Charlotte Hawkins, NHS paramedic

I’m a paramedic training officer in the NHS. I didn’t know anything about the gender issue until I was asked to update maternity materials and replace the biological language with terms like “birthing people”. I just thought: this is ridiculous. That was my turning point.

Then we were moving into a new building, and I realised that all of the toilets and showers were going to be gender-neutral. I kicked up a fuss, and managed to get them to keep some single-sex facilities. But the ones closest to the entrance, which are used the most, remained gender-neutral. To get to the women’s toilets and showers you had to go upstairs and walk down a long corridor. That’s not good: sometimes when you get back from being in the ambulance you’re covered in blood and you need to get straight into the shower. 

So I wrote a report explaining the law on single-sex spaces, and included accounts from colleagues from other stations who had similar issues. I sent it to the safeguarding and HR departments, but I was just laughed at. One day, at the start of my shift I was pulled into an office and shown Facebook posts that some colleagues had spent months collecting. None of them were written by me – they were newspaper articles, petitions and the odd meme that I had shared. 

My badge was taken off me and I was frogmarched out of the building. They even made a list of people who had interacted positively with the posts. One of them – she was pregnant at the time – got suspended too.

I was supposed to come back from my suspension and be under a 12-month “warning” period. I was told that to return to work I had to write a letter of explanation to colleagues “affected by the posts” and attend a course on equality to learn to “be better”. But I lodged an employment tribunal application, and before it could even get under way, the trust retracted everything and gave me a full apology. I’m really happy that I don’t have to hide my opinions anymore.