A social worker who was suspended for expressing gender-critical views on Facebook has won a harassment case against her employer and the social work regulator.
Rachel Meade, a social worker of over 20 years, won her claims against her employer Westminster City Council (WCC) and regulator Social Work England (SWE) on Tuesday.
The social worker said it’s “a huge relief to be so completely vindicated after all this time.”
“It has been a horrendous experience,” Ms. Meade said. “This ruling makes it clear that I was entitled to contribute to the important public debate on sex and gender. I hope it will make it easier for other regulated professionals to speak up without threats to their career and reputation.”
Her solicitor Shazia Khan, founding partner of Cole Khan Solicitors, said it’s a “landmark victory for common sense and free speech in the culture war on gender issues.”
According to the law firm, this is the first time a regulator and an employer have together been found to have been liable for discrimination relating to gender critical beliefs.
Ms. Khan said the judgment “sounds an alarm for all regulators—and all employers of regulated professionals—that they must not let their processes be weaponised by activists bent on silencing the debate on freedom of speech on gender.”
She demanded apologies from WCC and SWE, and called for an “urgent root and branch reform from the top down of both organisations to mitigate against further unlawful discrimination of employees and registrants.”
Ms. Meade was reported to SWE in June 2020 by Aedan Wolton, one of her 40-some Facebook friends, who claimed her comments were “transphobic.”
The complaint said Ms. Meade had donated money to and signed petitions and shared posts from organisations which he described as being “known to harass the trans community,” that “seek to erode the right of transpeople,” or were “a known hate group.”
Not Discriminatory
Following the complaint, SWE launched an investigation and found that there was a realistic prospect that Ms. Meade’s fitness to practise was impaired, despite a glowing endorsement from her team manager Jackie Gilroy that said she had never practised in a discriminatory way and that her work with minority groups was exemplary.SWE’s finding was followed by a suspension by Ms. Meade’s employer.
“By the time the case was heard, both the regulator’s sanction and the employer’s warning had been withdrawn, but Ms. Meade had been suspended from work for a year and bullied into silence on the subject of proposed reforms of the Gender Recognition Act, the importance of safe single-sex spaces for women and related subjects,” her lawyers said.
In a judgment issued on Wednesday, Tribunal Panel Judge Richard Nicolle, sitting with two non-legal members, said they found that Ms. Meade “never believed that any of her individual posts were discriminatory.”
“All of the claimant’s Facebook posts and other communications fell within her protected rights for freedom of thought and freedom to manifest her beliefs as protected under Articles 9 and 10,” the judgment said.
“We do not consider that any of her manifestations of her beliefs were of a nature that they aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms of others contrary to Article 17.”
The panel said they did not consider WCC and SWE “struck a fair balance” between Ms. Meade’s “right to freedom of expression and the interests of those who they perceived may be offended by her Facebook posts.”
The panel found that the treatment of Ms. Meade by both her employer and the regulator constituted harassment.
They also said SWE’s “failure to check if Mr Wolton’s complaint could be malicious, and not checking his previous social media history, is indicative of a lack of rigour in the investigation, and an apparent willingness to accept a complaint from one side of the gender self-identification/gender critical debate without appropriate objective balance of the potential validity of different views in what is a highly polarised debate.”
According to a Guardian article on Oct. 10, 2014, the author, named Aedan Wolton, was a caseworker and the co-lead on service development at “cliniQ—the UK’s only trans-led sexual health and wellbeing clinic, and also a member of ReShape, an independent sexual health think tank.” The Epoch Times has been unable to verify whether the author is the same Aedan Wolton named in Ms. Meade’s case.
The judgment came after Maya Forstater, who lost her job after her Twitter posts were deemed transphobic, won a case against her employer, setting a precedent that “belief as to the immutability of sex is one that amounts to a philosophical belief” and is therefore protected under the Equality Act 2010.
