Engineer suffered years of ‘gaslighting’ over trans toilet use, tribunal hears

An engineer suffered years of “gaslighting” from her employer over her concerns about transgender colleagues using female toilets, an employment tribunal has heard.

Maria Kelly suffered “profound distress” and “embarrassment and humiliation” when she raised the issue, her lawyer Naomi Cunningham told the tribunal in Edinburgh.

Ms Kelly is taking legal action against aerospace and defence manufacturer Leonardo UK and has lodged a complaint alleging harassment, direct and indirect discrimination.

In her closing submissions on Wednesday, Ms Cunningham said that Leonardo appeared to be more concerned about staying “with the herd” rather than complying with the law on how trans women are treated.

The case comes after the UK Supreme Court ruled in April that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

Ms Cunningham said that in the past few years there has been a “false belief”, which by 2025 was “deeply entrenched” that the law requires men who say they are women to be treated as if they were women and required them to be given access to women’s spaces as long as they say they are women.

She said it was understandable why, at least until April this year, many employers would simply choose to do what looked like playing safe.

The lawyer said that since 2011 “trans activism has pulled off the most extraordinary cognitive and social heist and the impact of that has been to make it an article of unquestioned faith in most of our educated elites that trans women are women”.

She also referred to evidence earlier in the tribunal from Leonardo’s vice-president of people, shared services, Andrew Letton.

Ms Cunningham said: “The creed in full as often repeated by politicians and others is trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary identities are valid.

“In my submission, one of the most telling individual pieces of evidence that Mr Letton, the respondent’s witness gave, was about the respondent’s concern to stay in this respect with the herd; it was quite clear that the respondent was more concerned to keep its practice consistent with what other employers were doing and what the unions wanted it to do than to comply with the law.”

Ms Cunningham said many women feel it is important to have access to female spaces for privacy and safety reasons.

She said there are many reasons why a man might want to use such spaces, including the cultural picture of the “paradigm trans woman”, a middle-aged person who has undergone surgery and hormone therapy.

However, she said the case of transgender rapist Isla Bryson “shocked Scotland out of the illusion that that paradigm was the only kind of trans woman”.

Bryson was convicted in 2023 of raping two women, one in 2016 and one in 2019, committing the offences while still a man known as Adam Graham.

Ms Kelly, people and capability lead for the aerospace defence company, previously told the employment tribunal that she began using a “secret toilet” at her workplace after encountering a transgender colleague in a female bathroom in March 2023.

She said she had first become aware of a transgender person using the female toilets in 2019 but did not raise the issue with the company at the time as she feared being labelled “transphobic” or being put on the “naughty list”.

Ms Cunningham, on Wednesday, highlighted her client’s “courage” in raising the issue about access to a single sex space.

She said: “This is an employee who has suffered profound distress, embarrassment and humiliation in front of her male colleagues because she has been deprived of something she should have been entitled to.”

The lawyer added: “The claimant has been made to feel as if she is somehow out on a limb, she is asserting something very outlandish and strange in insisting on this obvious everyday reality and that is the kind of cruelty that is very often referred to as gaslighting.

“It’s the kind of gaslighting that the claimant has been suffering for years in this employment”.

In response to a query from the judge, Susanne Tanner KC, representing Leonardo, told the hearing that it is not in dispute that Leonardo accepts that a trans woman is biologically a man, for the purposes of the equality act and definition of sex.

The tribunal continues.