An LGBT activist has been removed from a tribunal which is due to hear an appeal by a school worker who was sacked after claiming pupils being taught that ‘gender is a matter of choice’ amounted to ‘brainwashing’.
Edward Lord was assigned to sit as one of the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s two lay members in the case brought by Kristie Higgs, who was formerly a pastoral administrator and work experience manager at Farmor’s School in Gloucestershire.
Higgs was sacked in January 2019 shortly after she posted on Facebook about teaching school children about same-sex marriage and relationships, as well as gender being a matter of choice, which she described as ‘brainwashing our children’.
She brought a claim under the Equality Act 2010, arguing that she was discriminated against because of her ‘lack of belief’ that someone can change their gender, her opposition to sex education for primary school pupils and her ‘belief in the literal truth of the bible’.
The employment tribunal ruled against Higgs but she was given permission to appeal, which was due to be heard in May but was delayed after her solicitors raised concerns with the EAT about Lord ‘holding strong views opposed to “gender critical” views, which [they] equate with “transphobia”'.
Lord said they ‘have never hidden either my gender identity as a non-binary person or my sexual orientation as a bi/queer person, nor indeed have I ever hidden my commitment to supporting the rights of LGBTQ+ people’, adding: ‘My publicly expressed views … would have no impact in my approach to this or any other case’.
But Mrs Justice Eady ruled that Lord should be recused from the case as a ‘fair-minded and informed observer could not exclude the possibility of bias’. The judge said that none of the material drawn to her attention by Higgs’ lawyers, including Lord’s tweets, ‘could have been understood as communicated by the lay member in their capacity as such’.
However, she added that it is ‘necessary to have regard to the broader context relevant to these proceedings and to the highly polarised nature of the debate relating to some of the issues raised by the appeal’.
Eady also said that the EAT will be asked to determine whether the tribunal’s finding on the facts about Higgs’ Facebook posts was correct, posts which ‘might be seen as expressing precisely the same views as have previously been characterised as “transphobic” in [Lord’s] tweets’.
‘Even allowing for a distinction between views expressed in a private capacity and an exercise of judgment in carrying out a judicial role, that would inevitably give rise to a fear of pre-judgment in the mind of the fair-minded and informed observer and thus to the conclusion that there was a real possibility of bias,’ the judge concluded.
