The bigot press have been hyping up the story of an NHS Nurse taking her employer to court over the existence of trans people and our human rights. Which has in turn become a circus of harassment that the UK Judiciary should be made to answer for.
To get you quickly acquainted with the story; an NHS Nurse and bigot approached a doctor in the women’s changing areas at work and told her she shouldn’t be in there because said doctor is a transgender woman and said Nurse is a bigot. She was disciplined by her employer and subsequently suspended from her position.
She has, with the aid of the usual bigot suspects such as Naomi Cunningham’s “Legal Feminist” group and Maya Forstater’s “Sex Matters” group; taken her employer to court over this. For months the bigot press have been hyping this up with essentially daily coverage despite absolutely nothing having changed until recently when the tribunal began. And began it did!
Before the actual meat of the tribunal could even kick off some key decisions were made about how the case would proceed. The one which caused the most ire amongst my community was the decision to allow the bigot Nurse and her legal team and witnesses to misgender the trans doctor. A reminder: the trans doctor in this case is, by all accounts, the victim of harassment.
Whereas I don’t disagree with Judge Sandy Kemp’s decision here to allow the claimants to speak however they please about whoever they please; I don’t find their reasoning to be particularly sound and it doesn’t read like they will be following the “anything you do say may be given in evidence against you” part of law. Stating that the bar for harassment in this tribunal would only be met if misgendering were enacted “gratuitously and offensively on a repeated basis” – which it obviously is being despite the victim of harassment, the trans doctor, saying how hurtful and upsetting it is.
The ruling was quite specifically about the use of male pronouns and titles with regards to the trans doctor however it is also reported that the anti-trans legal team has used the trans doctor’s deadname in court documents. A deadname which has subsequently been reported in the press.
Which is how we get to the decision that I believe the UK Judiciary and quite specifically Judge Tinnion who made it should be ashamed for. Before any of this the court was asked by the trans doctor, who again, is the victim of harassment – if the identity of the doctor could be anonymised. Judge Tinnion refused this request throwing open the doors to every bigot in the country to take a stab at a doctor for having been harassed.
The Times, Tribunal Tweets, Sex Matters and For Women Scotland alongside Naomi Cunningham’s Legal Feminist all worked together to petition the court to refuse a request for anonymity. Their argument, according to the court documents, essentially boils down to the bigot nurse reckoning that everyone believes the same bigot crap she does about the doctor. With the doctor having to testify things like “no actually I’ve been catcalled by men in the street before” to suggest otherwise.
The doctor talks about the stress and anxiety she has faced as a result of becoming a victim of transphobic harassment at work including having her psychotherapist write a letter in support of these mental health claims. Though Judge Tinnion stated the tribunal “has significant reservations” about relying on anything in this letter because, and I’m not making this up, the psychotherapist didn’t ask the claimant about their version of events.
In rejecting the doctor’s application for anonymity as a witness and victim of harassment in an employment tribunal Judge Tinnon writes; “althought this ET litigation has been mentioned in the press, no-one outside of a relatively small circle of people professionally involved in this case will know of <the doctor’s> involvement. She is not a public figure and has no public profile”. So why have I seen photos of her wedding being spread around by bigots on social media? Why have the press published her deadname? Why do I even know who she is?
I know all of this and more because the Judiciary were either ill-prepared or incompetent enough to have allowed themselves to become just another cog in the machine that spins the bigot merry-go-round that is our politics, press and media here in the UK now. Judge Tinnion in particular should be ashamed and this event should be considered a huge stain on the Judiciary that forces them to wake up and take the threat of bigotry in the UK seriously when making their decisions about our lives.
Bigots in the UK have succesfully turned part of our justice system, employment tribunals in particular, into a weapon to further the harassment and targeting of transgender people. This doctor lived a relatively quiet life, accepted and supported by most people in it, until this tribunal and the Judge’s involved forced bigotry into it now and forever.
There is no putting the cat back in the bag; she will never have a fully private life ever again. She has been robbed of that human right by the Judges in this case and I believe they should have to face the consequences for that, just as she will bear the consequences of their decisions too.