Maya Forstater

Maya Forstater, a researcher, writer and advisor working on business and sustainable development and co-founder of Sex Matters, talks about having lost her job after tweeting and writing about sex and gender. She is the claimant in a landmark test case on whether the protected characteristic of belief in the Equality Act covers gender critical beliefs. In this episode, Forstater discusses her case and the larger implications this legal challenge holds for the future of free speech and the rights of women and girls pointing to the vulnerability of employees in the academic gig economy who are often targeted by institutional policies that are quickly replacing the age-old role of the church throughout history. Examining the structure of her legal case which is based on the protection of a belief that impacts how the subject lives her life, Forstater postulates the social framework for disagreement or discussions about belief in an era where the presumed moral high ground of an employer can be the means for terminating one’s employment. Covering compelled speech and the institutional capture of gender ideology where women are forced to accept the personal and professional costs of free speech—to be polite or to save one’s job—in order to talk about what they see, Forstater discusses the legal system that has also been caught in the very paradigm her case addresses: ideologically-driven NGOs like Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence have pushed private and public institutional policies to adopt religious, anti-science beliefs which are also parroted by judges who instruct women within the courts to refer to men with a “gender identity” as “she.”