Earlier this month, a British employment judge ruled that a researcher’s anti-trans views did not constitute what’s called a protected philosophical belief under the nation’s Equality Act, which meant that her employer’s decision not to renew her contract over those views did not constitute discrimination. The woman at the center of the case, Maya Forstater, was employed on a contract basis as a tax policy researcher for the Centre for Global Development. In 2018, she began publicly campaigning, mostly on social media, against reforms to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow trans people in the United Kingdom to self-identify their gender. In response to concern from her colleagues, her employer’s human resources department warned her that others might find her anti-trans tweets “offensive and exclusionary” and eventually declined to renew her contract. Forstater decided to sue, purporting to seek legal protection for her beliefs.

The subsequent ruling against Forstater set off a series of predictably over-the-top reactions from the self-described “gender-critical feminists”—also called trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs—who dominate the British feminist discourse. In their framing, the case became the latest example of the so-called death of free speech and thought, the result of lefty madness and groupthink. (The author J.K. Rowling raised the international profile of the case—and was also heavily criticized—after tweeting support for Forstater.)

But a closer look at the case reveals that it doesn’t have much to do with a belief that “there are only two sexes in human beings … male and female,” as Forstater claims (and growing bodies of science dispute). In practice, Forstater was seeking legal cover to disregard the already established rights of trans people in the U.K. Hers was a familiar argument—one that for too long has dominated mainstream coverage of trans rights.

A passage from employment judge James Tayler’s ruling explained it perfectly: “The claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.” Forstater, in her witness statement, more or less confirmed this: It “may be polite,” she acknowledged, to use a person’s preferred pronouns, “but there is no fundamental right to compel people to be polite or kind in every situation.”

Forstater’s claim about protected belief was just a smoke screen for her underlying bigotry, and Tayler saw through it. “It is also a slight of hand to suggest that the Claimant merely does not hold the belief that transwomen are women,” he wrote in his judgment. “She positively believes that they are men; and will say so whenever she wishes.” The case, then, wasn’t so much about belief as it was about actions.