Two civil servants for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are facing legal action over allegations of discrimination against transgender people.
A colleague of Andreas Meuller and Elspeth Drummer-Wrigley, who currently remains anonymous, thinks the pair should be reprimanded for their view that transgender people can’t change their sex, The Telegraph reported. Mueller and Drummer-Wrigley are co-chairs of the Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN), a department of Defra the claimant is now calling to be shut down.
SEEN is a cross-government staff network, described by Drummer Wrigley as 'the only civil service network that clearly treats sex and sexual orientation as concepts defined in the Equality Act, which should never be conflated with or replaced by "gender identity."'
Meuller, co-chair of the network with Drummer-Wrigley, said that he has been targeted for engaging with social media posts that are gender critical. 'I am being sued for being gender critical, and for co-founding a staff network of like-minded people,' Meuller wrote online.
The anonymous claimant asserted that comments made on SEEN’s message board were threatening to transgender people, The Telegraph reported. 'I do not accept that these or any of the other posts, comments or actions were offensive or discriminatory in relation to gender reassignment, nor that they created an unsafe place of work for employees with that protected characteristic,' Drummer-Wrigley responded online.
Meuller is opposing the anonymity application made by the claimant on the grounds that the hearing is a matter of public interest. 'If this claim is successful, then an activist ideology will effectively dictate not only what civil servants can say to one another, but all conversations that can be had in the workplace,' he wrote online. 'This will potentially determine whether we have an objective, evidence-based Civil Service where freedom of speech and diversity of thought is encouraged. That’s what we are defending here.'
The hearing was set for November 3 and is expected to last approximately 16 days.
