Parliamentary staff urged to police pronouns and ‘identify transphobia’

[IwantToRetire]

The UK Parliament authorities have drawn up gender-identity guidance for hundreds of civil servants working in administrative roles in the House of Commons and Lords, which has been circulated internally for the last three years.
One section of the 15-page guide warns that staff should “learn to identify what transphobic behaviour looks like and understand that these must be met with an attitude of zero-tolerance”.
It lists examples including “another colleague refusing to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns or names”, adding that this “should be dealt with in an appropriate manner”.

The pamphlet, obtained by The Telegraph, has been criticised by campaigners and a senior MP as “concerning” and “compelled belief”.

The guidance also says that staff who keep Parliament running behind the scenes can “use the facilities that match your gender identity or that most closely align with it”, with both single-sex and gender-neutral facilities available.

It goes on: “It is your choice and we will support you to access the toilets, showers and changing rooms that feel right for you at that time. It may be that you access both male and female facilities, which we support.”

This is despite single-sex spaces being protected by the Equality Act 2010. The guide states several that gender reassignment is a protected characteristic under this law, but fails to mention that sex is protected too.

Parliamentary staff are also urged to ensure that “trans experiences are celebrated” and that “trans colleagues feel comfortable bringing their authentic self to work”.

... continues

Original article is in the Telegraph but reproduced by yahoo Parliamentary staff urged to police pronouns and ‘identify transphobia’ (yahoo.com)

This 👆🏼

Precisely.

And when sense finally fights its way back into the room, a very serious inquiry is going to have to be held, as to how this was able to happen to government institutions and departments that are supposed to withstand this kind of thing and maintain their written policies and supposed values. Because the next movement seeking political capture might be considerably worse than this one.

Questions were asked of the minister for safeguarding on the 'webchat' a year or two back, but HQ deleted them.

It has been the biggest fundamental, institutional safeguarding disaster of modern history.

How can Parliamentary management both pull out of that Stonewall employers’ scheme and still have guidance promoting Stonelaw? Which is it? And where is the statement that the new staff guidance will be based only in the law of the land. And that they respect and support the right and need of women at work to be able to access single sex spaces at workplace in line with the law…?

I would add that any party not deeply concerned about this and committed to dealing with it, root and branch, and ending this capture, has no business in power. The fact that a party may be in hock to/sympathetic to the particular extremist lobby that has performed the capture is irrelevant: to not address this means being fundamentally involved in prejudice, forced belief and control, and happy to throw away democracy, transparency, impartiality and all the other values on which a party should stake their claim to be fit to run a country.

It is going to have to be that every person trained by this extremist lobby, every policy written based on that training or with lobby involvement, has to be regarded as compromised. The brainwashing has to be reversed and balance provided with clear expectations that commitment to freedom of belief and religious tolerance are the basic fitness requirements for employment in a position of trust. That there are no special groups who get to be above the law or have laws of their own.

And then they can focus on why the actual fuck tax payer money was used to fund the lobbies that were permitted to comprehensively fuck over taxpayers.

This is something of an aside, but I think it relates, despite being in Canada.

I don't really know much about the publication, but this has been about the only in depth article I've been able to find on this topic, which I was aware of through hearing from people involved in the system.

It's about the court system incorporating race considerations when sentencing.

Where I see it as related to this is that it's about a very particular approach to identity questions becomeing incorporated into the system, not at the po;itical level, but rather quietly and under the radar through another part of government, in this case the courts. But we've seen similar stuff in the civil service.

Here in Canada the courts have more powers to essentially create law compared to the UK. But both the courts and the civil service have been instrumental in pushing all of these ideologies into the political sphere, rather than the main push coming from politics into the civil service and courts.

I rather wonder if that isn't also the case in the UK.

Shit, and I didn't include the article:

https://www.thefp.com/p/justice-is-no-longer-blind-in-canada?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR3SezqLPZnjzHUjVfquKUbEgYY5wJKMKL3sg2tkkobPUUJlFZD_jYSTmaI

I've seen the creep into my bit of the civil service. We have a really good balance of the sexes and I was told shortly after joining that the department was known for its sex equality.

However we have a gay man who promotes LGBT themes all the time, and a recent joiner identifies as queer. The visibility of the (now) LGBTQIA+ message is now front and centre. The two of them present to the leadership group on how to root out LGBTQIA+ phobias, advise on pronouns etc. My (gay) director now calls himself 'cis'. Lots of people have taken to wearing the Proud Trust lanyard which is rainbow stripes on one side and the trans colour stripes on the other.

The new queer member of staff has recently joined a:gender, the civil service pro-trans staff group which dictate language. This is celebrated and applauded.

There is a recent staff group called SEEN (Sex Equality & Equity Network) who promote sex-based rights and strive to protect those with gender-critical views. The howls of outrage about the formation of this group are frightening, the vitriol directed towards its members is dreadful.

