A process of exploring his gender
Maya Forstater on gender fluid people in the workplace:
The case of Taylor v Jaguar Land Rover has been trumpeted as a “landmark” employment tribunal decision recognising that people who identify as non-binary or gender-fluid can be covered by the Equality Act protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.
The case concerns Mr/Ms Taylor, a man who began to wear women’s clothing to work in 2017 as part of a process of exploring his gender.
It makes me feel tired already. Work is work, it’s not therapy, it’s not your living room, it’s not a place to “explore” your anything. Do your exploring and navel-gazing and self-actualizing and diary-keeping and mirror gazing on your own time, away from the job and your bosses and above all your fellow workers, who have other things to do and don’t want to have to spend their time and attention on your Journey.
The Equal Treatment Benchbook, which guides judges’ conduct, says:
It is important to respect a person’s gender identity by using appropriate terms of address, names and pronouns.
It isn’t though. It isn’t important. It’s trivial. People have been shouting and screaming it into importance over the past 10 or 20 years, but that’s what people do; in reality it isn’t important, it’s silly. It’s just silly. It’s like saying it’s important to respect a person’s Star Wars identity by using appropriate terms of address, names and pronouns. It’s treating adults like very young children, and playing along with them.
But what if following this guidance means the court loses sight of reality itself?
What indeed.
Jaguar Land Rover is a male dominated company. Women make up 1 in 10 of the workforce. With 50,000 staff in the West Midlands, it is the region’s largest employer. Sean Taylor had worked at Jaguar Land Rover as an engineer for 20 years. He was based at Gaydon – a complex with some 13,000 staff; the size of a small town. In the building where he worked there were over 1,000 people.
The case against Jaguar Land Rover was that in not protecting him from colleagues’ comments, and asking him at one point to use the accessible unisex toilets, they engaged in a course of harrassment and discrimination.
Harassment in the Equality Act is defined as “unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, and which has the purpose or effect of violating a person’s dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.
I wonder how many women dealt with unwanted conduct of that kind at Jaguar Land Rover. I wonder how much time anyone spent fixing that problem.
There was a big issue about the toilets. Which oh which oh which toilets to use.
On 16 July 2017 Taylor wrote to HR saying he was not sure what the toilet arrangements should be.
On 19 September 2017 Taylor sent an email to a manager, saying: “I don’t know what toilet to use, I raised this three times with no progress over six weeks. I spoke to HR twice about moving as part of the transition at work, but this was ignored.”
How about using the same ones you’ve been using for 20 years? That way you won’t be bothering the women in their toilets – or maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe it’s all about you and your “exploring.”
Finally, following on from the grievance meeting there were a series of discussions between local management and HR, and it was decided to allow Taylor to use whatever toilets he wanted on any given day…
Ah that’s great. And if any women on any given day don’t want to use a toilet with him in it well that’s just tough shit, isn’t it. It always is.
The tension between the exception applied to Taylor and the general rules of the company quickly became a problem. Taylor complained that the women’s toilets were locked (with a code) in some locations to avoid vandalism, and this caused him stress. He was concerned that trying to gain access to the women’s toilets would involve “difficult conversations with local staff”.
He was apparently not, however, concerned that trying to gain access to the women’s toilets would be unpleasant for the women who needed them.
The employment tribunal was keen on grand gestures – comparing Taylor to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and rewriting history so that the events it considered appear to relate to a woman called Rose, rather than a man called Sean. They refer to Taylor, a man in his 40s, as a “poster girl for LGBT+ rights”.
So much more interesting and glamorous than mere boring women, who are just women. Yawn.
They are less keen on the idea of occupational health support for Taylor’s mental health issues, including self-harm and suicidal ideation, saying these were only the symptoms. They diagnose the way Taylor was treated by colleagues as the cause of his distress, apparently without the benefit of any expert evidence.
It is notable that Taylor began the “social transition” to dress in women’s clothing at work without any diagnosis, or medical or psychological support. His mental health seriously deteriorated. A therapist might have been able to better prepare him; helping him to anticipate how colleagues might respond, and supporting him to develop resilience strategies for when those responses did not align with his inner world.
The tribunal’s enthusiasm for playing along with the fantasy meant that it failed to consider the practical dilemma faced by Jaguar Land Rover, namely, where there was a mismatch between Mr Taylor’s self-perception and material reality, what exactly should the company have done to protect him from feeling distress at how others perceived him? What rules should it have communicated to all employees?
And even more basically, why should a workplace play along with one employee’s fantasy (at the expense of all the other employees) in the first place? Why has this whole idea of playing along with the fantasy of “becoming a woman” taken over so completely? It’s definitely not a general rule that employers and workers have to play along with other workers’ fantasies on the job. Why is this one fantasy treated so differently? Massive social pressure is one reason, but why isn’t there more resistance to the massive social pressure?
Maybe someday people will start to notice how damn silly it all is.
What a TERFy name for a workplace? Won’t somebody think of the TIMs? Quick, change it to Transdom (nice ring to it) BEFORE THERE IS A MASS OUTBREAK OF SUICIDE.
snerk
So the case is:
1. Co-workers said things about him, from which the employer did not “protect” him, and
2. The employer apparently provided to him (and then had the temerity to ask him to use) a unisex/mixed sex toilet. IOW, he asked multiple times, “what toilet am I supposed to use? I’m so confused!” and the employer gave him an answer and made accommodation for him.
My position is that, if what he is wearing would be work-apprpriate, then it shouldn’t matter what the sex is of the person wearing the clothes. However, a man wearing clothes that would be work-apprpriate if a woman wore them doesn’t change his f*ing sex.
