When I sought legal representation to bring a claim against my ex-employer, two major law firms refused to take my case, with one dropping it just days before I was due to launch a crowdfunding appeal because of concern about “transphobia”. When I complained to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, it said that it was not a breach of professional standards to vet and reject clients.

In the meantime, I looked around for another job in the international development sector, but was told I was too controversial to employ. Then a person I had never met complained to The Scout Association that I had referred to them as “he” rather than non-binary “they” in a short exchange on Twitter,  reporting me as a “bigot” and “transphobe”. The Scouts launched a full investigation, concluding that I might not be fit to continue as a volunteer Scout Leader because I responded to the complaint by saying that, although my pronoun slip-up was an accident and I would generally try refer to people as they felt comfortable, if I came across someone male in the ladies’ showers at Scout Camp I would not worry about respecting their pronouns. The judge in my employment case also took this as a sign that my views should be condemned.

I asked the Fawcett Society, an organisation that dates back to the Suffragettes, if it would speak up about my case. It declined. Its former CEO, Sam Smethers, singled me out on the day she left the organisation as someone she wouldn’t miss. Stonewall and a host of LGBT organisations wrote saying it was a “kick in the teeth” when the Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened to argue in support of my right to freedom of belief. Amnesty International and the TUC have only commented on my case to emphasise the rights of transgender people.

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My experience, however, is far from unique. I have heard from hundreds of people who faced similar harassment, victimisation and discrimination because they have refused to fall into line with the new dogma of gender fluidity. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that our common, everyday view — despite being painted as controversial and dangerous — aligns with the law of the land.

That there are two sexes, and that people cannot literally change sex, are plain statements of fact that also align with British law. Sex is recognised as a matter of biology. Since 2004 the Gender Recognition Act has enabled people to change their legally deemed sex for certain purposes, but it also recognises that this doesn’t change their actual sex (for example in relation to motherhood or fatherhood, sport, religion and inheritance).

A powerful lobby group led by the charity Stonewall, which used to campaign for gay rights, has told organisations to go “above and beyond” the law. As a result, we now live in a society where articulating the law is deemed an offence for which powerful people and organisations will try to ruin your life, while others look away.

And so I sued my ex-employer for discrimination and victimisation. Victimisation has a specific legal meaning: being treated badly because you have taken action to protect your rights under the Equality Act. My “protected act” was to highlight what the law says about the sexes — that men are male and women are female.

My legal team argued that as well as this being the law, I was also protected against belief discrimination. People who hold the opposite belief — that only gender identity matters, that “trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid” — are also protected. This is as it should be in an open, pluralist society.

But the Center for Global Development, my ex-employer, argued that only one belief system — one that rejects the UK legal definition of sex — should be tolerated, and that those who share my belief (and agree with the current law) are bigots who should have no protection against being harassed by colleagues for their views and having their livelihood destroyed.

Shockingly, the employment tribunal agreed with this, judging my belief “unworthy of respect in a democratic society” and thus excluded from the protection that is given to other beliefs (or lack of beliefs) such as in the doctrine of the Trinity, transubstantiation, ethical veganism, stoicism and Scottish nationalism.

Last month the Employment Appeal Tribunal reversed the employment tribunal’s decision. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Choudhury, remarked that “where a belief or a major tenet of it appears to be in accordance with the law of the land, then it is all the more jarring that it should be declared as one not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The idea that the law is out of date and can be ignored is widely embedded in organisations’ diversity policies that confuse and conflate sex and “gender identity”. A key reason is that many are signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme, which, according to Stonewall itself, covers a quarter of the UK workforce. Members include Whitehall departments, universities, NHS trusts and police forces, as well as large swathes of the corporate and voluntary sectors.

Gender-identity lobby groups even train the media and the judiciary. Views similar to Stonewall’s, for instance, are echoed repeatedly in the “Equal Treatment Bench Book” — the guidance written by judges, for judges, on how to treat people fairly in the justice system. The Bench Book says that the language used in the Equality Act 2010 is “now widely considered to be out-of-date and stigmatising”. It tells judges that “man” and “woman” are genders, not sexes, that there are “people who identify with no particular gender or who are gender-fluid”. The gender landscape, it says, “is rapidly changing, as is the terminology in the field”.

That government departments, public bodies, professional regulators and the judiciary are disregarding the law in favour of rapidly changing terminology controlled by a lobby group should be alarming to all. It undermines democracy, justice, freedom of speech and the integrity of organisations. Most importantly, by confusing adults and children about sex, it undermines safeguarding.

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Only last month, for example, the employment tribunal heard another case of a woman punished for speaking up; Sonia Appleby, the safeguarding lead at the NHS Tavistock Clinic. In 2019 she raised concerns about the treatment of young people suffering from a feeling of disassociation from their sexed body, saying that safeguarding failures were a “Jimmy Savile waiting to happen”. The Tribunal heard that instead of responding to her concerns, management put a letter in her personnel file and told clinical staff not to talk to her.

