A Scottish rape crisis employee who questioned her center’s refusal to accommodate clients who requested support from biological women was unfairly dismissed from her post following a “Kafka-esque” disciplinary process, a tribunal has found. 

The center’s investigation of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre employee Roz Adams “should not have been launched” and offered “entirely unsatisfactory” evidence, ruled the employment judge on the case, Ian McFatridge. 

Mr. McFatridge went so far as to call the investigation “reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka,” a reference to the Czech author’s novel “The Trial” which tells the story of the arrest and prosecution of a man for a crime unknown to him and the reader.  

While Ms. Adams told the tribunal she was “initially happy” with her job at the crisis center, she grew concerned about the center’s approach to gender, which she said was based on the view that there are no differences between a woman, a trans woman or a non-binary person. Ms. Adams noted that any clients who expressed views of gender that differed from the center’s leadership were classified as “bigots” and their correspondence was sent to a “hate emails” folder. 

Ms. Adams’s concerns came to a head in June 2022 when a client asked her whether the counselor she had been assigned to — who identified as non-binary and took on a male-sounding name — was a man or a woman. Ms. Adams reached out to management for guidance on how to proceed. 

Following Ms. Adams’s query, management invited her to a meeting concerning her “potentially transphobic” attitude, she said. The management subsequently launched an investigation that the tribune characterized as “spurious and mishandled” and driven by senior management’s determination that “the claimant was transphobic.” 

Leading the charge against Ms. Adams was the crisis center’s newly elected chief executive, Mridul Wadhwa, a transgender woman, who the tribunal described as “the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place” who had determined “the claimants guilt at the outset.”

The tribunal unanimously found that the center had “unlawfully discriminated” against Ms. Adams on the basis of her belief in the biological immutability of males and females, and “unfairly constructively dismissed” her. 

Ms. Adams said that the ruling was a “victory for all people who have been subjected to sexual violence who need a choice of worker, and group support on the basis of sex in order to feel safe.”

She has since taken up work at Beira’s Place, a sexual violence support service for women founded in 2022 by the author and womens rights activist J.K. Rowling.