Thank you for visiting xychromosomeguy.com
This website is a companion resource for my GoFundMe page.
I registered the xychromosomeguy.com domain name on 4 October 2024 and began constructing this website the following day. I was directly motivated by an email I received on 1 October 2024 from the UK Employment Tribunal (ET) informing me that it had accepted a costs application from my former employer, East Riding of Yorkshire Council, and was therefore notifying me that I must pay the Council’s legal expenses. As the general rule of employment tribunals is that each party will pay their own legal costs, I believe this order to be in direct contradiction of the ET’s overriding objective to deal with cases fairly and justly.
I will use this website primarily as a channel to retrospectively chronicle, for the public record, public proceedings—specifically those in the ET—arising from my response to the invitation by Caroline Lacey (then, Chief Executive of East Riding of Yorkshire Council) to all its employees: ‘to consider adding pronouns to your email signature, should you wish to do so’.
The invitation was circulated to all East Riding of Yorkshire Council employees, in a global email during the morning of 13 April 2022.
After serious consideration of the implications of the invitation, and the obvious dangers that self-identification presents, I responded the following morning in an email to my manager, in which I included my preferred pronouns (actually, neopronouns): XYchromosomeGuy/AdultHumanMale.
I wondered exactly how genuine the Council’s invitation was, or if in reality the Council had been ideologically captured and persuaded to promote a pernicious political ideology, with no mandate to do so, and no intention of ensuring equality for all its employees.
The full text of my email response, which Employment Judge Ian Miller reproduced in its entirety in his Reserved Judgment of 28 June 2024, can be read here.
I recommend that for complete contextual appraisal, the judgment should be read in full. But here are some statements that stood out for me:
The judgment confirms at paragraph 1: The claimant’s gender-critical beliefs are a philosophical belief within the meaning of section 10 Equality Act 2010.
The judgment includes at paragraph 21: In our view, the tone and meaning of the guidance was that employees were free to identify by whatever pronoun they felt applied to them.
The judgment includes at paragraph 24: We note here that the claimant made distinctions on a number of occasions during the period that we are considering with the respondent referring to transgender and trans people, when the Equality Act 2010 refers to transexual [sic] people. “Transgender” is a word in current, common use and that is the word we will use. We are not required to make a decision about this and in our judgment transgender is a more common word that people will more easily understand than transexual [sic].
The judgment includes at paragraph 26: The claimant interpreted [the] guidance as allowing employees to adopt their own pronouns, rather than choosing from a list. We agree that it is not explicit that there is a prescribed list of pronouns from which employees can choose and that the guidance did suggest people might have their own pronouns that are not listed in the guidance.
The judgment includes at paragraph 32: We recognise that we have quoted, and continue throughout this judgment to quote, at length from correspondence but in our view it is important to our decision to understand the nuances of the claimant’s position.
The judgment includes at paragraph 41: We find that the communications from Ms Lacey and the accompanying guidance did not restrict the pronouns to a prescribed list and did give employees the option to add their own pronouns. If the respondent’s managers were now saying that this was the policy, it was different from what had been communicated to the claimant on 13 April 2022.
The judgment includes at paragraph 48: We were not taken to any “agreed corporate template” and we find that the respondent had no formal policy on what pronouns in what format were and were not at the relevant time acceptable to the respondent.
The judgment includes at paragraph 49: Mr Elliott [Corporate Programmes Manager] did not give evidence to the Tribunal and neither Mr Curtis nor Mr Menzies were able to articulate in oral evidence what was or might be offensive about the proposed email footer. Ms Fairfoot gave a very clear explanation that she considered that the proposed footer was mocking the idea of pronouns and, accordingly, those who chose to use them.
The judgment includes at paragraph 88: Mr Curtis did not, as part of his investigation, assess whether the process by which employees could choose their own pronouns was appropriate, and he did not consider independently whether the instruction to the claimant to remove the pronouns was unlawful or discriminatory. Mr Curtis said that he gave some consideration to the lawfulness of the policies but he discovered that the respondent had taken legal advice and that satisfied him that sufficient consideration had been given to that question. We did not see the legal advice on the basis that it was privileged.
