Substack Article: How A Private Conversation about Gender Got Me Fired From My Dream Job

[TempestTost]

I stumbled on this through Andrew Sullivan's substack and I thought some here would find it interesting. I've just finished reading it myself and am off to do some errands so I'll add my thoughts later

This is an interesting read. That sexual health workers are meant to pretend that sex doesn't matter is truly worrying.

Thanks for sharing, a good read, poor guy.

I feel disgusted at the idea of mpox vaccines being used as affirmation medicine by teenage girls who think they are gay boys. FFS.

Thanks for sharing. The comments section also has a number of interesting observations.

I was a bit shocked they allowed those young women to get the monkeypox vaccine, that just seems nuts. But then, the whole thing seems nuts.

What struck me is something that I know people have noted before. While male AGP types seem to often be the most flagrant and obviously aggressive on this topic, pushing into places and making demands, the people who are pushing it at an institutional level and doing the gatekeeping often seem to be professional women but also in many cases transmen, people like Strangio. I thought it was interesting that the author's manager, despite the fact that she didn't, privately, subscribe to GI, she still played that institutional role.

I haven't got time right now to expand on this, but I think there is a common social dynamic where women police the rules as the first line, and men only step in for people who weren't cowed by female social pressure.

And underneath it, I think women police society so male rage is not triggered against the whole group.

Hmm. I think you are certainly right about women policing society. I think women's social dynamics are typically more complicated and sophisticated than men's.

I'm not so sure that it's just about avoiding male rage. I think women are just as likely to be status seeking as anyone. Social policing seems to be part of female status seeking, in my experience, to a greater degree than it is with men. Possibly because they are just not as good at it, or maybe because they have other ways of accomplishing the same thing, I don't know.

I can’t find it atm, but I remember one study on sex differences in the playground found that girls were the ones reinforcing and calling for rules of the play to be upheld whilst the boys would transgress them.

Edited to add: I’m reminded of helping in a DCs year one class. They had to write a short paragraph before being allowed to go play. The sex difference was so marked.

The boys wrote quickly and then looked at me in disdain if i couldn’t understand their writing as their goal was to go play as quickly as they could.

The girls wrote slowly and laboriously asking me to spell every word. Their goal was to get the paragraph correctly written and felt personally responsible if they didn’t. I thought ‘there is evidence of how self esteem develops’ or not.

Why 6 year old girls felt so acutely responsible for getting it exactly right, that I don’t know but both parents and schools contribute.

Thank you for linking to this.

It dredged up out of the recesses of my memory something that happened in Hackney in the 1990s. A popular headteacher of a good school was similarly, but much more publicly - treated for 'refusing free tickets to see Romeo and Juliet because it was too heterosexual'.

She was pilloried in the press, denounced at council meetings, [Hackney Council were trying to shake off their old 'loony left' image] and paraded, looking crushed and defeated, on the steps of Hackney Town Hall - an image which somebody captioned 'Ecce homo..'

Gradually, after all the damage had been done to her name, reputation, career, and emotional health, the facts trickled out: it was not Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, it was the ballet Romeo and Juliet; the tickets were not free; the school didn't have the budget to pay for the tickets; the comment about it being a heterosexual lovestory was an unwise throwaway remark, and not the reason for declining the tickets.

An enquiry dragged on for over a year - sound familiar? and she was cleared of all allegations. I think she later became a school inspector, so at least her career in education wasn't totally destroyed.

So, are you saying you think he is fibbing? I'm not sure I see the comparison you are making otherwise?

Gosh NO! It reminded me of the consequences of a throwaway remark by a lesbian causing her to be suspended from her job and become the subject not just of a prolonged investigation but also abuse in the media.

Really interesting.
So part of the fight-back against gender ideology has to be learning how to use this social dynamic (because trying to stop it won't work), so that the females doing the social policing start upholding female rights instead of trampling all over them. There will have to be more female social status gained in defending women / truth / reality than in defending men in make-up.

Which is of course why they currently don't. Because women don't have as much social/cultural power as men. So motivating status-driven women (not in the Range Rover sense especially, more in feeling their status is safe in society which by definition means not challenging the social structures that bestow that status) to fight for women against men on ground where the man is not already breaking that social structure is going to be very hard.

After all, if it was easy to persuade a mass of women to jeopardise their relative but fragile social safety for the long term benefit of al women, Feminism would have been a 5 year project!

(These posts are a bit rambling because they are the iceberg points of a much bigger thought, indeed thread, on why women maintain social mores that hurt women that I have not had time to write yet. Hoping Christmas will give me time)

Great article and have passed it on to someone in the Field. It is really worrying how disconnected from reality some activists are

Ah, I see - yes.

I am lately more inclined to think that people's social media usage and private conversations should not be allowed to be used to fire them, unless they are pretty directly badmouthing their workplace or something else quite extreme.

i am not sure how to balance that because it isn't black and white. But I just don't think off the cuff remarks are enough to justify someone losing a job. And I also think that it's important that people should be able to discuss things like political and social opinions freely, because that is part of a public discourse in a democracy.

Haech Lockwood v Cheshire and Wirral NHS Foundation Trust and Others.
Summary of the Case
Haech Lockwood, a non-binary individual who was assigned female at birth and previously known as Heather, brought a case against their employer, an NHS Trust, and six staff members for harassment and discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment under the Equality Act 2010. Lockwood identifies as trans/gender fluid, uses they/them pronouns, and legally changed their name by deed poll to Haech.
The claim alleged a series of incidents, including misgendering (being referred to as "she" or "her"), their former name ("deadname") appearing on internal systems, and other issues.
Tribunal Ruling
In a recent employment tribunal decision, the panel ruled that:

• Haech Lockwood did not have the protected characteristic of "gender reassignment" as defined by the Equality Act 2010.
• The tribunal reasoned that the Act's protection for "gender reassignment" applies to a process of moving from one biological sex to the other (male to female or female to male).
• Since Lockwood had not undergone, nor intended to undergo, any medical or other steps to change their sex from female to male, they were not covered by this specific protection.

The tribunal concluded that using preferred pronouns and living as non-binary does not have the same protected status as reassigning sex under the current interpretation of the law, a decision influenced by the UK Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland which defined "sex" in the Equality Act as biological sex.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6926ec33a245b0985f0340aa/Haech_Lockwood_v_Cheshire_and_Wirral_NHS_Foundation_Trust_and_others_2401211_2024___2407178_2024.pdf

The whole thing is a joke.

And saying oi emperor you’ve got no balls riles them up to heights of fury.

Little emperors.