The FSU is currently supporting two separate legal Crowdfunders, both of which have been launched by Northern Irish members who were discriminated against on the basis of their gender critical beliefs. (The Irish Times namechecked us in an informative piece about the issues involved, which you can read here).
First, there’s the group of 23 people – including the writer Graham Linehan and feminist academic Dr Julia Long – who were refused service at a Belfast pub, Robinson’s Bar, simply for wearing ‘Woman = Adult Human Female’ T-shirts.
Speaking at the event, the solicitor representing the group, Simon Chambers, described it as the first case of its kind in Northern Ireland. The legal action was sparked when the group visited Robinson’s Bar after they had taken part in a demonstration led by women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as ‘Posie Parker’.
The second, equally shocking case, is that of FSU member Sara Morrison, who was suspended by her employer, Belfast Film Festival, for the ‘crime’ of speaking at the same Kellie-Jay Keen event.
She was of course in attendance as a private citizen rather than as an employee, but that didn’t matter to the various LGBT+ organisations that heard about her sacrilegious act through the local grapevine. What looked and felt like an orchestrated cancellation campaign then materialised, with large numbers of activists emailing, texting and tweeting Belfast Film Festival to complain that its employee was [yawn] “an unsafe person to be around” and [zzz] an “anti-gay fascist”.
As is so often the way with cultural organisations that yearn for the quiet, publicly funded life of annual salary uplifts, empty gestures and sparsely populated auditoriums, Belfast Film Festival quickly caved in to the mob, publicly announcing that it would launch an investigation into its employee. That investigation is still ongoing.
Sara’s case, not unreasonably, is that her employer is discriminating against her due to her support of women’s rights and the fact that she holds gender critical beliefs.
Please show your support for these cases – here and here – and help send a message to all employers in Northern Ireland that women’s rights and LGB rights cannot be trampled on in this way.
