Maya Forstater

Writer, research, gender-critical activist.

Maya Forstater is a researcher, writer, and free speech advocate whose landmark legal battle shook the foundations of workplace rights and gender discourse in the UK. Having spent much of her career working on global development and corporate responsibility, including high-profile roles with organizations like the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the Center for Global Development (CGD).

But a single tweet made her a national figure.

In 2019, Maya lost her consultancy role at CGD after publicly stating that biological sex is real and immutable— a once universal view, now deemed “gender-critical.” What followed was a fierce legal fight that would reshape UK law. After an initial tribunal ruled against her, Maya appealed—and won. In 2021, the Employment Appeal Tribunal declared that her beliefs were protected under the Equality Act 2010, setting a powerful precedent for freedom of belief in the workplace.

In 2022, a second tribunal confirmed that Maya had been unlawfully discriminated against and awarded her over £100,000 in damages. Her courage became a rallying point for thousands who felt silenced in conversations around sex and gender.

Today, she is the Executive Director of Sex Matters, an organization she co-founded to champion clarity on sex in law, policy, and institutions, and continues to be a necessary, unyielding voice in one of the most heated debates of our time.

So why did we invite her on?

Last week, Britain saw its Supreme Court rule that, under the same act which underpinned Maya’s case, the legal definition of "woman" refers to biological sex, not gender identity. Indeed, the country’s finest legal minds congregated to debate the first thing our species discovered about itself.

The decision (shocker) has proven divisive. For every image of JK Rowling triumphantly dragging on a cigar, there was a pink-and-blue placcard held aloft on the street, wryly calling for her to be burned alive. Trans activists have claimed that the ruling has left their community unsafe. But why?

Maya has been deep in the trenches of this fight for over half a decade, and we wanted to hear not just her story, but how she feels about the possibility of a changing tide. Is she optimistic? Or are things only going one way?

What did we learn?

”A woman is an adult human female.”

Class dismissed. Until recently, it was something you could lose your job for pointing out. In Francis’ words, “isn’t it embarrassing?”

It is, but it’s not just that. As Maya, points out: it’s dangerous. This is arguably most starkly revealed by the Isla Bryson case, when a born-male double-rapist in Scotland was housed in a womens prison, having begun their transition after standing trial.

”As soon as people think of the ‘magic’ of transition, they forget about women. Why do we have womens-only prison? Why do you have womens sport? Why do you have single-sex services? It’s to protect women from men, and enable women to be part of public life … if you try and erase those differences, you’re operating counter to reality: you’re making yourself stupid, and you’re making your institutions stupid. You end up corrupting everything.”

Maya concedes that not everyone involved in the sociopolitical establishment of this mistruth had nefarious intent. Many will have had sincere, good-hearted ambitions. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if it were true? And even if it isn’t, why not accomodate it anyway? What’s the harm? Maya breaks it down for us.

”Saying men and women are the same is like saying 1 = 0 … What [trans activists] did was say 1 = 0 for these people over here [trans people]; let’s say this untrue thing to accomodate these people over here. ‘We can accomodate it’. But it turned out you can’t; you end up breaking everything that kept women safe.”

But why was this allowed to happen? If trans people have always existed, why has this only become such a hotly contested issue in the last decade? To Maya, much of the
is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the 2010 Equality Act. After all, how did the same act that ‘justified’ Maya’s firing also protect her position and underpin the ruling that inspired this whole conversation?