A lawyer and the United Kingdom government department she works with are facing a lawsuit after she said only women menstruate.
Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley, a lawyer linked to the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, said an unnamed person is suing her over her criticism of gender ideology at work.
In a crowdfunder for her legal bills set up on Tuesday, Wrigley said the lawsuit takes issue with a statement she made during a seminar on “Women and Autism” in which she said that “only women menstruate.”
The lawsuit also attacks her for several comments and posts made in the workplace, she said, including her sharing links to an interview with detransitioner Ritchie Herron, sharing the link to a children’s book, “My Body is Me,” and a post on an internal work forum in which she explained why she was critical of gender ideology.
“Some people believe that we all have a gender (sometimes ‘gender identity’) separate from our biological sex; that sex is a spectrum, and that biological sex is an idea that first emerged with white European colonisation. Such beliefs are protected by law,” Wrigley wrote in that post.
“Other people, such as myself, hold that sex is binary (male and female), fundamentally biological and an important category to recognise in language, laws, sport and [the] workplace,” she said.
Wrigley said she works for an “arms-length body” to the government department.
“The case has been brought by a claimant who is an employee of another arms-length body. The claimant is taking their own employer, the government department and me to court,” she wrote in her crowdfunder.
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Wrigley also chairs a group of human resource professionals who are critical of gender ideology called the Sex Equality and Equity Network (SEEN).
The person who filed the lawsuit is also suing over SEEN existing, Wrigley said, “on the basis that the existence of the network has the effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and/or offensive environment for the claimant.”
SEEN expressed support for Wrigley in a social media post on Wednesday.
“It seems extraordinary that, given the many successful gender-critical cases, we are still in the position of needing to defend ourselves in this way,” SEEN said.
Back in October, Wrigley was a key signer of an explosive letter to the cabinet secretary warning that anyone who criticized gender ideology was “openly and unlawfully bullied and harassed,” The Times reported.
The letter referred to a “small number of active gender ideologues” working for the government.