Maya Forstater: ‘I am fighting for the right to say men can never be women’

Forstater’s tweet was liked 103 times. In the months that followed, as the proposed changes became a hotly debated social- media issue, she waded into the row and began tweeting to her then around 2,000 Twitter followers about her general beliefs. No one mentioned her tweets at work (few work colleagues were on Twitter). She was aware of how controversial she was perceived as being ‘but it was a think tank – the kind of place where controversial opinion was OK’.

One of her tweets was critical about Pips Bunce, a senior director of Credit Suisse who identifies as gender fluid and non-binary (someone who identifies as not exclusively woman or man). Forstater made comments about Bunce, who sometimes goes into her (Bunce’s preferred pronoun) office in women’s clothing as Pippa and on other days in a suit as Phil, when she was named as one of the Financial Times’ Top 100 Women in Business. Forstater questioned the idea of Bunce being recognised by the FT as a woman and refused to rescind her views.

It was Forstater’s opinions on Bunce that would provoke, as she understands it, a few employees at the US headquarters of CGD (people Forstater knew only vaguely, as she worked for its European branch) to raise concerns, and when CGD requested she state that her account was personal, she complied. CGD in Washington then set in motion a ‘process’ – undertaken by an independent company – to look into the matter. Forstater claims she was not interviewed by the investigators and was not allowed to see their report. Eventually, in March 2019, she received an email from the company informing her that they would not be renewing her contract, ‘with immediate effect’.

‘I am quite stoic, not very good at emoting in public, but this was hard, a slap in the face. I had been working on a project for months and we had got funding for it from a big foundation and I fully expected to continue with CGD,’ Forstater says.

With £124,000 raised through crowdfunding, Forstater took CGD to the London, Central Employment Tribunal for discriminating against her, a case she lost in December 2019, when the presiding judge, Justice James Tayler, declared that her ‘absolutist view’ was ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’, and that she was not entitled to ignore the rights of a transgender person and the ‘enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering’.