Why trans activists who hound their work colleagues could cost employers dear

Both online and offline, angry activist-workers decry the supposed ‘bigotry’ of ‘GC’ feminists. Believing women are adult human females is not to be viewed as basic fact, such activists argue. Some people have a female ‘gender identity’. If they say they’re a woman, even if male, that must be prioritised.

It takes a lot of vigorous unthinking to maintain this stance; to ignore the growing litany of consequences this assertion leads to. From male rapists in women’s prisons to the erasure of lesbian spaces free of men, it is often tiresome to repeatedly spell out the foundationally dangerous stupidity. It’s also vital to, due to activist intransigence.

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‘Not worthy of respect’?

It has long been confirmed that it is legal and reasonable to hold GC views. Maya Forstater, co-founder of human rights charity Sex Matters, lost her first employment tribunal against the Centre for Global Development in 2019. An extraordinary initial judgment concluded her losing her job was justified, as believing women to be real and important was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The glee from gender-identity activists in 2019 was palpable. I wasn’t the only woman to have that judgment used against her. In my case, an open letter to the Scottish Poetry Library was penned in early 2020 by then-colleagues in poetry and publishing. The complaint? The SPL appeared to be supportive of feminists like myself, due to a statement they made opposing no-platforming attempts by poets against other poets.

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At the time, I was newly tangled in a hellish online and offline campaign of harassment, kickstarted by my vocal opposition to the violence of some ‘genderist’ activists in 2019. Times have changed – I would hope such a stance would not kickstart a hounding today.

But, in 2020, the root argument of the open letter was that the SPL was guilty of “institutional transphobia” as GC views were unlawful. It also claimed that “women’s rights” are “trans rights”. Proof, if one still needs it, of how deeply wrong genderist activists have always been, legally speaking.

Costly compensation

Forstater won on appeal in 2021, setting an important precedent. No woman is ever un-hounded, of course, but Forstater’s seismic victory led directly to other successful employment tribunals including Professor Jo Phoenix’s win against the Open University in 2024, and Roz Adams against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre last year.

In both cases, the severity of the harassment from colleagues was judged extreme. The financial awards made in damages should also confirm to bosses that allowing serious abuse of women with perfectly ordinary views is not just appalling and unjust for that individual, it can be very costly for employers.

Unlike women in the thick of it, however, gender-identity activists don’t seem to pay attention to legal precedents or public opinion. Routinely behaving as though it were still 2020, engaging in snarky online savagery, such activists still assume that everyone disagrees with the ‘Gender Critters’ (as some particularly loathsome activists call us) and that self-ID is law. It never was, as the Supreme Court judgment this April confirmed emphatically.

Some sectors are proving more intransigent than others, continuing to act at best unfairly, at worst unlawfully. As shown by the recent ‘Everyday Cancellation’ report from SEEN in Publishing and Sex Matters, the literary world has been particularly hard for gender-critical writers to navigate.

Profound injustices

Since that report was published, however, it hasn’t stopped those implicated in its findings, including commissioning editors, literary programmers, festival board members, and staff at leading publishers, openly continuing precisely the same behaviours and using the same discriminatory language online that has already landed so many other workplaces in severely hot water.

Any gender-critical employee of one of these literary institutions, ground down by the workplace atmosphere, would have a strong case for screenshotting such things into an evidence bundle and swinging them to an employment lawyer.

The literary world has long acted as though gender-identity beliefs are legally coherent and morally mandatory, with profound injustices and a dreadful culture subsequently created for the non-compliant. That is the case, as the SEEN report makes clear, both for writers like myself who speak out openly and for those terrified to do so as activists’ intolerance is matched by their wrong-headed self-righteousness.

Now, a new report from Professor Alice Sullivan, commissioned by the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, exposes the extent of the harm this ideology has caused in UK universities.

It’s grim reading, even for someone seasoned in studying gender wars ‘houndings’. Amongst familiar tales of psychological coercion and harassment, we see serious failures to uphold the very point of universities, with the closing down of important research into areas of study related to sex, gender, and medical transition. As in publishing, a tiny minority’s intolerance has been permitted to upturn entire institutions, seemingly more concerned with activist ire than their foundational principles.

Sabotage of gender critical writers continues

Writers’ freedom of expression is the bedrock of a functioning literary world. Academic freedom plays a similar role for universities. So, are gender-identity views compatible with a healthy workplace? In practice, the Forstater judgment protects both GC beliefs alongside their opposite. There is just one problem: how those beliefs manifest.

In academia and publishing, where abuse and economic sabotage of GC writers and academics continues openly, HR managers must urgently assess whether this is a feature, or a bug, of that belief system. Individual employees should take stock too, and put down their fiery pitchforks.

Tolerance of differing views is worthy of respect in a democratic society. If hounding people is an inevitable manifestation of holding genderist beliefs, then employers should urgently assess their hiring practices.

Jenny Lindsay is a writer, poet, essayist, and author of Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars