with the content of MF's messages as they related to her beliefs. And clearly is reluctant to engage with them in this hearing.

@nauticant

My bold prediction is it's going to go right down to a handful of "bad words" said by MF on twitter or on the work Slack channel and how these constituted "harassment" or "unethical behaviour" to justify MF losing her job.

But if that were the case the employer should have gone through due process, which it seems they didn't.

I read the witness statement yesterday. To my inexpert eye, it read like a company trying to fire someone without telling them why they were firing them, purely for the reason of holding contentious views, and without following usual procedure.

The employer are trying to claim both that they didn't fire Maya and that she was fired for wrongdoing. It can't be both.

But we'll see.

Poor LE. He didn't understand what is meant by a belief in 'material reality'.

LE isn't very bright is he?

BC: Materialism is a strand of philosophy isn't it?
LE: I don't know.

No, bless him.

To be fair, I don't blame him for that. It's dreadful that you can go for an HR job and be expected to adjudicate on philosophical materialism vis-a-vis the illogical position with which your organisation is clearly aligned. He's just not qualified in any way.

BC just made a Freudian slip.

We're now getting nicely into gender identity ideology and what MF believes. LE is answering everying as "I didn't understand MF believed that". This is what I was hoping for when I asked for a log-in for the hearing.

BC: Did you read the materials provided by MF from Kathleen Stock to support her views?

LE: I skimmed them.

Poor little guy.

'CGD does not draw a distinction between sex and gender.'

Ooh.

LE has just said that gender identity = sex, and that's the CGD position.

We're now getting nicely into gender identity ideology and what MF believes.

This is where it all unravels.

BC: Do you understand why in some circumstances that you need to distinguish between sex and gender identity?

LE: [he doesn't have a view on that, having been firm on them being the same]

There’s an awful lot this Luke fellow doesn’t know, isn’t there…

Ha! Try rephrasing it: 'do you understand that some things are real and some things are made up?'

Substance/belief: BC on the point here. The claimant has no way of expressing her beliefs, given CGD's institutional position.

Ben Cooper is good.

If Maya can't say TW are not women, It's not about language it's about prohibiting Maya's speech.

'I think the phrase "a man's internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality is offensive"'.

She wins, surely?