Waterstones fires Tilly

Could this be the first gender identity belief discrimination case?

Waterstones has fired an employee, Tilly, allegedly for comments she made on social media, including criticism of Christina Dalcher, an author who has published books sold by the company. Many of the facts surrounding these events are uncertain and the original video that Tilly posted to explain her understanding of the situation is not freely available as she has protected her Twitter/X account. Nevertheless, there may be some interesting legal questions to unpack here.

On the face of this, there appears to be some similarities between what has happened to Tilly and the facts of cases such as Higgs v Farmor’s school. This has prompted me to consider whether there may be a plausible claim that Tilly’s firing amounts to unlawful discrimination based on philosophical belief. Could this be the first gender identity belief discrimination case?

Before we go any further, it is important to set out clearly that my discussion here will only concern the Equality Act 2010 and a claim of unlawful discrimination. Any other claim in employment law will need to be considered by others. It is also important to stress that we don’t have a complete picture of the facts here. We don’t know what reasons Waterstones had for terminating Tilly’s employment and we don’t know what reasons were given. There is also some ambiguity over what can be reasonably be inferred from the social media comments in question.

So what happened? Christina Dalcher, a Sunday Times bestselling author who has published books sold by Waterstones posted a thread on social media compiling examples of comments made by publishing professionals in response to the announcement of the founding of SEEN in Publishing, a network of publishing professionals who hold gender critical or sex-realist views. Dalcher anonymised the examples but it was possible for others to search what were then publicly available posts. One of these posts was from what Dalcher described as a ‘Waterstones bookseller (directly to me)’:

“I’ll enjoy tearing your books up and popping them in the bin today. Thanks for the heads up.”

That post came from Tilly who considers SEEN in Publishing to be a transphobic network. It’s unclear whether this comment referred to Tilly’s own books or stock belonging to Waterstones. She later claimed the former. Let’s presume based on the principle of charity that this is true. Regardless, a social media cacophony ensued and Waterstones fired Tilly. She claims that she was fired for standing up for trans rights. Does she have a claim under the Equality Act?