Teacher Kevin Lister's court case starts today on Tribunal Tweets

[Imnobody4]

Kevin Lister, a maths teacher of 20 years, is taking New College Swindon to an employment tribunal alleging he was fired for not affirming a student's preferred pronouns.

https://twitter.com/tribunaltweets/status/1770010705019711637?t=46yG9nCCclvIz5b4-iq4cg&s=19

Obviously it would be horrible to go through no matter who you are, but what if this man hadn't been a reactionary git with questionable views and an overinflated view of his own legal abilities?

You shouldn’t be deprived of justice for being unlikeable. The only reason why NEU should have not supported his case is if there were no case to answer, including if only in scale of outcome.

It doesn't set a legal precedent but it sets expectations and a kind of moral precedent, I feel.

I do agree that his union should have supported him, and that he deserved a fair hearing. Justice definitely shouldn't be a beauty contest. In some respects those who are the most abrasive or forthright probably need fair justice more than most!

Which union was he part of?

He may have had better chance with the FSU, they’ve won a few cases like this

Edit - oh NEU they are very gender id

Or do any kind of series of articles about the WPATH horrors.

Only part way through this and already in a rage. The issue came to ahead because the child wanted to participate in an *all female maths olympiad?!?!?! *talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it!

He shouldn't have then shared his personal views on medical transition with her, but the same should apply to teachers who share their personal views in favour of medical transition, which of course it doesn't....

Absolutely.

I also have concerns about all surrogacy and in fact about ivf on the NHS for people who are not infertile.

One of the problems here is he brought his politics to work - not just around trans stuff - so the case looks more like preexisting prejudice towards different lifestyles rather than it being about safeguarding.

He couldn't see the difference and he couldn't build a case where this wasn't going to be raised and used against him. If he had good legal representation this might not have been an issue.

It's also arguable whether he did treat the student with respect - it's not simply about pronouns - there are examples where he looks to have gone out of his way to cause embarrassment and make a big deal of it rather than just being unhappy with the pronouns.

I saw bits of the tribunal and it was fairly obvious this was the way it was going.

Although I'm a little confused now, maybe she didn't want to do it and was asking about eligibility because she didn't think she was eligible.

You need to read to the end. The Maths Olympiad stuff is complicated. The student asked the teacher if she would be eligible for the Olympiad. He said yes and wrote her official name on the board. She was upset about the use of that name. She then went to the exam office and signed herself up for the Olympiad there. She then did badly in the competition, and as I read it, said she deliberately did badly to send a message that she didn't really want to take part.
I didn't think it was segregated by sex though so I don't know why the teacher said she was eligible by being a girl.

Have now asked a random A level maths student who says you only get into the Olympiad if you score high enough on the Maths Challenge. But there is a separate Olympiad for girls only, which any girl can enter.
My student expressed strong views on entering any kind of Olympiad in addition to their ordinary Alevel workload.

Please, please crowd fund for an appeal and support your gender critical brother!

In line with the Forstater judgment it reaffirms that policies against misgendering and deadnaming are lawful, and "The Claimant accepted that the Policy did not seek to change his philosophical beliefs but, rather, seek to modify his behaviour and speech."

If you want to crowd fund go for it

I don’t think we need men to tell us who to fund

Forstater won her case tg

I think he overstepped the bounds of what is appropriate in terms of sharing personal opinions with students and trying to persuade them to his point of view. I know that SSA decided early on that they would not support his case; I am not sure of the exact whys and wherefores but they clearly felt it didn't fit with their clear-eyed safeguarding focus. However, there are teachers up and down the land who are sharing personal opinions with students and trying to persuade them to to their point of view, but they are not being disciplined or fired because the powers that be share those opinions.

In line with the Forstater judgment it reaffirms that policies against misgendering and deadnaming are lawful

Forstater did no such thing.

This.
The situation in schools is a mess and the self invested adult groups should never have been allowed to gaslight children into the mistaken belief that their developing bodies are flawed and that a sex change is desirable.
However, as a teacher he shouldn't have involved a student in his feelings / arguments about this - that's what transactivists do and it's unprofessional. No child / student should become the focus for individual staff to get involved with - no matter how difficult this is for us as adults.
Imho, that's where he went wrong and it's telling that numerous organisations stepped away from his case. Teachers have to follow school policy / leadership instructions and when they fail to do that, then it becomes a disciplinary matter.
It's regrettable as it gives those who don't give a damn about safeguarding children the opportunity to gloat and try to stir up dissent and that's the last thing we need.

From what I can read, he has some legitimate arguments and it is a denial of justice that he didn’t get representation to put these across in his case. There are points in his judgement where some concerning comments were made by the judge which I think a good representative would have had dismissed, including a concerning college policy. But he might still have been sacked.

The homophobia claim - I would say it is a reasonable position to object to surrogacy, and to question the NHS spending money on fertility treatment for couples who can't conceive for reasons of being the wrong sex, not for reasons of infertility. I agree that having a baby is not a right. But it is possible to have views like that out of homophobia rather than feminism. I'd want to read carefully what was said in context to work out for sure if he was homophobic.

"This judgment does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity. The Claimant, like everyone else, will continue to be subject to the prohibitions on discrimination and harassment that apply to everyone else. Whether or not conduct in a given situation does amount to harassment or discrimination within the meaning of EqA will be for a tribunal to determine in a given case."

That was an obiter, not part of the judgement. Maya could no more use pronouns to harass colleagues than colleague could to harass her. So, for example, if she followed a trans colleague around shouting ‘he! He! He!’ that would be unlawful harassment, if she referred to him as ‘he’ in the normal course of a conversation then it would not be. At no point does the judgement require someone to use pronouns in a specific way. It did however make clear that not only were Maya’s GC beliefs protected, so was their expression.

On the other hand Lee vs Asher’s Baking Company Ltd set down cannot be obliged to manifest a belief you do not hold. In other words, you cannot be required to pretend someone has changed sex, by using opposite sex pronouns, when you do not believe that is possible.

James Dreyfus was offering to help with a crowdfunder to Kevin on Twitter, as were others. I think it’s a pity he hadn’t realized how much support there now is out there.

Hopefully, he can now get a decent lawyer’s opinion on whether an appeal is worthwhile.

Thanks for this information

It's good to have some actual legal knowledge here, but I'm sure certain posters probably think they know better because they read it on a TRA blog.

Yes we all know that the TRA version of the law is not the law.