Tempest v Rural Payments Agency Tribunal Thread 4

[myladydisdainisyetliving]

Previous thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5549122-tempest-v-rural-payments-agency-tribunal-thread-3

TT substack: https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/tempest-vs-defra-and-rural-payments

Tempest (a TW) is claiming discrimination, harassment and/or victimisation on grounds of gender reassignment. Central to the claim is the existence of the Sex Equality and Equity Network in the Civil Service (SEEN). SEEN has been granted right to intervene. Parts of the original claim against the co-chair of SEEN (Elspeth Duemmer-Wrigley) and another party (Andreas Mueller) were struck out or narrowed. Another claimant, PQ, is no longer part of the case.

I will also note that Elspeth still has a garden in need of seeds and water to support the ability of SEEN to be an intervenor in this case. The claim originated because she said "only women menstruate" and a search with her name and those terms at the usual gardening website should point you to her plot.

Flaming Nora, I'm going to have to go for a walk to bring down my blood pressure.

TT are doing a good job of summarising as usual, but ED is hectoring, argumentative, sullen, talking over both the judge and NC, sermonising and speechifying wherever she can. Whereas ultimately I'm frustrated with ST, I recognise that there is deep vulnerability there and ST has been badly served by unswerving affirmation. I don't know what's ED's excuse. But ED appears to take the GC/SEEN position as personally as ST. If ED hadn't chosen to disclose her medical condition variation then no-one else would know and I doubt a single person has any issue with her using women's facilities.

Oh come on now, have we learned nothing? If the person responsible for equality and diversity in a blumming hospital isn’t sure if they are male or female …………. These things are so much more complicated than most of us who have better things to do understand.

14. As an intersex woman, I have primary and secondary male and female characteristics in my body. When somebody says in the workplace that ‘sex is binary,’ I find that offensive because it denies the reality of my lived experience, my body, the disadvantages I have experienced throughout my life, and the medical issues I have had. I am living proof that sex is not binary.
All of my healthcare concerns are diminished and erased. It has led me to experience very real medical harms that would not happen to people who are not intersex. All of that is removed when someone states that sex is a simple binary which I know is not true, because I have lived in-between the binary.

Emma love - you have a disorder of sexual development. It like someone born with one leg. They don't live in-between the binary. Humans are bi-ped and they developed abnormally. Its a disorder. You might not like that language but that is what it is. It has a diagnosis and medical treatment to address it. You are not intersex - you have a sex that is disordered.

And leaving all that aside Tinkerbell was presumably a mediocre man in his 40s who got divorced and started to wear dresses. He isn't you. You don't have to use your medical diagnosis as cover for his AGP.

He's really coming across as completely uninterested in what women have had to put up with for the past 15-20 years, isn't he? Or even what we've had to try to do to get the law enforced since last year.

15. I would absolutely defend anyone's right to hold a belief – even one I disagree with.

Ok - please defend SEEN and Elspeth's rights to hold a belief.

But I question why anyone needs to come into the workplace to say that sex is binary, when that has nothing to do with our work and causes active harm to me and others.

You affirming non binary people is harmful to them as it doesn't exist in law and is nonsensical. Yet you were paid to do it for 5 years at work.

I have a genetic mutation that means I only have one kidney. I identified as someone with two kidneys and now I’m a single kidney person since my ultrasound. Can I have a special network please because when people talk about two kidneys or altruistic kidney donation, I get triggered and they don’t want people like me with one kidney to exist.

If ED hadn't chosen to disclose her medical condition variation then no-one else would know and I doubt a single person has any issue with her using women's facilities.

If her stance was that there was no need for SSS and everything should be mixed sex, she would be wrong but I would have some respect for her position. But I suspect that she wants separate spaces for her definition of men and women. So she does see a need to defend her version of women. She’s a fucking hypocrite who has used her own position to punch down on women.

From ED WS paragraph 16:
"From the outset of SEEN’s establishment in Defra, members of a:gender were contacting me to express profound distress at some of the content that was
being posted. People were horrified, afraid, and found the environment that had been created by the network’s existence profoundly offensive. Many felt unable to perform their duties as they previously had."

Glad Naomi highlighted the ridiculousness of this. Not being able to work and going off sick because of something you've had to seek out in the external website of a network that you don't belong to. It's all a grift isn't it.

16. Moving on to SEEN’s activities, because the Land Registry is entirely separate from Defra, I did not see first-hand anything that was being posted by or about Defra’s SEEN chapter at the time it was published.

I am not paid by RPA or DEFRA, I don't see their content and it actually has sweet fanny adams to do with me. But I was paid full time to do nothing and I am a rebel intersexual without a cause. This gave me one. SaMANtha sent me screen shots and I prohesised the genocide that was to come.

Also imagine how him saying that must make Elspeth feel?

Imagine the reaction if he'd said 'We're not here to discuss what it feels like to be trans.'

FFS

Ffs J.... the point is that SEEN is not a random group of people there to get up the noses of gender ideologist, it's about the actual defense of women's sex based rights. Because actual harm and exclusion is the outcome of men using women's spaces, and as these witnesses are so excellently proving, women and their rights and their sex are such filthy things now that there's a tax payer funded group sitting in this court seeking the eradication of them being mentioned in workplaces.

Women and their sex based rights being outlawed as too sad for men.

This is absolutely bloody relevant. It's jawdropping. And the J seems quite staggeringly and openly biased.

