A week after Jim Orwin was sacked by East Riding of Yorkshire Council for using the email footer ‘XYchromosomeGuy/AdultHumanMale’, his line manager and his line manager’s manager arrived at his immaculate bungalow near Hull to collect the council’s property, which included a laptop and a chair. One of them drove a Porsche and the other a sporty Mercedes. Neither could fit the chair in their car.
‘Somebody else had to come back for it with a bigger vehicle. When the driver from Accommodation Services arrived eight days later his email instruction was to collect a desk. There was no desk,’ says Jim, 67, with a you-really-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up look on his face.
You couldn’t.
Jim, who worked as an information and communications technology project manager for the council, is at his wits’ end after losing, not just his livelihood but his and his wife Julie’s life savings in his stand against, what he calls, the ‘steady creeping evil’ of identity politics.
In short, the council’s then chief executive Caroline Lacey sent a global email to all employees two-and-a-half-years ago inviting them ‘to consider adding pronouns to your email signature, should you wish to do so.’
Like many who are gender critical, Jim, who maintains he is neither transphobic or homophobic, believes self-identification – where a person chooses their own identity (male, female, non-binary etc.) without any legal or medical requirements – is ‘garbage’.
Clicking on an invitation to choose ‘other’ rather than he/him, Jim entered XYchromosomeGuy/AdultHumanMale.
He was asked to remove it after a trans member of staff saw the footer and ‘queried its acceptability’. Jim refused.
A disciplinary hearing followed during which he compared the council’s strapline ‘Your East Riding Where Everyone Matters’ to George Orwell’s dystopian Animal Farm edict: ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’. He was dismissed.
Jim has never been a troublemaker. In fact, he says, he hadn’t ‘had any truck’ with anyone in the workplace ‘before the pronouns email’, but he is a man who inhabits a world where two plus two equals four and, as far as he is concerned, a biological male plus a she/her pronoun absolutely does not equal a woman.
‘The chief executive signed the email off she/her which was like saying, “I’m doing it so everybody else should do it”.
‘There was a link to a website mypronouns.org which said somebody might want to be addressed by a particular pronoun one day but that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. People can change pronouns from meeting to meeting.
‘I thought, “This is self-identification.” I don’t accept self-identification. I think it’s dangerous. It puts children and vulnerable adults at risk to predatory males. I don’t agree with self-identification in sport. I don’t agree with it in changing rooms, in bathrooms and in women’s spaces.
‘A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man, but manipulation of language is encouraging people to accept the distortion of reality,’ he says.
‘We’re introducing this indoctrination into schools,’ adds Jim. ‘You get kids – young kids – identifying as SparkleHorse Unicorn or whatever it is, that’s ridiculous.’
His views are forthright and will no doubt rile trans rights activists. But many agree with him. A few weeks ago, Jim set up a crowd-funding site to help fund a £12,000 legal bill after losing his employment tribunal battle with the council in the summer.
Since he appeared on GB News earlier this week it has increased ten-fold to more than £16,000 and is rising faster than East Riding’s council tax bills which soared by 4.9 per cent in February.
Jim’s inbox also ‘keeps pinging’ with numerous messages of support from those who, like him, believe self-identification is ‘garbage’. One 86-year-old lady ended her email xx, pointing out these were not kisses but the ‘xx’ chromosomes.
Julie, who adores her husband of 48 years, tells me she is ‘overwhelmed’ by the support.
‘When you’re feeling down it lifts you,’ she says. ‘It’s just like strength in numbers that ordinary people have got your back.
‘People, who don’t know the kind of people we are, have put their hands in their pockets and are standing with him. I think it’s humbling.’
Jim and Julie, who have raised a son and a daughter, get by with very little. Indeed, they’ve only been abroad twice in their lives. Jim, who was a self-employed painter and decorator before completing an Open University degree in IT, tells me the £27,000 salary he earned at East Riding council, is ‘the most I’ve ever earned in my life’.
He was ‘devastated’ when, on October 1 he was ordered to pay the council’s legal expenses.
I wonder if Julie, 67, had a few choice pronouns of her own for her husband when that email arrived. ‘No because if he hadn’t [fought them] he wouldn’t be the man he is,’ she says. ‘I knew what I signed up for.
‘I married him for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – and we’ve had the whole lot.’ Jim had a stroke in 2011 and Julie suffers with Crohn’s disease.
‘I married a man who would put his family before everything, be faithful to me and to the truth. The shame is he really loved that job.’ She looks at him. He folds his arms.
‘Before the pronouns email there was no sign of any wokeness [at work] or anything like that,’ says Jim. ‘I worked with normal every-day guys and we had normal every-day banter,’ he says.
‘Most people had similar views. Brexit was a good idea, culture wars were nonsense – that type of thing. Sometimes we’d talk about woke stuff like trigger warnings for books, university professors being Left wing and indoctrination. But not all the time. Only if something was in the news.
‘Although we did go to what we called away days where we’d all sit around the table in teams with people you’d never met before.
‘We had to perform certain tasks. One of the things that surprised me was when, for one of the tasks, we had to think of something that would improve the conditions at the council.
