It was revealed earlier today that Maya Forstater, who was sacked from her job as a tax expert with a charity for questioning gender ideology has won her case for wrongful dismissal on appeal to an employment tribunal. Ms Forstater was sacked not for anything that she’d done wrong in her work, but for stating on social media basic facts such as ‘little boys do not grow up to be women and girls do not grow up to be men’. Ms Forstater was accused of being ‘transphobic’ by colleagues who saw her social media posts and this led to complaints from colleagues and the loss of her job.
She has fought for two years to clear her name and during this time has been subjected to the usual smears and lies about her that we’ve come to expect from the wilder shores of the trans activist community. She fought back against a previous tribunal ruling that her views on biological sex were not protected and were akin to views that society would generally consider to be wrong, such as support for Nazism. Let’s just let that sink in for a moment. The previous tribunal judge classified views about the immutability of sex, something many reasonable people believe in, to views that many would generally find abhorrent such as Nazism or Stalinism.
However this latest ruling by Employment Tribunal Judge Mr Justice Choudhury sitting with two other panellists, changes and wipes out the ruling by the previous tribunal hearing. It basically states that holding views that run counter to the gender ideologists is legal. The ruling stated that Ms Forstater’s views did not impinge on the rights of trans individuals.
This is a massively important court ruling. It does not only affirm that it is perfectly legal to be critical of the gender ideology and to call for single sex spaces to be protected, but may have other more far reaching impacts on freedom of speech in general. This is a win for women, common sense, biological reality and freedom of speech.
The views that I find abhorrent are those of people who don’t believe that freedom of expression should be universally protected, Nazis and Stalinists for example. Such people should be allowed to express their abhorrent views but in return they need to recognise my right to express my view that you can’t alter reality by stopping people from saying stuff.
Oh I’m with you on that. I personally think that the best way to identify and counter those who support totalitarian ideologies is to let them speak and then counter them with more but better speech. The only speech that in my view should be curtailed is that which directly and credibly incites immediate violence, which is the main restriction on the US First Amendment. However in my article I was writing in the context of the 2010 Equality Act (legislation that the Tories should have dumped asap when they’d finally got rid of the boat anchor of the Lib Dems) but did not) that does class support for Nazism and other totalitarianisms as not protected by that Act when speaking of a protected ‘philosophical view’. That the previous judge in this case had chosen to class acceptance of biological reality in the same category as Nazism is in my view a complete and utter scandal and also credible evidence of how far the views of the trans cult has penetrated into our legal and admin systems.