Fired for misgendering someone?

Sometimes you see a news report, or an anecdote embedded in another story, saying that someone was fired for some genuine, curious, innocent, non-harassing, or accidental questioning of trans person's identity. So the person was fired for misgendering someone? Yeah! Well, why do you think that? Because that's what the article said!

However, sometimes articles say things a certain way, and the way they frame the story or sell the story is not the full story of what actually happened.

So, for example, you may have heard J.K. Rowling defense of Maya Forstater, who complained that her work contract was not renewed because she was seen as a transphobe and that this job loss amounted to a violation of her own rights. But in this clarification from Think (December 20, 2019), there is more substance to the trans-inclusive claim. Forstater wasn't only expressing an opinion to which she was entitled, as she'd like to have had it. She was judged to be speaking inappropriately according to professional and legal standards. We place all kinds of limits on speech in various contexts, and there are reasons to identify certain statements as transphobic and therefore unacceptable in professional contexts.

"This, then, is what Forstater wanted the courts to uphold: Her right to make her co-workers uncomfortable; her right to place her nonprofit organization in an untenable position vis-à-vis potential donors (like Credit Suisse senior directors); her right to be, even as she defines it, rude and disrespectful in social and professional contexts; and her right to disrespect U.K. law, which defines transgender women as women and transgender men as men if they jump through the right legal hoops. (As Judge James Tayler noted in his ruling against her: 'If a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate that person is legally a woman. That is not something that the Claimant is entitled to ignore.')"

In the judge's determination, as Think paraphrased it, "Forstater's repeated statements that trans women are not women — statements that by her own admission she knew were rude and disrespectful, and that she knew bothered her co-workers — violated the rights of trans women to be free from such harassment, and were a legitimate cause to not renew her contract."

I'm interested in Gemma Stone's analysis in January 2024. If the issue were over, say, pacifism, "two separate pacifists in two separate tribunals would both have to explain their own individual pacifist views and those views would then be measured against the Grainger criteria. The same applies to transphobes and transphobia — each individual’s views and the way they choose to manifest those views are very important to deciding whether they pass Grainger." In the Forstater decision, "a specific selection of views held by Maya Forstater were found to not be sufficient reason to fire her."

See my article on J. K. Rowling's 2020 essay: The Misrepresentation of Compassion and Solidarity (Medium)

On 2 November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) said "exploratory therapy must not be conflated with conversion therapy." Seems to be a result of the Forstater ruling.