Uh, hold on. Who was vandalizing the toilets? Why do I get the impression that it wasn’t the people who needed the code to access the toilets, which is to say, the women who worked there? And if that’s the case, why should we care about the stress it causes him?
You know, it causes me stress that bank vaults are locked when I need cash. Can I sue to get banks to give me access to their vaults at all hours of the day?
Also the pubs are often shut just when I need a drink, say after being confronted with news fresh from the TERF and other alphabetical battle fronts.
As a wheelchair user, I really don’t mind if trans people use the disabled toilets, if it will help. It’ll inconvenience me, but don’t tell me I’m not prepared to compromise. You’ll love the disabled toilets, trans people. They’re great. They’re usually very clean and well-stocked, there’s lots of space and some of them even have a shower! They’re a single, huge lockable cubicle! They’re a fucking utopia compared to the toilets for you leg-walkers*. They’re better than some of the offices I’ve worked in and have a built-in toilet! I’d spend all day in one if I could!
Oh, right. Dignity and safety isn’t what you actually really want, is it? Sometimes I forget.
* In reality, I have a lot of issues with typical disabled toilet design. They are clearly not usually designed by disabled people (see also, wheelchairs). There’s often nowhere to hang your stuff, the sink placement is usually stupid…. OK, I’ll go and rant somewhere else.
I hope the term “leg-walkers” catches on.
I don’t entirely agree with the above. What if it had been someone who was gay and wanted to come out of the closet. That would mean some kind of exploring too.
Perhaps it would help if the unisex toilets were relabeled as “all who identify as women,” and the locked toilets were relabeled as “biological females only.”
“Exploring your gender” sounds rather a rude thing to do at work, in both senses of the word, and couldn’t they do it at home?
@Axxyaan #9;
I don’t think that’s a situation which would be described as “exploring,” though. A gay man who “comes out” only informs people, they don’t change anything about themselves. They’re not practicing a new set of behaviors, or wearing “gay” clothes. The hope is that things remain the same.
If someone were to say a gay man was “exploring” his homosexuality at work, it would sound like he’s doing something with someone in the supply closet.
Axxyaan, the workplace isn’t an appropriate place to explore your sexuality, either. The claimant, while claiming to want to “explore their gender” at work, doesn’t seem to want to entertain any conversation about it that they’re not in complete control of.
The case makes for interesting reading. Inappropriate behaviour abounds (OB: “I wonder how many women dealt with unwanted conduct of that kind at Jaguar Land Rover. I wonder how much time anyone spent fixing that problem.” Indeed!) but then the claimant also complains about receiving what it seems were intended as compliments from female colleagues… I can’t tell if those were genuine or not from the transcript, but they don’t seem to have been either overtly sexual or obviously insulting as the male colleagues’ comments were. (And yes, like it or not a female colleague complimenting my attire is received differently than a male colleague doing the same. It maybe shouldn’t be that way, but let’s please recognize that people are human.)
The claimant complains about proposed compromises without (as far as I can tell) offering a realistic solution: “use whichever toilet you like, if you’re uncomfortable use the other toilet” seems reasonable compared to expecting the construction/designation of unisex toilets, or of demanding an HR directive to… what? “use the men’s toilet when wearing a men’s shirt and the women’s toilets when wearing a blouse?”
One of the advantages of living in France is that no one much cares which toilet you use. I’ve used women’s toilets on occasion, and I’ve seen women in the men’s toilets. You don’t see anything you’re not supposed to see.
Axxyaan @ 9 – it’s an interesting question. I don’t think coming out of the closet does involve exploration. Realizing or deciding one is bisexual might, and so might changing from straight to gay or gay to straight, but just ending secrecy doesn’t.
But I’m not convinced coming out of the closet is necessarily a work thing either. In a small outfit it might be; in a massive one like Jaguar Land Rover? Surely not.
Actually, this “compromise” is exactly what the trans claim to want…to use the toilet that conforms to their “identity”. They do not want unisex toilets, they want to force women to accept them in women’s toilets. So I actually see the proposed solution as a problem, because women do need their spaces absent men.
If it were only about needing to pee, they would use the unisex toilet. If it were only being concerned about violence from men, they would use the unisex toilet. They do not need to be in the women’s toilet if there is a unisex toilet around. Ever. This is about forcing women to accept them as women, to admit them to their space, and to open up all things woman to men who say they are women (this last brought a sexual reference to mind, but I opted not to say it).
latsot @ 6, I concur with your post. I would far rather that men who claim to be ‘trans’ use the disabled loo than the ladies. Much shorter wait for me. Why? Because if the men who claim to be ‘trans’ use the ladies, then I won’t just be waiting behind young boys sensibly using the disabled loo for safety, but behind all the girls (and probably most women) as well.
Quick note: Those code-locks on the women’s bathrooms? Yeah, no, I’d throw money down that they weren’t really there to prevent “vandalism”. Rather, there had probably been an incident or two of men going into the women’s lavatory and behaving in an unseemly fashion. Calling it ‘vandalism’ instead of ‘sexual harassment’, ‘predatory behavior’ or ‘sexual assault’ is most likely an easy way for the company to keep it all looking relatively innocuous, while at the same time covering their asses by blocking opportunistic assholes.
(It’s worth noting that, having worked in office settings with similar arrangements, the mens’ rooms never needed to be locked for any reason.)
Ah good point. My attention did snag just a little on the vandalism explanation but not enough.