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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

Note that the court held two things: 1) Strongly held philosphical beliefs have much the same protection as religious beliefs in law and 2) That doesn’t mean you get to express those beliefs to other people in workplace.

In other words, anti-trans (or GC) beliefs occupy much the same position in law as anti-gay Christian beliefs. You can /believe/ them all you like & can’t be sacked for that belief, but if you express those beliefs in the workplace you’ve just created a hostile environment for other employees & your employer can simply fire you (after going through the appropriate disciplinary procedures where required by law) due to your breach of the Equality Act, under which being trans (specifically in law: gender reassignment) carries protected status in the same way that being a different skin colour or sexuality does.

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Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile? There are plenty of things that would argue against on a moral basis, that are important parts of the lives of some of the people I've worked with. I'd never harass them directly or indirectly for one of these things, but it would be hard to keep them a complete secret either.

On the other side of the coin, I recognise that the people I work with will surely have some deeply-held beliefs about the wrongness of some aspects of my life. That's inevitable when you have some minimum diversity of viewpoints, and of course "reasonable people may differ" on many of those topics. I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them. (Assuming that just having a belief isn't harmful.)

> I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them.

The argument from the trans community would be that misgendering and encouraging other employees to misgender them(which will happen if the belief is propaganda-ised) will cause significant emotional harm, risk mental health, cause problems in fulfilling job etc.. I'm not sure about how true this would be, as I'm in the closet and I'm a bit indifferent about what other people think, but can imagine it being very difficult for others.

Incidentally, threatening suicide to get what you want is a form of emotional abuse.

Good thing nobody does that, isn’t it?

I have been on the receiving end of it.

I suppose I made a big generalization there. Yes, people do sometimes use the threat of suicide to gain social leverage. That in no way is equivalent to saying that people who suffer from chronic pain, chronic depression, who are gay, trans, or work in high stress jobs have much higher than average suicide rates. If you hear statistics around suicide broken down by those demographics and see yourself as a victim of terrorism then that says more about you as a person than about anyone else. If someone directly tells you that what you are doing to them makes them feel suicidal then call 911 and walk away from that person. Beyond that, it's not your responsibility. If you keep feeling terrorized by a situation like that, I suggest talking to your mental health professional who can help you develop better coping skills.

> Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile?

Not in terms of the Equality Act. You can be as critical as you like in private, or outside the workplace as I understand things.

But if you voice those criticisms directly to someone in the protected class in the workplace, then you’ve crossed the line.

So, eg, telling a gay person to their face that you oppose gay marriage & all gay people are going to hell might be your strongly held philosophical (or religious in this case) belief, but the act of voicing it to the individual in the protected class breaks your employers obligations under the Equality Act in the UK & they would be entitled to fire you for it. The same goes for persistently mis-gendering a trans person (quite apart from it being extremely rude of course!) as gender re-assignment forms a protected class in law.

(Obviously, this is as I understand things & not the opinion of a legal expert in these matters.)

I'm not sure that's relevant; the case was a Tweet, was it not?

I think it was significantly more than just a single Tweet. You’d have to go back to the original judgement (some of which is quoted in the judement I linked to) to see.

Fair enough!

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