Anti-trans claims of women being bullied out of work have hit social media after Jo Phoenix wins tribunal for unfair dismissal over her “gender critical” ie transphobic views.
I don’t know or care that much about the ins and outs of this case in particular. I expect that like many of the other “gender critical wins” it amounts to a boring technicality that will have little to no actual impact on transgender people where the rubber meets the road. Yet will be marketed by bigots as the next best thing since sliced bread regardless.
But I am pretty interested in this idea of “women being bullied out of work”.
Because yes, sure, we’ve had about a half dozen employment tribunals regarding anti-trans campaigners engaging in anti-trans activity and then facing consequences for that. And yeah sure in many of those cases it was found that the employer, in their attempts to deal with the problem, did so badly and opened the door for tribunal. For example Bailey likely wouldn’t have won her tribunal had her employer not tweeted about her.
But we’ve also seen transphobes lose their employment tribunals too – even despite citing the successful ones in their cases. See David Mackareth who attempted to argue his christian faith meant he should be allowed to misgender people at the DWP. Or Enoch Burke who is probably still outside the school gates waiting to be carted off by the garda again.
Admittedly the transphobes are quieter about those last two. Probably as it doesn’t add to their “women being bullied out of work” narrative to see that transphobia is intolerable even when men do it.
What they aren’t quiet about is how they actually regularly engage in women being bullied out of work. In fact, some transphobes in the comments of a BBC post regarding the Jo Phoenix story are actively engaging in an attempt to bully a woman out of her job. Why? Because Mridul Wadhwa is transgender.
Mridul Wadhwa is a transgender woman whose Wikipedia page has over half of its page under the subheading “harassment” detailing the abuse she has faced for being a transgender woman in the public eye. Transphobes have targeted and abused her on social media for literally years now all because they believe she is too transgender to be CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.
Steph Richards is a tory, but she’s also a transgender woman who has faced repeated harassment from anti-trans activists. Including recently regarding her appointment of CEO of an endometriosis charity. I assume she got the job due to her actually impressive business acumen whereas transphobes think she shouldn’t have the job because they are transphobic.
Joanne Harris is a cisgender woman who happens to have an adult transgender son. She too has faced years of harassment and abuse from transphobes and was essentially forced into outing her transgender child – or as Kathleen Stock put it her “undeclared transgender offspring”. All of which culminated in Harris almost becoming a ‘woman being bullied out of work’ via her role as Chair of the Society of Authors.
And it isn’t just women being bullied out of work either, the above story nearly repeated itself with Keir Starmer taking the hotseat as recently as a few weeks ago. A potential slip of the tongue led transphobic conspiracy theorists to decide Keir Starmer has a transgender son which they took to social media to challenge his leadership over. Outright stating their belief that someone with transgender family cannot be allowed in a position of power due to biases.
I don’t expect transphobes to talk about how they engage in women being bullied out of work for being transgender or having a trans child. Of course not, they are rabid propagandists endlessly selling a lie that they are the one true feminists protecting women from evil. What would be nice to see is a media class actually challenge that narrative a little, maybe by using the above facts as you know… a jumping off point… or something.
The real scoop here is that yes, women being bullied out of work is definitely a thing that is happening – but more often than not its actually transgender people – with an emphasis on transgender women in particular – being targeted for this. Alongside our allies, supporters and even family members facing similar challenges and targeted abuse for refusing to spit on us whenever they see us in person.
You won’t catch that take in UK journalism however. As it appears the entire UK media class have given up on journalism to function more as PR firms for whatever flavour of bastard is ‘controversial’ on any given day.
