Sometimes the people around you scramble reality to turn up into down, black into white and open into closed. That’s how Prof Jo Phoenix must have felt when she was subjected to what the courts described last week as a “targeted campaign of harassment” from her colleagues that was facilitated by her employer, the Open University, in a way that shut down her academic freedom and caused a judge to find she was constructively dismissed.
What put a mark on her back was her view, shared by a majority of people and enshrined in law, that whether someone is male or female is a matter of reality, not belief, and that someone’s gender identity, or belief about their sex, cannot supersede their actual sex for all purposes in society. That’s what paved the way for her fellow academics to miscast the harassed as harasser, and for her university’s management to delude themselves that by turning a blind eye to bullying they were protecting free expression, when they were really undermining Phoenix’s ability to exercise just that.
