A trans software engineer fired by Wikipedia is speaking out after she filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit website claiming wrongful termination.
Kayla Mae said that the “bigotry” described in her suit is “organization wide” and that most of her former colleagues “are as against the problems in leadership as I was.”
“Unfortunately, I became the squeaky wheel for management to retaliate against by reporting the discrimination,” Mae wrote on Reddit, “instead of quietly leaving like others did.”
Mae was hired in 2022 by the Wikimedia Foundation, the website’s parent organization, as a software engineer in a remote role based in Texas,
The Desk reported in May. Her direct supervisor was based in Kenya.
The lawsuit states that from the moment the neurodivergent, transgender woman was hired, she faced abuse and harassment by her supervisor, leading her to file complaints with Wikimedia Foundation’s human resources department.
Among other things, her supervisor asked her inappropriate questions about her sexual identity and inquired about her medical history. In emails to HR, Mae characterized other behavior by the supervisor as “transphobic microaggressions” and “ableism”. She wrote that the situation made her “dread work.”