Maya Forstater was discriminated against over gender-critical beliefs, tribunal rules

theguardian.com:

A researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex has won her claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs.

Maya Forstater suffered direct discrimination when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract or fellowship, an employment tribunal found on Wednesday.

The tribunal also ruled that Forstater, the executive director of Sex Matters, suffered victimisation with respect of the removal of her profile from CGD’s website.

Its decision comes after Forstater successfully brought a test case to establish that gender-critical views are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. She initially lost that case at an employment tribunal in 2019 but won on appeal last year. The case was then sent back to the tribunal to decide whether her claim had been proved on the facts.

The tribunal examined a number of tweets by Forstater, including tweets in which she drew an analogy between self-identifying trans women and Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman who misrepresented herself as black, and another in which she said: “A man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality.” It concluded that the tweets asserted her gender-critical beliefs.

It said the same of one that described self-identification as a woman as “a feeling in their head”, rejecting the suggestion that it equated self-identification with mental illness.

The tribunal also considered tweets in which Forstater said she was surprised people could say they believed that males could be women, and that they are “tying themselves in knots”.

It said they were “fairly mild