It’s cases like these — and many other that we have heard — that led me, together with a team of lawyers and academics, to establish a new human-rights organisation, Sex Matters, earlier this year. It campaigns for clarity about sex in law and policy, seeking to help other organisations wake up from this nightmare.

One way is do this is by using freedom of information requests to shine light on the influence of gender-identity lobby groups. We are also calling on employers to leave the Stonewall scheme. The Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, Ofsted and the Equality and Human Rights Commission are among the 40 organisations we know have left. But 800 or so are hanging on. The Government Legal Department (which advises other departments on what the law says) remains an enthusiastic member, as do the Home Office and the Scottish Government.

Interestingly, Stonewall has responded to criticism by changing its public story. After years of telling employers that the law is outdated, it now claims its advice is in line with the law it has derided, as set out in the Statutory Codes of Practice for employers and service providers.

Yet as analysis published by Sex Matters today reveals, in our report “Understanding the Risk of Following Stonewall Advice” there is an alarming gap between Stonewall’s advice and the Statutory Code of Practice for employers. Stonewall’s approach ignores the rights of other employees, focusing only on advancing gender ideology. In particular, Stonewall’s advice, replaces the Equality Act’s protected characteristics characteristics of sex (being male or female) and “gender reassignment” with a single characteristic, “gender identity” — so that women and trans women are said to have the same “gender identity”. It also states that employers must allow people to choose which toilets and other facilities to use based on their gender identity — and that challenging or denying them access amounts to harassment.

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So what can be done? Well, we will plan to send our report to every Stonewall Champion and to every minister, MP, peer and member of a devolved legislative assembly. Concerned readers can also write to their MPs and representatives, and to organisations they have links with, asking them to leave the Stonewall scheme and return to following the law that protects all their employees.

We are also today sending an open letter with over ten thousand signatures to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We are calling for a public inquiry into how so many public bodies could have abandoned the Nolan principles of acting in the public interest with integrity, objectivity and accountability, and instead adopted policies that make people afraid of complying with the law, or even of saying what it is.

Such behaviour is not worthy of respect in our democratic institutions. I have already experienced first-hand what can happen when we allow the law to be misinterpreted. And if we don’t wake up to the way it’s being distorted, I certainly won’t be the last.

Then I learned that the moral philosophers at Amnesty International had discovered a distinction between “nice” dissidents and “not nice” dissidents, and that “not nice” dissidents do not deserve the title of “prisoner of conscience”. They are, it seems, simply prisoners — like people who get done for robbery or arson, presumably. I learned this, like so many others, when Amnesty stripped Alexei Navalny of the title of “prisoner of conscience” after it discovered what anybody who pays a modicum of attention to Russian politics has known for a really long time: that Vladimir Putin’s most indomitable opponent is a Russian nationalist who has used unsavory rhetoric when talking about immigrants. Not to worry, Amnesty explained in a rather desperate-sounding press release; they would continue to support Navalny, despite having just denounced him as an extremist and, in doing so, providing Putin with some rather excellent propaganda.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the good folks at Amnesty don’t read newspapers and know nothing about Russian politics. More likely, however (and despite their protestations to the contrary) they were caught off guard by a coordinated online campaign to discredit Navalny and panicked. Regardless, the fact that Navalny really is a Russian nationalist, and really did call for the expulsion of Georgians from Russia during the war in Ossetia, raises interesting questions. Who exactly do we in the West think we are cheering on when we venerate the opponents of despots we despise? And what do we think would happen if they ever came to power?

Navalny, unsurprisingly, is a product of his own culture, which makes it unlikely he would ever be a liberal democrat. Yes, the Russian opposition includes principled liberals, but most of us have not heard of them because their platform is incredibly unpopular within Russia. Anybody seriously looking to rally opposition to Putin is unlikely to latch on to ideas that were so thoroughly discredited by Yeltsin, the oligarchs and their Western enablers in the 1990s, when the president shelled his own parliament and male life expectancy dropped from 65 to 57.

At the start of his political career, Navalny joined what was possibly the “nicest” of all the liberal parties, Yabloko, which was led by Grigory Yavlinsky, a vocal critic of Yeltsin’s disastrous policies. Navalny was thus granted the privilege of drinking deep from the cup of abject failure: he was a member in 2003 when Yabloko fell just short of the 5% threshold that would have won the party seats in the Russian Parliament. He might still have been in 2007, when the party’s share of the vote fell to 1.6%, had he not been kicked out of the party a few months earlier for “nationalistic activities”.

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Whether or not Yabloko were the victims of election fraud, as many argued, was beside the point: they were the poster children for the idea that nice guys finish last, especially in a system controlled by a ruthless operative such as Putin. And with the other opposition parties coopted by the Kremlin’s “managed democracy”, Navalny’s choices for political ideas around which to rally opposition to the corrupt elite were limited: either revanchist communism or some kind of nationalism.