And then you get to this person declaiming 'I don't know what this group I want to be silenced, punished and eradicated from my life think'. (But definitely want them eradicated. For Reasons. Not sure what these are but Owie.)

Yet more hypocrisy from Emma…. She bleats on here about her medical condition but pulled Naomi up for referring to her DSD as a medical condition.

Yes, this is why 'at taxpayers' expense was important. This failure to operate as an adult in the grown up world has a cost and we are paying for it.

I know many of you didn't like it but I think it is clear from her questioning overall that this is a crucial point. The being kind modus operandi is a very, very expensive one and these folk are costing us all a lot of cost and wasted time.

Does she have a hang up, she's found out she's not what she see's as a 'proper' women, so she's developed a sensitivity to any person she sees as a 'proper' women, saying they're a women.

Yes, I think that's where she's found commonality with ST.

From TT:

[we resume]

J: Thank you everyone.

NC: para 19 a)(i) of your WS. You are talking about your response to Elspeth DW blog - p684(main)

NC: Can I flag here to ask the tribunal to read that in full at some point? thank you

NC: You complain that EDW represents her views as truth, without putting opposite view. aG doesn't put the GC view across, you try to silence it?
[assume ED nods]

NC: You say that referring to 'gender affirming surgery' has no relevance in workplace. But aG frequently holds CS event about your variation. You are on camera talking about your genitals. Double standard here?
ED: no, am talking about having intersed variation.

Surely the work place is one of the areas where sex and equality law is most relevant?

And the stupidity of popping out that young teen flounce word 'genocide'....

the lack of self awareness is a standard feature, but I cringe for them, I really do.

But isn't that more of a political point than a legal point?

18. Compared to prior to SEEN’s existence, I was absolutely deluged with fearful messages. The volume was such that I had to call an emergency agenda item at one of the a:gender executive meetings to report on what was happening. I told the executive that I had so many people contacting me from Defra, and so many people were complaining about the same things, that I simply could not cope. This has had a huge impact on my health, both physically and mentally, and there have been times where I have questioned whether I can continue. I have persevered because I know how few people are willing to stand in support of trans, non-binary and intersex people and I will do everything I can to ensure that they have a voice and that their concerns are taken seriously. Above all else I wish they were treated as actually being protected from discrimination and harassment in practice, not just in theory. If the civil ervice and Defra specifically truly believed this, I believe they would have made far more effort to be proportionate and balanced in how they handled SEEN.

After the good days of no work the people I was supposed to represent heard some facts and things from people who had been oppressed. This made us as opressors and the silencers really annoyed. How fucking dare these sex realists have an opinion. The law said they could have an opinion but the law is an ass and these nasty bitches made me sick. Sick I tell you.

I only had a few hundred members across the entire CS and so maybe 10 or fewer from DEFRA but 10 is too many for me to cope with. I was incapable of signposting these people to resources on differences of opinion. All this era of no debate meant we didn't make sense. So we should genocide and cut and paste pretty neutral statements for days on end.

19. Specific SEEN content that I became aware of that stands out in my memory includes the following:

(a) An article on the SEEN website published under the pseudonym "Bethany" which I believe was authored by Elspeth Duemmer-Wrigley [pages 684–690 of FH Main Bundle].
(i) I read it and I was crying. I was astonished, angry, in pure disbelief. The
author stated how ‘lucky [she] was’ that, by implication, no-one had told her
that being transgender was possible or valid. She represented her beliefs as
‘the truth’, without scope for alternative viewpoints. She referred to gender-
affirming care as ‘surgical damage’. She reported her nephew saying that he
‘wants to become a girl’, and stated that she was ‘glad’ that teaching
resources which affirm transgender identities were not shared with him.

(ii) Regardless of my personal disagreement with these beliefs, I simply do not
understand why such statements are appropriate for people (including trans
people and their allies) to be exposed to in the workplace. It is hard to
understand how referring to medical treatment for gender dysphoria as
‘damage’ is a proportionate way to let these beliefs be expressed, when it is
so overtly critical of trans people.

I see why the J does not want to get into the mare's nest - who would - but this group are harassing far more than harassed and actually wishing to destroy women's rights in law. That is their agenda. The context is not something this can be neatly put aside.

From TT:

NC: You say that you and several other aG members when to the "spotlight on SEEN" event, but were not on camera and did not speak. You only went to gather things to complain about?
ED: No

NC: p2355 - starts 2354 (main).
NC: You take exception to a comment quoted in the post complaining about ppl plastering beliefs all over email sigs - notes civil service impartiality duty and says this breaches. You take exception?
ED: To article and the way written yes

NC: Would it be OK to have "pronouns sex based" in email sig?
ED: No bcs pronouns are not sex based they are gender

NC: So someone having "pronouns sex based" is plastering their beliefs, but having allyship and flags etc is not?
ED: I don't believe GC ppl are remotely affected by what we do and say

I had mostly retired this username, but looks like it's time for it to make a reappearance 😂

She definitely has hang ups, but they probably vary depending upon what side of the bed she got out of that morning.

Probably a deeply, deeply unhappy, bitter, grievance-seeking person, who daren't ever look at her real self in the mirror of her mind, ever. I have worked with a few of these. They can be very charming, but underneath, they are insecure, frightened, petty ten year olds who will never grow up unless someone who has authority over them says 'Stop. Stop crying, look at yourself, deal with yourself, or you will never have any friends'. Yes, I was one of those spoiled, crybaby ten year old kids, and thank goodness my older brother said this to me in time for me to grow up.