Can anyone tell me if MW was appointed to the CEO role before RA was employed by ERCC or after? I got the impression from tribunal tweets that RA was already at ERCC, and then when MW got the CEO role there was a certain amount of public debate about a male person without a GRC (= information in the public domain about MW) taking a role that had been advertised as for a woman, based on the SSE in EA2010.
It seems to me to be entirely legitimate that an employee in a (supposed to be) women’s service, which switches from only employing women to employing a male in the most senior role, to ask management for an explanation of/ guidance on what is to be said to service users about whether an employee who’s going to be dealing with them is a woman or male.
The overriding impression I got from reading the threadreader was that, in its approach to this whole situation and in particular the disciplinary, the ERCC combined being self-righteous and disingenuous with being clueless and shambolic. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when unremunerated volunteer trustee MR said the delay in producing the record of the three and a half hour disciplinary panel (3.5hrs!) was because she typed up the audio recording herself in any spare time around caring for her disabled adult son. What kind of an organisation thinks it’s ok for its trustees to serve as an unpaid audio typist? I know MR said using a transcription service simply didn’t occur to her, but still.
They incorrectly accused RA of a data breach. An internal email, for a legitimate purpose, with people who have already had that information disclosed to them is not a disclosure.
But then the accusation changes to bullying and harassment on the basis that i) a female individual working in a women’s service decides they wish to no longer be considered a woman, and wish to be considered neither a woman nor a man: ii) they change their name to a name commonly associated with men; iii) they want their colleagues to refer to them by their new name but don’t want that name change/new name to be discussed with them; and therefore… iv) that background context evidently means that a colleague who needs clarification about what answer she should give in response to a service user’s enquiry about the male-coded-name-change co-worker’s biological sex should jolly well know better than to have the common courtesy of giving their male-coded-name-change co-worker the opportunity to say for themselves how they would prefer that question to be answered.
If the male-coded-name-change co-worker’s mental health is so fragile they can’t deal with that question, they are unlikely to be able to provide survivors with the support they need.
More fundamentally, am I the only one taken aback that in a therapy service of all places the first course of action was not, as you would expect, to go down the mediation route in order to support co-workers to resolve the hurt feeling and misunderstanding so that they can work effectively together, but instead to go straight to a disciplinary?
Another observation is that it’s another example of so called “safe space” training sessions being used to compile evidence of wrongthink against disapproved-of colleagues. To be fair to unremunerated volunteer trustee MR, she appears to have been the one who, quite rightly, set aside the allegations relating to safe space discussions.
Sorry for the long post, it’s taken me ages to catch up with the thread. And I see there’s been ten new posts since I started this.