Communism was a non-starter: not only was Navalny old enough to remember the rotted, senile variant of the ideology which had prevailed during his formative years, but the post-Soviet communist party was useless. Like Yabloko, it could never be mistaken as a serious vehicle of opposition, even if it was still able to rally armies of angry grannies to turn up for protests against the government.

Instead, he turned to nationalism. The field here was more open, with several parties vying for territory. Russia’s most famous nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was a buffoon fully integrated into Putin’s corrupt system, and not to be taken seriously. Another nationalist, the scandalous author Edward Limonov of the National Bolshevik party, established his oppositional bona fides after a stint behind bars in the early 2000s for allegedly attempting to raise a militia to invade Kazakhstan.

Limonov, however, was too weird to become a mainstream phenomenon; he was a political provocateur who glamorised both Che and Khomeini, chanted “Stalin Beria Gulag!” at rallies and called for the introduction of polygamy to Russia. He also wrote lyrical memoirs, including one structured around his memories of bodies of water that had won a prestigious literary prize. Despite his weirdness, however, he succeeded in attracting young people to his party, and they won a reputation for their fearless opposition to Putin and his cronies.

Putin was also casting around for a founding ideology around this time, and likewise saw the attraction of nationalism. When he started to resurrect Soviet symbols, and “Volgograd” was replaced with “Stalingrad” at the eternal flame monument outside the Kremlin walls, this immediately led to anxiety among some Kremlinologists that Putin was out to restore the old USSR. This was naïve; Putin had no interest in taking back the Baltics or Central Asian Republics. He was, however, looking for a unifying idea that could inspire pride in all Russian citizens, and settled upon the USSR’s victory over Hitler in the Second World War.

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Aside from the fact that “We beat Hitler” is always a winner, there was another appeal to this idea. Soviet propaganda had always stressed the multinational aspect of the Soviet war effort, that it was the combined forces of all the Soviet peoples that had brought down Nazism. If you visit the Republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia, for instance, you will see that the war monument in Elista, the capital, features not Slav faces but Mongolians — and this despite the fact that Stalin actually deported much of the population to Siberia during the War for fear that they were untrustworthy. It was easy for Putin to take this pre-established model and apply it to multiethnic Russia as the successor state.

With Putin having annexed the “imperial nationalist” position, and all other positions discredited in the eyes of voters, that left ethnic nationalism as the last powerful idea up for grabs. And that is what Navalny began to advocate, and continues to advocate unapologetically, because his main constituency is not Amnesty or western liberals but people inside Russia who are disgusted by Putin.

If Navalny’s politics were transplanted to the UK or US, they would most certainly offend all good progressive people — and so it was that Amnesty suddenly found itself embarrassed to be associated with them. But is it so surprising that dissidents we admire for their bold opposition to tyrants also hold ideas that would not win them invites to dinner parties at Martha’s Vineyard?

Consider the most celebrated of Russian dissidents, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a man of ferocious principle and extraordinary bravery; but he was also a conservative Russian Orthodox nationalist who lambasted the West for its decadence and lamented the loss of Ukraine and Belarus following the dissolution of the USSR. Then there’s Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic and trade unionist who hated communism but may also have been a secret police informant. And this is to say nothing of the once-saintly Aung San Suu Kyi, or the once-upon-a-time heroic freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, or the Ayatollah Khomeini who was memorably described as “a Gandhi-like figure” by the US ambassador to Iran. We all know how well that one aged. In fact, with a few notable exceptions such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, great dissidents often prove to be disastrous national leaders, at least as bad if not worse than the system they overthrew.

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This is not to say that Navalny would be worse than Putin. In fact, Yevgenia Albats, a Russian liberal who has known Navalny since 2004, argues that his main political goal was always to win over moderate nationalists, and that he has expressed regret for his past rhetoric. But there can be little doubt that ethnic Russian nationalism is a potentially destabilising force in the country. The multinational USSR died in ethnic violence, and multinational Russia was born in ethnic violence, and when Putin came to power, he inherited the war in the Caucasus. He bought off some separatist leaders and killed others, but their submission is not permanent, and it is almost certain that once he exits the scene there will be some in the regions who will want to test the new leader.

How would a president Navalny handle that? Amnesty, of course, has done its bit to help Putin and make sure we never find out. But the truth is that even were he to be released from jail, Navalny is unlikely to ever be leader of Russia, and not just because of his criminal convictions. According to independent polling, the Russian public’s trust in him remained at a lowly 3% between 2017 and 2020.

Yet Navalny keeps on going, despite harassment of his family, a poisoning attempt, and now imprisonment. His hatred and contempt for Putin’s regime is so all-consuming that it exceeds his concern for his own safety. To become a dissident — a real, outspoken, vocal dissident — is an extreme act. Navalny is not some keyboard warrior or posturing faux-radical; he is hardcore. And that is the role of the Navalnys of the world — to be hardcore, to tell the truth, regardless of the consequences, while the rest of us keep our heads down. And given all the suffering that being a dissident entails, perhaps it’s asking a bit much that they make us like them too.