The judgment includes at paragraph 90: Mr Curtis was unable to explain how the claimant’s footer presented a risk to the transgender community (or any other community) or in what way the footer was offensive of [sic] transphobic. He said that he took advice from the equalities team who said (as recorded in his presentation to the disciplinary hearing) that they
“…consider the tone of the initial email and the pronouns to be transphobic, and there is therefore a serious risk that the continued use of James’s pronouns cause offense to the transgender community, who are a protected characteristic”.
The judgment includes at paragraph 93: Mr Curtis was unable to say whether or why the footer was offensive or transphobic and did not give any independent consideration to that question.
The judgment includes at paragraph 95: Mr Curtis did ask Mr Lowe [Strategic Services Manager] about the option for staff to put in their own pronouns. Mr Lowe said it would be inappropriate to prescribe what people can or should put in their email footer because that would be inherently contradictory in terms of self-identification but it was implicit that people would not put anything offensive and the respondent would have the right to say that something was not acceptable. We observe that the respondent has been inconsistent in this point. The original email and guidance from Ms Lacey did not prescribe what pronouns people could use. Mr Lowe was apparently aware of this. Other communications to the claimant have asserted that the claimant’s choice of pronouns was outside the acceptable pronouns These are obviously two contradictory positions
The judgment includes at paragraph 96: Mr Lowe said that the claimant’s footer rebutted the right for people to transition – it was about making a provocative biological and anatomical statement and that could be considered transphobic.
The judgment repeats at paragraph 100(b) one of the conclusions of Mr Curtis’s disciplinary investigation: The corporate equalities team considered the tone of the initial email (we assume the one from 14 April) and the pronouns were transphobic and there was therefore a serious risk of causing offense to the transgender community who are (sic) a protected characteristic.
The judgment includes at paragraph 102: we agree with Mr Curtis’ view that the claimant has used the option to provide pronouns in email footers as an opportunity to raise political issues in the workplace. However, we also find that the respondent first raised the political issue of pronouns in the workplace by allowing employees to self-identify in their emails.
The judgment includes at paragraph 228: The claimant was, in our judgment, mocking the idea of gender self identification.
It continues at paragraph 229: That was entirely consistent with the claimant’s gender critical beliefs and was in the very broadest sense a manifestation of those beliefs. But it was not a manifestation in sense referred to in Article 9.2 or in Eweida. It was not intimately linked to the claimant’s gender critical beliefs.
And so it goes on.
While I accept that some individuals may claim to be ‘offended’ by facts, facts in themselves cannot be transphobic. They are facts.
I will repeat: for full context the Reserved Judgment should be read in its entirety.
In a statement about its intervention in the Court of Appeal case of Higgs v Farmor’s School, the Free Speech Union (FSU) outlines its objection to the second of ‘two key rulings’ of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT), in which the EAT ruled that the employee can be fairly dismissed if ‘(2) dismissal was a proportionate interference with the employee’s right to freedom of expression’. The FSU believes: ‘the law makes no distinction between the belief and the manifestation of that belief, and trying to separate the two is a sleight of hand that can be used to justify censorship.’
Considering the judgment of my case, in which it was acknowledged that my actions were ‘in the very broadest sense a manifestation’ of my beliefs—and the principle of belief manifestation more generally—I find it difficult to understand in what respect the principles under consideration in the Higgs case differ from those of my own.
Sometimes in life, we witness an abuse of power or office with such clarity that we know it must be obvious to everyone, not least the perpetrators. The perpetrators may continue in their roles for another ten years, or a lifetime; but the facts of that abuse of power remain, in perpetuity, for all to see. The target is aware that the perpetrators know they abused their power; and that the perpetrators know the target knows they know they abused their power; and this is sufficient for the target to survive, undaunted and content, with dignity and integrity. Those who previously counted the perpetrators as family, friends, lovers, or colleagues will in future navigate their relationships with more perspicacity: ‘How your lovers treat others, they’ll treat you in the end’.
I look forward to the Court of Appeal judgment on the case of Higgs v Farmor’s School.
NB: On this website, whenever I reproduce or quote from documents relating to my ET claim, I will make every effort to present the original text as it was, including style and formatting errors—mainly my own. I may point out where these errors occur, but I will generally be copying and pasting from the original texts, unless I provide the actual pdf documents in some form of pdf reader.