Gardening for ET - Loss of work in Art for GC views

[WarOnWoman]

Another gardening opportunity through Crowd Justice.

Sibyl Ruth is going to Employment Tribunal in September. She is being assisted at no cost by the Free Speech Union. She is being advised by Doyle Clayton and represented by Chris Milsom of Cloisters.

She was working for Cornerstones Literary Consultancy as one of their ‘Core Editors’ for about a year when, in May 2022, the management told her without warning that the client she was working for no longer required her services. She was removed from the Editors’ page on the Cornerstones website.

Ultimately, a Subject Access Request revealed that a member of staff at Cornerstones took objection to the gender critical views Sibyl Ruth had expressed in her Twitter account.

Cornerstones proceeded to immediately halt any work she was doing for them by lying to her and their client, and then effectively terminated her.

She is on Twitter as Sibyl Ruth@SibylWrites.

Please consider gardening for Sibyl. She's here on mumsnet too.

There is a real difficulty in industries which should be all about enabling freedom of expression clamping down on anyone who expresses the 'wrong' views. But mostly it's women who get penalised.

I genuinely thought that after the Forstater case organisations would think, 'Oh we'd got it a bit wrong. We do have to respect gender critical views.'

Except that doesn't seem to be happening.

The Denise Fahmy result was good news for women working in the arts. Perhaps this one will also help to turn the tide?

I do hope so.

I work in HR and cases like Mayas are noted in the HR press and updates so it will slowly filter through even if it's more of a 'cover your arse' than genuine respect for gender critical beliefs.

It will take time to overcome all the stonewall capturing though.

There may be loads of claims we don't know about that got settled and gagged. That's how it works, most claims dont go all the way to Tribunal but the case law wil influence the decision to settle.

Let's be grateful to those who didn't accept an offer to settle before their claims were heard. Not all will have been, but I'd imagine some would

Yes, I agree - we're not quite at the point where organisations are sufficiently confident on the legal position to stand up to clients demanding that they punish the bigot.

And as Purple says, it will take some time to undo all the years of Stonewall programming. It took several years to properly embed all of these ideas, so it's going to take some time (hopefully not years!) to gradually undo, not least as gender identity ideology has already been embedded as if it were fact in so many policies and trainings, as well as culturally.

Good luck Sybil!

I've gardened. And put out a message on Facebook- tho since I scarcely ever use it, I thought I d come back hear and Bump.

Another bump.

Cheers, OP!

It will take a few more cases I suspect. With just one, however high profile, HR departments will think it won’t ever apply to them

I tried to start a thread on the petitions section, but links to crowd-funders are not allowed apparently.

The case got onto Free Speech Nation
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1680660720336158722?t=pQiiTBaMKq_Lk3PqW7kXqA&s=09

Bump.

Sybil is on my payday list now. I don't think I'd seen her case until FSN last night (sorry Sybil) and hats off to Andrew Doyle who continues to give this nonsense publicity. Sadly, as he says, he's never short of stories.

Really important for democracy that we maintain free speech and allow people to express their lawful views.

I have gardened.

In Telegraph now - though behind paywall. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/21/sibyl-ruth-gender-critical-editor-dropped-literary-agency/

There is also a podcast....https://thatsdebatablepodcast.podbean.com/

Bumping

Have just heard a short clip from the podcast here; very scary how she was treated and how quickly too

x.com/speechunion/status/1695842879975891186?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

Preposterous and maddening.
No-one tells any religious person what they can or can't believe, vice versa them on anyone else in the company.

One of my staff is a Christian, one an atheist, neither prevents the other view, no demands made, no toes stepped on.

I could easily employ a trans, even one who believes in the TRA ethos. A queer theory spouting trans ally (God forbid!). I can't imagine we'd become close friends or see eye to eye, but work is work. They have their view, I have mine, never the twain shall meet. But we're all humans, we can all run along together.

But me telling this person they can't write pro trans stuff in their Twitter feed or blog, wanting them sacked, is as preposterous as them insisting on the same from their POV. Insisting on compliance to their ethos, and no dissent permitted.

She has won!

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230908130850/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/07/cornerstones-transgender-literary-editor-tribunal/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20230908130850/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/07/cornerstones-transgender-literary-editor-tribunal/

Yes I think they settled out of court. The tribunal would have been next week.

From the article linked above:

Cornerstones said it had removed Ms Ruth from its website while it investigated her social media posts over concerns “about the potential for negative reaction towards her comments from the wider publishing industry”.

But Cornerstones also said it acknowledged “that Sibyl holds gender critical feminist beliefs which are worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The company added: “We acknowledge and accept that the way in which her work was brought to an end could have been handled less abruptly. Cornerstones ought to have more firmly encouraged an open dialogue with her before taking any action. It is a matter of regret to us that we advised a client whose manuscript she had begun to work on that she had become unavailable.

“We regret that we did not encourage the opportunity to subsequently engage in dialogue with her. We accept that our actions must have been distressing to Sibyl. We accept that we were wrong in this regard, and apologise for our actions.”

They must have known they didn’t stand a chance. Hopefully it sends a message out to other companies that people cannot be discriminated against for holding GC views.

Another apology for discriminating against women. I hope they paid her significant compensation for their bigotry.

The Telegraph article says that the damages they paid to her are "said to be substantial".

Good news, these legal cases are making a difference. Whilst they behaved very poorly with Allison Bailey (and I always now change the contribution to them to be 0 as a consequence) crowdjustice has been instrumental.