Maya Forstater: Why I'm standing up for people with gender critical beliefs

11 June 2021, 11:52 | Updated: 11 June 2021, 11:58

'You don't believe someone might be born in the wrong body?'

A woman who won a landmark employment tribunal appeal after losing her job due to gender posts she made on Twitter today told LBC she is going to stand up for people who believe that gender is immutable.

Ms Forstater lost her job after posting views online that people cannot change their biological sex. She made the remarks in the wake of proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to identify as the opposite sex.

She lost an initial tribunal in 2019 but she appealed, and the High Court ruled yesterday that her views should be "tolerated in a pluralist society."

Speaking on LBC this morning, she said: "It’s an issue about women’s rights. If you can’t talk about the basic fact of being a woman, being a mother, being a grandmother, getting pregnant, giving birth… then you can’t fight discrimination, you can’t fight sexism, you can’t even talk about just the reality of the world.

"All of those words are being taken away from us."

She also relayed some of her discussions she had with her employer at the time. She said they got in contact with her not long after her online posts and said, "We expect our fellows and associates not to use exclusionary language."

"I wrote back and said, 'I don’t want to harass anybody, be mean or rude to anybody, but the word woman is exclusionary. It excludes males.

"'We need to be able to talk about this, and I will continue to talk about it,'" she explained.

"When it came to my contract being renewed, they said 'actually, we don’t want you anymore'."

She told Nick Ferrari: "I'm not against anyone doing anything in their own life. The question is, what are the obligations and what does that mean for other people?

"Somebody can transition, but does that meant that they then have the right to use spaces that were there for the opposite sex or sports that are there for the opposite sex? I don't think they do.

"That doesn't mean they can't wear what they like, call themselves what they like, or do whatever they want to with their own body. That's between them and their doctor."

The former tax expert at the Centre for Global Development (CGD) also received support from JK Rowling for her views, getting a message saying, "basically, well done".

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What has this done for your employment prospects?

Ms Forstater criticised LGBT charity Stonewall, among others, for their diversity scheme adopted by multiple organisations, which she claims has begun to make "using the word woman or mother" unacceptable.

She went on to say: "Those organisations have to protect trans people, they have to protect people who believe in gender identity ideology, but they also have to protect people who don't believe in it, and that's the majority because the ordinary belief about sex is held by most people and is said by Stonewall to be bigotry."

Ms Forstater's stance on the subject has impacted her career a lot, she explained: "It has made my life very difficult. I don't get invited to things and there were other jobs that I have been turned down for.

"I have had other work, but it's made my life very difficult. I thought it was important to stand up for this.

"Now, I have co-founded a new organisation called Sex Matters, which is standing up for people with gender critical beliefs, with the belief that sex is real, immutable and important."