Oh no, she raised concerns

Feb 22nd, 2025 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

It can be expensive to fire academics for knowing and saying that people can’t change sex.

A law lecturer who was sacked by the Open University after expressing gender-critical beliefs has been handed a payout from the institution. Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022 after she criticised changes to the curriculum based on gender identity in an online forum. She claimed the university was introducing requirements to “indoctrinate students in gender identity theory”.

The lecturer, who taught law at the university for almost a decade, claimed she had raised concerns about new teaching requirements, including making students use offenders’ preferred pronouns.

Brilliant. Requiring teachers to require students to lie about the sex of offenders – so if they’re discussing a rape case and the Offender claims to be a woman, the teacher and the students must all call him she/her. The OU might as well require teachers to tell students that money grows on trees and elephants can fly and Trump is an intelligent thoughtful compassionate fella.

The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, including the financial sum awarded to Dr Gadow. It amounts to an about-turn for the university, which previously told The Telegraph it would “vigorously defend” itself before a judge.

The institution also accused the academic of making “spurious allegations” about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal and said it looked forward to presenting its own version of events at an employment tribunal.

Well it totally did look forward but it turned out it was getting its hair done that day so it had to settle.

In a statement, Dr Gadow accused the university of agreeing “to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts”.

“After long claiming it could not wait for the truth to come out in court, that it would fight this case ‘vigorously’ and ‘robustly’ all the way, the OU [Open University] – while making no admission as to liability – has resolved the matter by way of payment of an undisclosable sum of money.”

Can we all guess why? I think we can.

4 Responses to “Oh no, she raised concerns”

#1
Your Name's not Bruce?
February 22, 2025 at 10:50 am

Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct….The institution also accused the academic of making “spurious allegations” about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal….

“Gross misconduct” and “spurious allegations” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I guess they weren’t so confident in their ability to defend or justify the bullshit to which Dr. Gadow refused to acquiesce. Employment tribunals have been the arenas in which gender idiocy and its advocates and enforcers have been most thoroughly demolished. I wonder if their lawyers told them to settle, and shut the fuck up.
#2
maddog1129
February 22, 2025 at 11:05 am

Too many malefactors get away with not admitting liability or wrongdoing. I think far more of them should be refused any settlement unless they admit they were wrong.
#3
NightCrow
February 22, 2025 at 12:45 pm

I am very glad to hear that Dr Gadow has won her case. The following is part of her own account of the circumstances that led up to her dismissal by the Open University:

Criminal law tutors were told that, to ‘liberate the curriculum’, our classes now had to introduce diverse gender identities and teach students to use offenders’ preferred pronouns. I questioned if incorporating gender identity theory might be an unnecessary distraction or even unwise. I described gender theory as hotly contested, and as recently developed in wealthy Western countries. I pointed out that (not) believing in gender identity is a protected religious or philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, and said law tutorials are no place to promote one’s beliefs.

I also highlighted some of the implications of describing offenders according to self-identified gender in our work. I said a criminal lawyer’s role is to present facts, that sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies, and that no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts. I said an assailant’s language about himself and his offence should not automatically be adopted over his victim’s, and that lawyers and courts sometimes need to describe offenders in terms with which the latter might not agree – calling the innocent-identifying perpetrator ‘guilty’, or the trans-identifying male ‘he’.…

I further incurred the wrath of the curriculum liberators when I asked them to define their key concepts such as ‘LGBTQ+’. It had become apparent to me that some treated ‘minor attraction’ (i.e. paedophilia) as part of the ‘diverse sexualities and gender identities’ Open University law teaching now seeks to ‘centre’. The criminal law module culminated in an assignment in which students had to discuss a relationship between an adult and a minor. Students would gain marks by describing child and adult as each other’s ‘boyfriends’, but lose marks if they considered whether the adult was grooming the child or committing a sexual offence.

This was described by the university as ‘misconduct’.
#4
Rev David Brindley
February 22, 2025 at 2:20 pm

I wonder if their lawyers told them to settle, and shut the fuck up.

Wouldn’t it be a delicious irony if those lawyers had been trained by Dr Gadow.