“Encountering colleagues wearing SEEN lanyards in the workplace makes me feel unsafe.”
This is Samantha Tempest. Tempest works for the civil service, and today at Leeds Employment Tribunal he was cross-examined by a barrister representing his ultimate employers, Defra (the government Department for Farming and Rural Affairs).
Tempest is taking Defra to court because they won’t ban the SEEN (Sex Equality and Equity Network) group from posting messages on the staff internal message board. Nor will they ban the group itself. Or stop staff from wearing SEEN lanyards. The bastards.
You can read the tweets reporting Tempest’s cross-examination here – generated by the wonderful Tribunal Tweets.
Tempest wants SEEN banned because their very existence apparently seeks to erase his. And that is because Tempest is a man who thinks he is a woman. In fact, he is utterly convinced he is a woman trapped in a male body.
Tempest’s desire to have Defra dismantle SEEN does not extend to banning other staff groups like a:gender (the “Civil Service transgender and intersex network”) which campaigns to let trans-identified men go in women’s toilets or ceasing to celebrate the holy month of Pride, no matter how it makes other people feel. Tempest likes those things, so they can stay.
According to his witness statement, Tempest transitioned in 2015, after a near death experience in 2014. “The trauma of going through that changed something in me”, he says . “I realised that if I had died then, nobody would ever have known who I truly was. I couldn’t live with that anymore, so my decision to transition was made.”
The process ended his marriage and appeared to lose him most of his friends. Work, though, was a safe space. “There were a few other trans people in the same office building, and there was a sense that we weren’t alone.” Those trans people no longer work in the same building. Tempest is alone again.
Tempest claims he has faced rising hostility around him since the Forstater judgment in 2021, and the creation of a SEEN network (I know I’m calling it a network network, but let it pass) in 2022, has stopped making him feel safe at work.
Tempest is insecure about his looks. “Testosterone shaped my body in ways that still make it feel foreign to me”, he says “I’ve done everything I can to make peace with it and make it feel like home. That’s why hearing colleagues use my appearance to mock me, suggesting I “prance around the office” in “little girl dresses”, feeling that even to respect my pronouns is to lie, has been devastating.”
Tempest has harvested three examples of comments posted on the SEEN website and a civil service message board called Yammer. Those comments are:
– “Gender identity in the workplace forces me to lie.”
– “I can see the many great ways my career can progress…Why would we jeopardise that by forcing people to lie and pretend that biological sex doesn’t matter?”
– “We have now accepted the ideology of gender identity, something I see as similar to adopting the Christian faith of my grandparents without question, because they would feel distress if I didn’t.”
Of them, Tempest says: “These three comments frame my existence as a deception. It implies that acknowledging me as the person I say I am requires dishonesty. SEEN say they respect me but then how can they if this is how they feel? They talk about being authentic but when I present my authentic self, they view it as a deception to access women’s spaces. If my coworkers genuinely feel
forced to lie simply to interact with me, how am I meant to believe they have my best interests at heart? It’s simply a direct attack on my legitimacy and my ability to set the terms on how people interact with me.”
This paragraph is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least the final clause of the last sentence. This claim and Tempest’s internal grievance before it is really about control – setting the terms under which people interact with him. Expecting them to have his best interests in their hearts. Me, me, me.
In fact the entire witness statement is drenched in so much whinging entitlement, it almost drips off the page. I was trying to read it sympathetically, but Tempest’s total lack of self-awareness and empathy for others makes doing so a struggle.
Being charitable – I can understand why he doesn’t like reading negative things about gender ideology at work. He argues “SEEN wouldn’t say these statements about sexual orientation”, without seeing why the analogy is different. Why would he? His trans identity is as important to his life as some people’s sexual orientation is to theirs. As he puts it, “why would anyone choose to lose friends and family and be rejected by society if it was simply a lie?”
And why, given his gender reassignment is a legally protected characteristic, can’t he therefore compel people to change their pronouns, wear little girls dresses and camp out in the women’s toilets?
I get that he’s not pretending, I fully accept he genuinely believes he is some form of woman, but the whole tenor of the statement smacks of a man whose belief is so shaky, he requires everyone to re-shape their reality around him, or the psychological supports which maintain his belief will crumble.
The witness statement contains more insight into his way of thinking about biological reality:
“I am aware that the a:gender network organised a survey which found that 87% of respondents considered the statement “sex is binary and immutable” to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment… These findings are consistent with my own experience.”
On lanyards:
“In relation to SEEN lanyards and badges, the Respondents contend that these do not put anyone at risk. My lived experience is that encountering colleagues wearing SEEN lanyards in the workplace makes me feel unsafe. I have altered my behaviour as a result, avoiding certain areas and being fearful of how SEEN members might behave towards me at work. This is a tangible and direct impact on my working life.”
SEEN itself:
“I am aware that the Respondents contend that SEEN’s existence does not amount to harassment. Again I disagree. As I have made clear throughout, I respect the right of other employees to hold gender critical beliefs. My complaint has always been about the manifestation of those beliefs in the workplace and the Respondents’ [ie DEFRA’s] failure to protect me from the harm that has resulted. The existence of a network whose fundamental tenets deny the reality of transgender people’s lived experience, operating with the formal support and recognition of my employer, creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for me and other transgender colleagues.”
It is interesting that Tempest says he is “aware that other government departments, such as the Met Office, have refused to recognise departmental chapters of SEEN, on the basis that doing so was necessary for the prevention of harassment of trans colleagues… I consider that Defra’s decision to recognise and support SEEN stands in contrast to the approach taken by other departments”. I did not know this was the case (it may not be), but it suggests elements of the civil service are still struggling with reality.
By the way, Tempest’s mission to force everyone to see the world from his perspective has already had some success. Both Defra and the supposedly neutral tribunal panel in Leeds have announced they will refer to him with female pronouns, and they haven’t quite made clear what pronouns they are expecting Naomi Cunningham nor her client Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley to use when she is cross examined. The tribunal has made a decision which Cunningham has asked for in writing, as she wants to understand it properly. This tribunal is due to last another two weeks (and I think I’m right in saying Tribunal Tweets intend to cover it all). More as we (or they) get it.
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