A gender critical social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.
Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender critical views at an online meeting.
The background to Ms Pitt’s claim is that she made various comments during a Zoom meeting of the county council’s LGBTQIA+ Group in January 2023.
The meeting began with a male colleague claiming that his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog “to prompt debate about gender”.
No doubt feeling that there’s only so much of this sort of thing anyone can reasonably be expected to put up with, Ms Pitt and a lesbian colleague of hers, who was also in attendance, went on the offensive, expressing their belief that sex is binary and immutable, and pointing out that there are two sexes and people cannot change sex.
For good measure, they added that women’s sport was being ruined by men competing as women, and that biological women have a right to single-sex spaces such as women’s refuges, changing rooms and prisons.
The reaction of Ms Pitt’s colleagues to hearing perfectly lawful views that they disagreed with, but were apparently intellectually incapable of rebutting, was to accuse her of “symbolic violence”.
One attendee described Ms Pitt as having “a really aggressive tone,” and said he found it “quite inappropriate” that she and her colleague had commented on “transwomen participating in women’s sports and sharing women’s spaces”.
Another member of the group claimed he couldn’t sleep for two nights “thinking about this cruelty”, while another said she too had suffered several nights of poor sleep after the incident, and had continued to experience problems with sleeping and anxiety dreams.
A third colleague escaped the hell of insomnia, but said that by the end of the meeting he was “shaking in disbelief” and “traumatised”.
Following receipt of these rococo claims, the council’s management wrote to Ms Pitt to tell her a “formal concern” had been received in relation to “some views” she had expressed during the Zoom call, which were “perceived to be of an inappropriate and offensive nature”.
During the ensuing disciplinary meeting, she denied having been aggressive but accepted she could be “quite direct/forthright”.
Asked if she thought the LGBTQIA+ Group was an “appropriate place” to discuss her views, she said: “What was the group for, if it was not for that type of discussion?”
Management then prepared a report claiming Ms Pitt’s “comments… were perceived to be non-inclusive and transphobic”, had “caused significant offence”, and had been “particularly inappropriate and ill-judged”. It said they had “a detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being” of the complainants”.
As a result, Ms Pitt was sent a written management instruction, expressing concerns that she had demonstrated “behaviours that were non-inclusive and perceived as transphobic.”
She was instructed in writing not to contact any members of the LGBTQIA+ Ally and Support Group, or attend their events, and to act in a way which “ensured her personal views and beliefs did not manifest themselves in comments or actions in the workplace that might discriminate against others on grounds of a protected characteristic”.
Management also confirmed that the instruction constituted the informal stage of the respondent’s disciplinary procedure.
Speaking at the time, the 62-year-old said: “The whole process was intensely stressful and humiliating for me.
“It left me feeling that my colleagues and my employer regarded me as a bigot who could only be tolerated in the workplace if I was forced to keep my beliefs to myself even when they were relevant.”
Four months later, in October 2023, Ms Pitt took the local authority to an employment tribunal, pleading harassment related to sexual orientation and her philosophical belief that gender is immutable.
Her tribunal had been due to commence on Monday 29th July 2024, but after making their former employee wait around for 10 months, Cambridgeshire county council decided to back down at precisely 8:38am on the morning of the hearing. Having accepted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of Ms Pitt’s gender critical beliefs amounting to a philosophical belief within the meaning of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, it agreed to pay her compensation.
The reserved judgment records that, for the council, the manner in which the claimant (and her colleague) “chose to promote their views” had been “aggressive and confrontational – for example, talking over people and not allowing others to speak – and that this was the issue”.
However, Naomi Cunningham, the barrister representing Ms Pitt, said in written submissions that “the respondent’s own contemporaneous documentation ‘makes it unequivocally clear that the investigation, the investigation report and the management instruction were all in reality motivated by the claimant’s manifestation of her protected belief’”. She added that “the central contention on which the respondent’s resistance to the claim is based [i.e. the manner not message] is flatly contradicted by its own contemporaneous documentation”.
Ruling in Ms Pitt’s favour, Paul Michell, the employment judge, found that the documents “unambiguously show” she was treated in the way she was because of the manifestation of her gender critical beliefs.
He awarded her £30,000 in loss of earnings and £22,000 compensation for injury to feelings, totalling £55,910 with interest added.
Back in July, Ms Pitt’s legal team also made an additional costs order, and the Tribunal has now instructed Cambridgeshire county council to pay their former employee’s legal costs of £8,000.
Speaking following the ruling, Ms Pitt said: “Let’s hope that other employers will start to learn that it’s a bad idea to try to stop lesbians asserting their boundaries and silence staff who know that sex is real and sometimes matters.”
Interestingly, Judge Michell also recommended that the council change its mandatory staff training to include a section on “freedom of belief and speech in the workplace”, with the materials to be drafted by the employment barrister Anya Palmer, who represented Maya Forstater in her landmark gender critical belief case.
Will that recommendation now be upheld?
Responding to the ruling, a council spokesman said: “We strive to create a safe, inclusive and compassionate environment for people to work in and recognise this needs to be balanced with everyone being entitled to express their own views and beliefs. We will reflect carefully on this final outcome, as well as undertaking a review of our policies and procedures accordingly.”
