An Employment Tribunal has awarded Lizzy Pitts substantial damages of £55k to Lizzy Pitts, a social work manager in Cambridgeshire. Cambridgeshire County Council conceded her claim of harassment at the last minute in August, on the opening day of the hearing. The Council had disciplined her on the basis of complaints by her colleagues in the council's LGBTQ+ Peer Support Group.
This last minute concession by Cambridgeshire will hopefully mark an end to local authorities and other employers harassing social workers for our defence of the reality and importance of biological sex in our work, whether with adults or children.
Here is Lizzy's CrowdJustice post about the last minute concession by CCC. In this she outlines the bizarre case against her.
"Cambridgeshire County Council surrenders!
My hearing was due to start on Monday this week. Thanks to you, my case was extremely well-prepared, and my legal team was ready to ask the Council’s witnesses lots of hard questions. However, first thing on Monday morning, the Council’s solicitors told us that they were willing to admit that they had discriminated against me, and pay the compensation I had claimed in full. After some negotiation, they also agreed to a recommendation from the tribunal that they should add a compulsory module to their e-learning on freedom of belief and expression in the workplace. The module is to be written by the barrister Anya Palmer, which I consider a very welcome and important addition to all our council workers training in Cambridgeshire- thank you Naomi Cunningham for negotiating and holding out on that one.We have made an application for an order that the Council pays all my legal costs, because their defense was always hopeless, and the tribunal’s decision on that application is awaited. I will inform when we have an outcome.
I am personally very disappointed with my ex-employer who held out to 8.38 on the morning of the hearing before conceding- this was a 10 month wait after they were served the original papers. I say ex-employer as I gave immediate notice following a 9 month wait for a response to my grievance which was turned down flat. They could not tell me what I had said or done that was 'transphobic', yet refused to remove it form my record.We don’t know exactly why the Council decided to surrender at the very last minute, but we can speculate. The evidence in the case would have been, dare I say, embarrassing. Five of my colleagues had made a joint complaint about what I had said at a meeting of an LGBTQ+ Peer Support Group to punish me for expressing my everyday, mainstream belief in reality, that there are two sexes, and for having clear boundaries as a lesbian, about men in lesbian spaces. I also included online dating apps and in person social groups as areas that I want to be lesbian and women only- because yes, we all know what a lesbian is. My colleagues' reactions to hearing views they disagreed with had been hysterical. One said that he couldn’t sleep for two nights “thinking about this cruelty”, and referred to my “symbolic violence," and then going full steam with just "violence”. Another said that he had felt able to relax at the beginning of the meeting because he thought “ah we’re all like minded friends here”- it’s an amusing irony of gender identity belief that it holds that “diversity” requires everyone to think the same. The same colleague said that by the end of the meeting he was “shaking in disbelief” and “traumatised". A third colleague said she had had several nights of poor sleep after the incident, and had continued to experience problems with sleeping and anxiety dreams.There was talk of one colleague's “gender-fluid” (clearly male) dog, which he puts in dresses. He had identified his dog as gender fluid, no self-id there then. (You really had to be there.)So it would be understandable if, when it came to it, the Council’s witnesses may have felt a bit queasy about the questions they were likely to face, and for clarity the above is the tip of the iceberg. 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.
I thank everybody for the support you have given to me- I have lots of thank you's still to do- there have been 2121 donations to the fund!, and this win belongs to all of us."
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