Too many organisations have let them get away with it
Joan Smith at UnHerd yesterday:
A social worker has won her claim for harassment after she was suspended for expressing gender-critical beliefs — and the judgment has far-reaching implications for freedom of speech. For years now, activists have claimed an exclusive right to decide what constitutes “transphobia” and too many organisations — employers, regulators and political parties — have let them get away with it.
Not any more. An employment tribunal has found that Rachel Meade suffered harassment by her employer, Westminster Council, and her regulator, Social Work England (SWE). It’s a stunning vindication for Meade and a warning to other organisations that take accusations of transphobia at face value.
Meade’s ordeal began when the regulator received a single complaint about her sharing gender-critical posts on social media.
That single complaint, I’ve been learning, came from one Aedon Wolton, a trans man and busy “activist.”
SWE responded by launching a lengthy “fitness to practise” investigation and issuing a formal sanction. It was later withdrawn but Westminster Council suspended her for a year. A finding of gross misconduct was eventually withdrawn, but by then the damage had been done.
Now the tribunal has stated what the council and the regulator should have acknowledged from the start: Meade had not broken any law or said anything that compromised her ability to do her job. “All of the claimant’s Facebook posts and other communications fell within her protected rights for freedom of thought and freedom to manifest her beliefs,” the panel held.
And how did we get to the point where people are being suspended from their useful jobs for knowing and saying that people are not the opposite sex? We need to be free to know and say who is which sex, for a million reasons, some of them to do with the most basic safety.
The ruling goes further, calling out organisations which passively accept allegations of transphobia without considering that they might be malicious. The judgment explicitly criticises the regulator for “an apparent willingness to accept a complaint from one side” of the debate without any attempt at objectivity or balance — and for failing to look at the complainant’s own tendentious social media posts before initiating action against Meade.
It’s a body blow to all those gender warriors who claim that anodyne statements about biology constitute “hate speech”. Trans activists lurk on social media, like teenage boys looking for someone to throw stones at, and supposedly decent people are too cowardly to call them out.
It’s almost as if the whole point of being trans is the power to stick it to people who don’t adhere to the absurd ideology.
Or to get loads of attention. Probably some of both.
The entire point of the trans movement is to force women to comply with the most absurd of male desires. They started by attacking the lesbian-heavy Michfest. They now have begun an effort to negate they right of gay and lesbian people to assemble without heterosexual monitors.
Their most shocking success is that for years they have had a program to eliminate homosexuality through the sexual nullification of children through GnRHa drugs given in early puberty. This is worse than AIDS and almost no one is fighting back. And yes, I was around in the darkest days of AIDS.
@iknklast
Our generation had Punk. They practised what we’d probably now call “trolling” and got the desired response. That was their passport to seeing themselves as lonely misunderstood romantic heroes. Then came Goths and most people were a just little wiser and pretty much let them get on with mooching about in cemeteries at midnight and writing bad poetry. We’d been there. Then came what? We’d reached a point when nothing anyone could do in terms of presentation or “lifestyle” could shock or even slightly perturb the older generations. We, who had become those older generations, were all too busy desperately denying the reality of our ageing bodies.
So what do you do when dying your hair an unnatural colour and weighing down your body with a jeweller’s case of heavy metal isn’t getting a response? You make demands – inherently unreasonable demands. Except the generation which is still young enough to be successfully denying the reality of their bodies but has gotten their hands on the mid-level reigns of power, is way ahead of you. They’re actually happy to accede to unreasonable demands – indeed it’s a badge of pride(!), because postmodernism, or something, though mostly just to deny that they’re no longer young romantic heroes and have gotten hold of the power they profess to despise. And if it’s just the rights of women in prison (or women in general) that need to be sacrificed well that’s not a sexy issue, and won’t look good on social media, and almost certainly will never affect them or anybody they know (until one day they look in the mirror and realise they’re old and everyone else sees them as old and are plotting to push them out of the way, and no they can’t identify out of being old but that won’t happen, surely not?).
So the reasonably well-off twenty-somethings get to play the romantic hero and be a dick to women on the internet and everyone else gets to be a dick to women on the internet. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Well, it could be if they could just get their head around where all the shouting is coming from.
Stuart Campbell of the Wings Over Scotland blog has some information about Aidan Wolton, including a video clip:.
Arrrgghh
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