Relevant thread from last year: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4634273-times-article-on-academia
This is what she says on a well-known gardening site (can't link here, but should be easily found via search engine). Sounds like a very important case. She has an excellent legal team lined up but this will be expensive.
Summary
I'm an academic who has been researching the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics who raise questions about gender identity theory, including those that are ‘gender critical’ such as myself. As a consequence, I have been ostracised, subjected to false complaints, had my research stopped, my research data taken away, and I have lost my job. I’m raising funds because I am having to take the case to an Employment Tribunal.
Who am I?
My name is Laura Favaro. I am a Spanish sociologist, schoolteacher, and mum of two little boys. In 2020 we moved to the UK so that I could join City, University of London as Postdoctoral Research Fellow to investigate the disputes around sex and gender that have escalated dramatically since the 2010s.
I have collected large amounts of data on the ‘gender wars’ in academia. You can read about some of the findings in my Times Higher Education article called Researchers are wounded in academia's gender wars. You can also watch a talk , and another one .
There you will find harrowing testimonies by female academics across disciplines and careers stages: too afraid to voice their views, even to work in gender studies altogether; citing not just concerns about their jobs but fears over violence, putting their children at risk, and more. Some of them hold gender-critical views, others simply want to ask questions about aspects of the theory and movement of gender identity or transgender. You will also find the admissions of those who actively support the censoring, bullying and persecution of gender-critical academics in British universities and beyond.
One result of my Times Higher Education piece was that my university, City, received complaints alleging that I had somehow been unethical during my research. These complaints were baseless: City investigated and could find no ethical wrongdoing on my part. But despite this, I have been frozen out, and further such baseless accusations have been taken at face value, leading to the suspension of my research, and the withdrawal of access to my data.
I have been told at City that the university considers my research data to be dangerous, that it is frightened of having the findings made public, that it does not want to become involved in the sex and gender debate – and that things would have been different if I believed that ‘trans women are women’. Indeed, colleagues have described my Times Higher Education article publicly as an ‘attack piece on trans people’, and claimed that my research ‘clearly intended to cause harm’; while internally I have been described as an institutional risk, and even a risk to research participants, with calls to restrict my use of my research data to ensure it is ‘acceptable’.
It is difficult to overemphasize the toll this can take personally and professionally – not least for a more junior and precarious academic.
Please help me fight for academic freedom. Please help me push back against the persecution of academics with feminist or gender critical views. Enough is enough!