Silenced Then Suspended For Speaking Up

In light of the Supreme Court decision last week, a guest author essay from a woman who lost her job for stating what has now been clarified in law

I like to think White Ink is a place where we can have difficult conversations, and there is no conversation that seems as difficult as discussing the conflict that arises between trans’ rights and women’s rights.

Last week in the UK, the Supreme Court clarified that the term ‘woman’ in the Equality Act – which governs how we organise and protect everybody in society – means biological woman. Many people feel this clarification is a betrayal of trans people, despite the fact that the Equality Act also provides protections for them under ‘gender reassignment’. In that way it is now clear both demographics are equally protected in law.

Today I bring you the story of a friend of mine who will remain anonymous for reasons that will become apparent. It was her role working for a well-known UK women’s rights charity to point out where there was a conflict of interest and help that organisation navigate through, but for doing so she found herself jobless.

The reason I bring you this story is because I often write on the theme of women speaking out and its consequences, and also because wherever you stand on the gender debate, it is interesting to remind ourselves of the importance of policy underwritten by law, how this impacts us day-to-day, and why this clarification was essential.

White Ink subscribers always offer intelligent and thoughtful commentary at the bottom of this page and so I look forward to reading your comments and hearing your views.

By Anonymous:

Three years ago I was in a job that I loved. I worked for a women’s rights organisation, one that provides frontline services to women in need of help, and I felt very lucky to be there. I headed up a department, my team loved me, my boss loved me, and the most important thing was that I believed in what I was doing. How many people get to say that they go to work everyday and know what they are doing is important, that it changes and impacts lives, and it is a cause they believe in deeply? I was one of the lucky ones.

But then everything changed. It started with a tweet, a trans woman demanding access to female safe spaces. The attitude was that women needed to shut up, to shove up, to make space for biological men and if they didn’t they were bigots. Simple.

But I knew it wasn’t actually as simple as that.

This was something that I was dealing with day in day out in my role at this well-known national organisation – the conflict between trans’ rights and women’s rights, and how spaces hard-fought for by women should be preserved solely for them. In my senior role at this organisation, I had seen for myself the results of male violence, I had seen how unsafe it left women feeling about males — any male-bodied person however they might self-describe — I had seen how traumatised they were. We would not be supporting these vulnerable women if we simply told them that they needed to ‘shove over’ and accept male bodies in their spaces.

‘Being kind’ might sound simple as a soundbite or a tweet, it sounds very good in theory, but in practice it’s a bit more complicated, and so therefore it followed that it wasn’t as simple as just saying women were ‘unkind’ if they didn’t just move over. If you are providing support services or safe spaces for women, any change in policy has to be underwritten in law, and no such changes had been established yet I could see organisations that were already making changes in their policy, lobbied by organisations like Stonewall, and from the outside it looked as though it had the potential to be really unsafe. The cart was being put before the horse so to speak, so many parts of society were being told that they had to reorganise, based on nothing more than a wishful-thinking interpretation of what the law already said, and therefore trans activists were getting more and more aggressive in their approach to moving into these spaces because they felt – and told others – they deserved them. But what the Equality Act did say was that women’s spaces were protected. Trans lobbyists argued that a woman was anyone who said they were one, whereas other people believed that the Equality Act referred to biological women.

There was clearly a conflict of rights, but even to say that was to be accused of being a ‘bigot’.

But for me in my everyday job, it posed a big question, where did that leave our organisation? It was my job alongside others, to help advise our approach to this, were we truly offering single sex services, and could we call them that if we allowed those with male bodies into them? Yet commissioners — the ones who often allocate local funding for support services — were increasingly insisting that organisations like mine had trans inclusive services. But how were we to do this and keep our services single sex? I was in the process of establishing this with the rest of the senior leadership team when I replied to that tweet from my personal account saying that some women were scared of men and their opinions also needed to be heard. That was it, that’s all I said. It was not unreasonable to say that those who had been a victim of male violence had fears about being around a male-bodied person, or at least I didn’t think so.

A short while after the very short exchange on Twitter, I was called to a meeting with my line manager and HR and told I faced an internal disciplinary for potentially violating the organisation's social media policy (a policy I had helped to create). These tweets had been seen by the CEO, who recommended I face an investigation – for saying women are afraid of men while working for a women’s rights organisation. I’d have laughed if I hadn’t been so devastated. No one, and certainly not the CEO, who in my working life I spoke to every single day, after hours and at weekends, had spoken to me about the tweet, had suggested it was inappropriate, or asked me to remove it. Surely that would have been the first step?

In that same meeting I was told I was being placed on a Performance Improvement Plan, which made no sense to me, I was performing well, as was my team, we had just been shortlisted for a highly-regarded industry award, it was nonsensical that I would face an investigation into my performance and it was obvious it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t replied to that tweet.