‘A young woman who was on the team said, “Wouldn’t it be good if we could have a room where we could go for a half an hour nap in the afternoon?”
‘I thought, ‘“What would you want to do that for?” It seems strange to me because when I was a self-employed painter and decorator I’d work eight hours a day and, even if someone brought me a drink, I’d drink it while I was working.’
Jim was working from home on April 13 2022 when the email to all staff sent from the council’s chief executive dropped. I thought, ‘Oh God,’ he says. ‘I knew about this thing of putting pronouns on emails – but I thought it wasn’t [something that happened] at the council so I didn’t have to be concerned with it.’ He worried himself sick about what to do.
Yes, he concedes, some might consider him bloody-minded or, at the very least stubborn, he prefers ‘direct’.
‘If Yorkshire people don’t agree with something or don’t like something, they say they don’t,’ he says. ‘There’s no dressing it up in any way.’
After receiving that email, Jim thought ‘all day and all night’ about what to do. Staff were provided with a drop-down menu offering options including ‘he/him/his’, ‘she/her/hers’, ‘they/them/their’, ‘do not show’, or ‘other’ along with the link to mypronouns.org for guidance.
‘The website said there are neopronouns which people can make up,’ he says.
Examples of neopronouns include xe, xir, faer, vampself, beepself. ‘I decided to go for XYchromosomeGuy/AdultHumanMale. They serve the same purpose as a pronoun. They refer to me and only me. My logic is if people can put SparkleHorse Unicorn, you’ve got to allow everybody [to put what they want], otherwise don’t allow it all.
‘I said in the disciplinary investigation if they’d said, “These are the options: he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/their/them, ‘none’ or ‘leave it blank’”, I’d have left it blank.
‘My issue was not with pronouns, it was with self-identification.’ The following day he sent his line manager a message saying, ‘I’m pretty sure whoever dreamt up this nonsense isn’t actually interested in equality.’ Explaining that he didn’t want to put his line manager in a difficult position without giving advance warning, Jim said, ‘not adding a pronoun would be accepting this garbage’ and ‘what I will be using is bound to challenge the agenda of those who are implementing it’.
The matter was ‘escalated and escalated’ in emails from line manager to line manager to human resources.
A week later, when Jim had still heard nothing, he says his line manager told him it was ‘totally fair where you’re coming from’ and that he was ‘happy to refer to me as Adult Male Guy from this point on’.
Observing ‘there was a wider issue in play’, his line manager said he was hopeful the HR department would come back to Jim soon.
Jim says, ‘I felt I was being stonewalled and that they were delaying it as long as possible in the hope I would change my mind.’
‘Frustrated’, he decided to circulate an email internally with his preferred pronoun on April 29 and threatened to send it externally if he continued to hear nothing.
On May 19 he received a decision that his ‘email footer has been determined to be offensive to transgender persons’.
He was asked to remove it, which he refused to do.
The following morning Jim was asked to attend a meeting at County Hall at 2pm. Jim says, since his stroke, he needs time to assemble his thoughts, particularly when he feels he is being put on the spot. His employer was fully aware of this.
Jim explained that a face-to-face meeting would make him feel ‘under pressure and intimidated – to be blunt, bullied’ and said that if the council would put in writing the points it wished to discuss, he would be happy to provide a ‘full response’.
Jim received an email advising him he had been suspended before the lunch hour was up.
‘This has been really hard for both of us,’ says Julie, who is close to tears as Jim recounts the legal to-ing and fro-ings of the past two years.
He has now set up a website xychromosomeguy.com which includes the transcripts, statements, judgments and written representations from the disciplinary hearing, the tribunal and the application for costs.
To read them is to find yourself in a Kafkaesque nightmare peopled with bodies like the ‘Equality Diversity and Inclusion Task Force’, ‘People Board’, ‘Legal & Democratic Services’, ‘Overview Management and Scrutiny Committee’, ‘Workforce Wellbeing group’ and ‘Social Value team’.
He was accused of being ‘transphobic’ and ‘offensive’ countless times – quite how Jim stood firm in his belief that biological sex is ‘immutable’, goodness knows.
Although the tribunal panel dismissed his case and found he was not discriminated against, it did accept his gender-critical beliefs amounted to a protected ‘philosophical belief within the meaning of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010’ which Jim rightly chalks up to at least one small victory for commonsense.
Another small victory is the well of support he’s discovered online through setting up the GoFundMe account.
‘My initial idea was to enable people to put in as little as possible to show how many supported what I did.
‘I couldn’t stay silent.
‘Self-identification perpetuates a lie. Those advocating it don’t actually mean ‘self-identification for all’, they mean self-identification for those who share the same ideology as they do.
‘Those who don’t are castigated and discriminated against for refuting the ideology.
‘While purporting to champion equality and freedom of expression, what it actually does is usurp both.’
With that, his mobile phone ‘pings’ yet again from another well-wisher. In the time we’ve spoken, his fund has increased by another £483.
Whatever your stance, it’s clear Jim is not alone.
