In a damning ruling at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal, a judge has condemned a trans inclusive rape crisis centre, and criticised the organisation’s transgender chief executive for pursuing a “Kafkaesque” nine month-long investigation against a female employee who held gender critical beliefs, reports the Times.
Roz Adams, a support counsellor who has worked with vulnerable communities since 2003, brought the case claiming she suffered discrimination when her views on the importance of rape trauma and counselling services remaining single-sex became known to senior colleagues at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), including the centre’s chief executive, transgender woman Mridul Wadhwa.
The employment tribunal has now ruled in Ms Adams’s favour, upholding her claim of constructive dismissal against ERCC, which in 2023 received over £1.9 million in funding from the Scottish government, and finding that she had been harassed and discriminated against.
During the hearing in April, lawyer Naomi Cunningham, representing Ms Adams, claimed the ERCC mounted an “inquisition” after a female rape survivor said she would feel uncomfortable talking to a man and asked to know the biological sex of her support worker.
Ms Adams said she was accused of being “transphobic” after suggesting in an email that they tell her that one volunteer was “a woman at birth who now identifies as being non-binary”.
It emerged at a previous hearing in January that the centre refused to support that response, and instead told the woman that it “does not have any men on their volunteer team”.
Ms Cunningham also told the tribunal Wadhwa, who was born male, held a “hostile attitude towards sex-realist beliefs” and used the incident to instigate a nine-month disciplinary procedure against Ms Adams.