What also deeply hurt was this, I’ve spent most of my career working in human rights organisations – including leading campaigns for LGBT people. Working on those campaigns I have supported lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and so any accusation of transphobia or bigotry, the usual insults often thrown at women who dare stand up for their own rights, were both insulting and inaccurate, as well as deeply hurtful. I was being paid to help establish our position as an organisation, to protect the reputation of the charity as well as protect the women we served. Yes, it meant that we had to ask ourselves some awkward questions – for example, what the term ‘woman’ referred to in the Equality Act because it impacted our services every single day, but this was also my job, to recognise if there was a conflict of rights and then to fathom our way through that. Yet now to even raise that as a concern was to be treated as a ‘bigot’.

Even though I was a senior manager, from that moment on I was excluded from conversations about our Equality Act obligations, I was left out of any debates about how we navigate any potential new services or legal changes, and I was actively ignored and bullied when I made attempts to intervene in those conversations. I was punished for my views that there was a conflict that we needed to find a course through, I was isolated, alienated and later suspended from my job.

I spent the next eight months in a spiral of despair. The suspension was wrapped up in a nice parcel which conveniently excluded any mention of my gender critical views, or even the unsuccessful attempts to turf me out under the social media policy, that all fell away and they instead found different ways – any ways – to criticise my work and nitpick at my performance. Ironically, while I was on suspension my team won that national industry award we had been nominated for.

I can’t begin to describe the impact those eight months had on me, I was banned from talking to colleagues, isolated from the professional support networks I’d built and, ironically, a man was drafted in to do my job. I was essentially put onto the scrap heap while the organisation moved forward on making its services increasingly trans inclusive. They didn’t want my voice at the table reminding them of their Equality Act obligations, or reminding them that women have rights too, and urging them to follow logic and rational thinking instead of fantasy and establishing new policies with foundations made of sand. I fell into a deep depression, was placed under the support of my GP’s mental health services, prescribed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. The impact this had on me is hard to do justice to here, but suffice it to say there are moments when I wasn’t sure I’d get through it, and one desperate night I even called the Samaritans in despair. Meanwhile I watched from the sidelines as my organisation posted trans flags on its social media, blatantly disregarded the Equality Act and made clear its position. I could see women were upset and angry in the comments, often they replied telling the organisation that it was no longer providing single sex spaces, but those voices were ignored.

Fast forward several months of pain, stress, hurt and expensive legal bills and I settled with my organisation and left. I was forced out of a job I loved and was very, very good at. I signed the NDA that they insisted on which is why I’m telling this story anonymously, but actually at that time I didn’t mind that too much, despite everything I still believed in the work of that organisation and I knew if I’d gone public it would have damaged them in the eyes of the very women they needed to be there to support.

Of course, my organisation denied that my gender critical views were at the heart of the continued punitive action they took against me, but how else can you possibly view an award-winning manager with the best performing team in the organisation being relentlessly pursued and ultimately forced out of a job that she loved?

And so fast forward a couple of years, and finally, last week we have the Supreme Court’s decision on the meaning in law of the term ‘woman’ in the Equality Act, and it is exactly what I advised my organisation that it meant – biological women. This means that the single sex spaces that they provide are for women only. Of course they can reorganise and offer spaces for male-bodied people who identify as women, but they should not, if the law is followed, be housed in the same spaces as biological women. It is that simple.

Did it give me any comfort to know that I had been right all along? Yes and no. I felt gaslit by my employers and the movement itself which insisted that being in possession of a piece of paper (a gender recognition certificate, which only requires that you live in your ‘chosen sex’) was more important that the actuality of being a natal female and we now know this is not the case. But I was not comforted by the fact that me, and many, many women like me, have been forced from the jobs we loved and were brilliant at by the aggressive side of this movement, one – which I must say – has a very misogynistic energy about it.

There are many people who are now saying this is a betrayal of trans people, but it is not, they are still protected by the same act but under their gender reassignment characteristic which does not even require someone to have changed their body physically. The Equality Act prohibits discrimination, harassment and victimisation on the basis of gender reassignment in various aspects of life including employment, education and the provision of services. Trans people have not been let down, they are still protected in exactly the same way they always have been, and they absolutely must have those protections, but so should women.

It is also worth noting that trans people actually have more protections in the eyes of criminal law than women because ‘transgender identity’ is one of the five types of hate crime whereas misogyny is not.

Although the reaction to the ruling shouldn’t be a surprise, it has still stopped me in my tracks and reminded me of those long days and nights when I really thought I might lose my mind, as well as my job which obviously, eventually I did.

While my experience was nothing compared to women like Maya Forstater, Alison Bailey,

Kathleen Stock

,

Suzanne Moore

and Jo Phoenix to name but a few, I suffered a great deal for daring to express my views. This post is anonymous but the pain and hurt I feel when reliving my experience does need to be shared because people need to understand how policy matters in the real world, and how policymakers need to wrangle with it, defining meaning accurately to make sure that everyone in society is protected.

It's taken me several years to move on from what happened – but I am now happy in a new job, but why did I and so many women like me have to lose everything we held so dear, professions that were integral to our own identity just to point out what was obvious from the start? Reorganising society needs to be underwritten in law to make sure that all rights are protected, it isn’t a matter of ‘being kind’, it’s a matter of keeping everybody safe.