Raise a glass to Maya Forstater

Jun 11, 2021 by

by Joanna Williams, spiked:

She fought for all of our rights – and she won.

Maya Forstater has won. An appeal court judge has today ruled that the tax consultant at a global think-tank, sacked for expressing the view that males and females are biologically distinct and have different life experiences, was wrongfully dismissed. Judge Choudhury said that Forstater’s ‘gender-critical beliefs’ ‘were widely shared’ and ‘did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons’. The judgement notes, ‘It is clear from Convention case law that… a person is free in a democratic society to hold any belief they wish, subject only to “some modest, objective minimum requirements”’.

Success! Rationality and common sense have won out over intolerance and censoriousness. This is absolutely worthy of celebration. But, at the same time, we need to ask why Forstater was dismissed in the first place; why an employment tribunal found against her, and why she was put through two years of legal hell for saying something so very unremarkable.

It was back in 2019 that Forstater’s employers accused her of ‘fear-mongering’ and using ‘offensive and exclusionary’ language on social media simply for saying that men and women are different. As Forstater has pointed out on plenty of occasions, she firmly believes that ‘the rights of people not to be discriminated against for being transsexual must be respected’. But this was not enough. For saying that biological sex is real, Forstater lost her job.

Read here

See also: Maya Forstater: Legal judgement on trans is a landmark,UnHerd

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