Yes, this actually happened.
It's quite a long story but the TL;DR is just as in the title.
I follow someone on Twitter @ MouseInTheCourt and they tweeted about this earlier today.
The East Coast Main Line is the route that runs from London Kings Cross up to Edinburgh. It used to be run by Virgin Trains but they couldn't make it work so the route was returned to government control and a new, government owned, body called LNER was set up.
(totally irrelevant, they just copied the name of the company that used to own the route from 1923 to 1948 - ironically, that company, one of the "Big Four" was also set up by the government under the Railways Act 1921).
Anyway, last year LNER released a press release saying that they were going to have a train painted specially in "Pride" colours.
Together For a Summer Of Pride: LNER Launches Azuma Train Celebrating Pride
A few months later someone requested information about the process and costs of decorating a train in Pride colours. She also asked about the processes for selecting train designs more generally and about plans for future designs.
Since LNER is owned by the Department for Transport and so is a public body, this was done by way of an FOI (Freedom of Information) request.
LNER said that it did not hold the information requested. The woman then put the case that a significant sum of money had been spent and it was therefore odd that there appeared to be no paper trail explaining how the decision had been made.
LNER then trawled through her social media posts and suddenly declared that she was "vexatious".
Their reason for doing this was that, among other similar complaints, her tweets:
"... indicates a possible intent to challenge or disrupt initiatives related to transgender inclusion and to promote a binary view of sex and gender."
Her position was then given as follows:
16. The complainant accepted that she had a binary view of sex, but she argued that this was a protected belief – as determined by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the Forstater case. The public authority had therefore, in her view, unlawfully discriminated against her because it had refused to provide information, that she would otherwise have been entitled to receive, due to her beliefs.
17 She was unhappy that the public authority had conducted a trawl of her social media postings before completing its review. She argued that it was unfair for the public authority to restrict her right to access information simply because she had used her social media accounts to promote her own beliefs – beliefs which she is entitled to hold. More generally she considered it unreasonably restrictive for a public authority to grant or withhold information based on its opinion of the requester’s social media postings. Nor was it reasonable for the public authority to expect her to shift her entire system of beliefs in order to access information.
[...]
19 The public authority’s original press release had highlighted its “commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives for colleagues, customers and communities throughout the year.” There was, she argued, a public interest in understanding why the public authority had chosen this particular cause ahead of other worthy causes, what the decision-making process was and what plans it had to celebrate other causes in future.
.
Not surprisingly, the ICO came down on the side of this woman.
Full judgment here (pdf):
https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKICO/2024/305669.pdf