In a damning ruling at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal, a judge has condemned a trans inclusive rape crisis centre, and criticised the organisation’s transgender chief executive for pursuing a “Kafkaesque” nine month-long investigation against a female employee who held gender critical beliefs, reports the Times.
Roz Adams, a support counsellor who has worked with vulnerable communities since 2003, brought the case claiming she suffered discrimination when her views on the importance of rape trauma and counselling services remaining single-sex became known to senior colleagues at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), including the centre’s chief executive, transgender woman Mridul Wadhwa.
The employment tribunal has now ruled in Ms Adams’s favour, upholding her claim of constructive dismissal against ERCC, which in 2023 received over £1.9 million in funding from the Scottish government, and finding that she had been harassed and discriminated against.
When she joined the rape crisis centre, Adams, 52, had at first welcomed its trans-inclusive policies, believing that everyone who had “suffered sexual assault is entitled to support”, the tribunal heard.
However, the judgment states that once she started work “she felt it became more and more apparent that there were issues regarding the way that gender issues were dealt with in the organisation … She described things around the issue as being ‘eggshelly’.”
During the hearing in April, lawyer Naomi Cunningham, representing Ms Adams, claimed the ERCC mounted an “inquisition” after a female rape survivor said she would feel uncomfortable talking to a man and asked to know the biological sex of her support worker.
Ms Adams said she was accused of being “transphobic” after suggesting in an email that they tell her that one volunteer was “a woman at birth who now identifies as being non-binary”.
It emerged at a previous hearing in January that the centre refused to support that response, and instead told the woman that it “does not have any men on their volunteer team”.
Ms Cunningham also told the tribunal Wadhwa, who was born male, held a “hostile attitude towards sex-realist beliefs” and used the incident to instigate a nine-month disciplinary procedure against Ms Adams.
Ms Adams previously said she was “horrified” when she received a letter advising she was being investigated for gross misconduct and faced the possibility of immediate dismissal with no pay. She took sick leave but, after weeks of worrying, was told she was being investigated for “misconduct” and would face only a warning.
She eventually resigned in March 2023. (Ms Adams now works at Beira’s Place, a centre funded by the author JK Rowling, which offers a free “sexual violence support service for women run by women”.)
The panel also heard from one witness, Nicole Jones, who said there was “much talk of TERFS and transphobes” at the ERCC. According to Jones, when the issue of how best to determine whether potential new hires held gender critical views cropped up, Wadhwa bluntly instructed her to terminate employment of any personnel who didn’t subscribe to gender identity ideology. “Firing could be as important as hiring when creating inclusive spaces,” Wadhwa allegedly philosophised.
In the ruling handed down, Judge McFatridge said the ERCC’s review of Ms Adams’s conduct “was clearly motivated by a strong belief among senior management and some of the claimant’s colleagues that the claimant’s views were inherently hateful.
“It is clear,” he added, “that [Wadhwa] was involved in the process since she was the one who selected and contacted who would deal with the various stages of the disciplinary and grievance process.”
In one particularly withering section, the judgment describes the investigation undertaken by the centre into Ms Adams’s gender critical opinions as “unfortunately a classic of its kind, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”.
Ms Adams said in a statement issued on Sunday night that the judgment was a huge “relief”, but that it was “tragic” the case ever needed to reach the Employment Tribunal.
She said: “For three years, I consistently offered to enable discussion and I firmly believe that we will only find solutions that work for everyone through fearless, respectful, well-informed dialogue.
“This is a victory for all people who have been subjected to sexual violence who need a choice of worker and group support on the basis of sex in order to feel safe,” she continued, before expressing her hope that “the Scottish government, charity regulator OSCR, Rape Crisis Scotland and all those in the sector feel emboldened by this judgment to safeguard this important choice for survivors, as part of ensuring services are welcoming.”
