London: A British tribunal has awarded a woman who lost her job after tweeting that transgender women are biologically male more than £100,000 ($127,000). She claimed that because of her "perfectly normal beliefs about the material reality of sex," she was subjected to discrimination.
An employment tribunal in London ruled on Friday that the Centre for Global Development (CGD) must pay Forstater £106,400 in total, including £91,500 in lost wages and emotional harm compensation and £14,900 in interest.
When Forstater began criticising the government's plans to allow people to legally change their gender at will in 2018, she was employed by the GCD as a researcher and taxation expert.
She tweeted, "A man's internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality," before drawing comparisons between transgender women and activist and university lecturer Rachel Dolezal, who pretended to be black while leading an NAACP chapter in Washington.
Forstater expressed surprise in another tweet about how "smart people who I admire... are tying themselves in knots to avoid saying the truth that men cannot change into women."
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In 2019, Forstater's employment contract was not renewed, and the GCD terminated her fellowship. When a tribunal ruled that her tweets "did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons" and that she was unfairly discriminated against for her views in 2021, she was successful in her appeal against the think tank. However, it wasn't until Friday that she received damages.
In a statement, she claimed that "my case has exposed institutionalised discrimination against, as well as the routine abuse and smearing of, people with perfectly ordinary beliefs about the material reality of sex." "I, along with many other people who hold gender-critical beliefs, have been the victims of discrimination fueled by bigotry, not the perpetrators,"
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'Harry Potter' author JK Rowling, a feminist with similar views on gender, publicly backed the 49-year-old researcher in Forstater's case, which attracted a lot of media attention in the UK.
In order to allow people to legally change their gender without a medical diagnosis in 2020, the British government shelved those plans. A law allowing anyone over the age of 16 to change their gender at will was passed by Scotland in December, but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blocked the law in January.