Civil servants oppose plans to end trans reassignment leave policy

Eh? Male children have a penis all their lives, they don’t suddenly get one at puberty. What a bizarre view of human development.

You are very arrogant for someone completely wrong. That’s not a thing under the Equality Act. Section 16 covers discrimination for time off related to gender reassignment. You can’t treat someone taking time off for gender reassignment any less favourably than someone taking time off for sickness or injury.

The equality act and maternity legislation specifically states that employers must give pregnant women time off for their pregnancy related appointments and a minimum maternity leave and pay.
There are no such clauses or adjacent laws which require employers to do the same for trans identifying people.
The equality act brought gender reassignment discrimination in line with race, religious, sex and sexual orientation discrimination laws not maternity.
All the gender reassignment characteristic does is make it illegal to refuse services, employment or housing to someone purely because they are trans. It gives them no extra rights

Because it’s elective surgery? Should anyone having a face lift, boob job or hair transplant be entitled to paid leave out of the company or tax payers purse?

Imho no. Not for any of those whether it’s for vanity/cosmetic reasons or to support transition.

Nope not if they apply the same policy to anyone else wanting time off for cosmetic surgery.
But nice try thought

The problem is it was 13 weeks of extra paid leave that no other employee was entitled to. Trans identifying people should have the same sickness and sick pay leave as everyone else and not given extra for their chosen cosmetic surgery.
If women have to use a combination of paid and unpaid sick leave/holiday allowance and/or an unpaid sabbatical to have a boob job so should every single man who wants one otherwise thats sex discrimination.
Now if they want to keep the policy they can but they must open it up to all employees who want any cosmetic surgery whether thats a nose job, face-lift, tummy-tuck or even dental implants. However I suspect that the cost of doing so is prohibitive so they are rightly scrapping the illegal policy.
Why do you think that trans people should have rights that nobody else have when it comes to sick pay?

@Awkwardisfunny Definitely doesn't apply to children and I never agree with that - it should be illegal for kids.

Why should it be illegal for kids? You said that they know their gender from a young age. Why not block their puberty, give them cross sex hormones and then remove/refashion any secondary sex characterisitics that they don't like. All done nice and young so that they meet the adult world as their true selves.

Why don't you want that?

It's bonkers.
The sooner surgeons get sued the better.

Who was actually asked about this anyway? I'm a civil servant and don't recall any surveys or votes about this.

Thank God you're not running the country.

Assuming you're female (switch it if not): If someone told you at age 8 that soon, you'd go through puberty and grow a penis and beard, and have a voice 2 octaves deeper.. would you have been horrified? Now imagine a doctor gave you a pill and said: don't worry, once you take this pill, you'll 'recognise' that you're male and then be okay with growing a penis.

Would you take the pill? Or fight tooth and nail because you "know" you're female. Because even at that age, you "knew" your gender. We all did.

That's how these people feel. They know from a young age that they're a certain gender, it's just that their bodies don't match. So either operate on their brains (/ provide a pill) or operate on their bodies. But which would you choose? Or just be miserable all your life and commit suicide eventually.

You are lacking not only in empathy, but in basic understanding of the condition and impact on those affected.

They need support and it's probably just the lesser of two evils that we choose to operate on their bodies.

Definitely doesn't apply to children and I never agree with that - it should be illegal for kids.

@csturbjikbfd The CS is supposed to foster good relations between communities and these sorts of policies do not do that as the unfairness is obvious.

This is an important point. The overreach by the activists is causing harm to their own community. You can see and hear the pushback that is gathering pace, against the T, but also against the L and G from the homophobes who never went away and feel that they have a voice once again. This favouritism needs to stop, for everyone's sake.

There was a Civil Servant who spoke about this at a KJK LWS event. She said that if a woman needs reconstructive surgery after breast cancer she has to take that from annual leave and might end up going down to half pay or no pay.

It is. There are people with remitting relapsing conditions like MS or various mental health issues who could really do with having a lot of flexibility around their hours and time off and who don't get it so what inevitably happens is they don't work at all. And then there are these special people who get whatever they ask for.

13 weeks a year is one-quarter of a year. Available every year.
Bonkers.

Gender reassignment discrimination: cases of absence from work
(1)This section has effect for the purposes of the application of Part 5 (work) to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

(2)A person (A) discriminates against a transsexual person (B) if, in relation to an absence of B's that is because of gender reassignment, A treats B less favourably than A would treat B if—

(a)B's absence was because of sickness or injury, or

(b)B's absence was for some other reason and it is not reasonable for B to be treated less favourably.

(3)A person's absence is because of gender reassignment if it is because the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone the process (or part of the process) mentioned in section 7(1).

If the policy is changed then the transperson will be subject to exactly the same terms and treatment as they would if they had cancer or required treatment due to a disability so there would be no discrimination on the basis of GR

Don't be ridiculous. No-one is going to have genital surgery just to get time off.

I didn't say that. If you work for an employer who gives extremely generous leave to recover from this surgery it may be one factor that persuades an employee to go for the surgery, whereas if you had to factor in unpaid leave you might not.

The objection as far as I'm concerned is that I don't think anybody should be having surgery for a psychological issue,

That's not really your decision

providing this very generous paid leave makes it more likely that some civil servants will go down that path

Don't be ridiculous. No-one is going to have genital surgery just to get time off.

I have an objection to trans people being allowed paid time off for recovery from surgery that a cancer victim working for the same employer would not be allowed under the sickness and absence police

That's wrong if it's true but I'm not sure it is.

“Neo vagina” - the very name is insulting. It’s Neo nothing of the sort.

I agree it should attract the same leave as cosmetic surgery.

No, section 16 of the Equality Act 2010 covers this case and the comparator has nothing to do with cosmetic surgery.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/16

They are and still will be permitted time off. However the current policy treats trans staff more favourably than other staff in terms of sickness absence policy which could be discrimination on the basis of disability or sex potentially age too.

The same policy should be applied to all.

I actually think that allowing time off for medical appointments relating to 'gender reassignment' isn't unreasonable in principle - in the same way that pregnant women get time off for maternity-related appointments.

Surely this is exactly the sort of thing that the people who drafted the equality act had in mind when they made gender reassignment a protected characteristic - before it got displaced by the false claims that we all had to pretend that gender reassigned people really were the opposite sex?

I mean, the devil is in the detail, and 13 weeks sounds impossibly generous (unless it is restricted to certain qualifying situations such as profound surgical alterations entered into after whatever counts as a proper psychiatric evaluation). But in principle some degree of reassignment leave doesn't sound outrageous
(although in practice I can well imagine it having led to large amounts of spurious time off to attend any number of marginal things such as chestfeeding workshops and the like).

In what way? I could possibly see an argument for indirect discrimination, but that argument then opens up the entire sickness absence policy to a disability discrimination claim.

Wow

I’m a CS with a disability. In my dept, trans colleagues receive unlimited leave for reasons pertaining to gender reassignment and these absences are deliberately excluded from absence review trigger points. I can have 9 days absence in a rolling 12 month period before I am subject to action under absence management policies. My hospital appts don’t receive paid leave (and shouldn’t) and must be booked either outside of work hours or the time made up. The CS is supposed to foster good relations between communities and these sorts of policies do not do that as the unfairness is obvious.