True. It's from June. I had not previously read the part from the June judgement stating the obvious - that in a society people will be required to tolerate beliefs being expressed that they may find offensive.
Instead of being tolerant, people seem to be increasingly claiming they feel "unsafe" if someone holds a belief that offends them.
Maya Forstater wrote an article in Oct 2021 about the danger of judges being unduly influenced by lobbyists such as Stonewall to go beyond the Equalities Act in the judgements they hand out.
https://thecritic.co.uk/who-judges-the-judges/She says parts of the Equal Treatment Bench Book (ETBB), a guidance document produced by the Judicial College, which is the body that trains judges, seems to have been written by lobbyists from the trans movement.
She claims "The chapter in the ETBB on transgender describes sex as being “assigned at birth”. It tells judges that the language of the Equality Act is out of date. It asserts that acknowledging someone’s sex may breach their human rights. Most seriously, it warns judges that dissent from Stonewall’s teachings is dangerous; it blames “negative responses” to its expansive view of civil rights protections of trans people for a rise in hate crime."
She says it could have been this training that led to the judge in her original 2019 Employment Tribunal erring in law by finding against her on the grounds that her gender-critical belief was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”, putting it on par with Nazism or fascism; the kinds of views for which you can rightly lose your job. She writes of the difficulty and lack of transparency in finding out how much judges are unduly influenced by training from lobby groups.
Hopefully, more and more government departments will continue to back away from paying Stonewall for training or implementing Stonewall's incorrect interpretation/ misrepresentation of the Equalities Act.