Hope is lost, in my view. They 'gender-neutralise' all the language and this then get written into policy. I watch institutional capture happen round me all day long. This is how it happens.

100% agree, maybe we need to lobby for an enquiry now?

Demicolon preferential treatment under the Criminal Justice System has been one of the aims of Press for Change for "transgender" people since the 1990's in the UK. Since PfC took their lead from campaigns and manifestos in the USA I would astonished if there were not something similar in North America, possibly under a "Human Rights" cloak?

We see this play out in UK courts all the time, with "gender confusion" being accepted as a mitigating factor, convicted sex-offenders being spared prison due to their "vulnerability" if they are "trans", given lenient sentences, etc.

4.00 "Press For Change" campaigning

4.10 The right to have transsexual status taken into account when being sentenced, so that a non-custodial sentence is given whenever permissible, because of the additional difficulties faced by transsexual people in prison.

Search https://web.archive.org/ for

http://www.pfc.org.uk/campaign/pfcaims.htm

The International Bill of Gender Rights
As adopted June 17, 1995 Houston, Texas, U.S.A.

Search https://web.archive.org/ for

http://www.pfc.org.uk/campaign/princpls.htm

Tallisker I think SEEN is a legitimate, legal counter to a:genda and the Civil Service would be very unwise to try to discriminate against members:

https://seen-network.uk/

(I wish Mumsnet would sort out how web.archive links break the formatting and end up with an unholy mess - hence the workaround above.)

I work for a quango and we have the some policies - I'd imagine they're pretty common across these kinds of orgs. When questioning whether it was appropriate/legal for someone of the opposite sex to use the toilet of their preferred gender from the moment of transition, I was told if women don't like it they can use unisex toilets. These are few and far between, meaning women who already have greater need of toileting facilities due to menstruation, menopause and birth injuries are even more disadvantaged.

Just what I was going to say.

Hope is lost, in my view. They 'gender-neutralise' all the language and this then get written into policy. I watch institutional capture happen round me all day long. This is how it happens.

I still think it's a fad (obviously not the LGB part of the alphabet soup), and that serious questions will be asked - are already being asked - about the '+' and the practices this seems to be intent on normalizing.

'My Identity' has always been the territory of peak teen angst and by the time they hit their 20s most people realize no one else gives a shit. Back in the 80s the androgynous dressers, Goths and punks ended up working in offices and banks, and were more invested in living and paying the mortgage than wondering how others were perceiving them.

At the time they get really arsey, thinking 'My Identity' is the be-all and end-all, and how dare you say something so fundamentally important is a phrase, and I'll still be dressing like Morticia Addams into my forties. I did. And it was all a crock of crap.

The institutional capture is what makes this situation different, but at some point when Gender Identity has stopped being fashionable, and we see what's left of the '+', a different picture might begin to emerge. In the meantime, it's very depressing that the more vocal brand of activism isn't content for everyone simply to dress and present how they wish. Misogynists just will not leave women - our sports, our spaces, the parameters of our medical history, even the language defining what female means - alone.

This really isn't too much to expect.

I worked for the civil service when they decided to put sanpro in men’s loos what fresh hell was this I put on a group chat what a waste of money. I got disciplined for hate speech - bullshit

It may be that you access both male and female facilities, which we support
Wtf??

We've got sanpro in the men's loos but no one will answer how the additional costs for collecting the waste (doubling the provision of bins will have a much higher cost to the contract) but apparently in one office the men's loos has a general waste bin by the sinks. I expressed my horror that sanpro waste was going into the normal bins (must check what happened about that)

*how the additional costs will be met

You can have girl mode and boy mode. Eddie / Suzy Izzard taught us this.

How much sanpro do you think is going anywhere in the gents?

H*arrietJet

How much sanpro do you think is going anywhere in the gents?
*
None! But the bins have to be provided if they're doing things properly (I and another colleague have expressed our utter horror that there are no sanitary bins, hopefully highlighting the idiocy of this initiative). And the contractors don't check how full the bins are, they just empty/replace them each visit. It's such a ridiculous waste of money. Transmen have both the women's loos and the marked accessible gender neutral loos to go at, no need for the gents to have this 🙄

Of course, sorry . It's hard to tell sarcasm sometimes, the whole mess is so surreal...

I think SEEN is a legitimate, legal counter to a:genda and the Civil Service would be very unwise to try to discriminate against members

I agree; and at the same time I've been horrified at how open the condemnation of SEEN has been in a number of conversations I've been part of (all with staff predominantly below SCS). The disregard for impartiality grinds my gears. And this is how it happens, right - not by the employer discriminating against women with a reality-based view of their own rights, but by the zealots making it so that that very normal view is unspeakable.

That is so true notsure

SEEN is indeed a proper Cabinet Office-approved staff network and apparently it's taken many months to be launched as all the i's have to be dotted and all the t's crossed. The monitors of the network are like the monitors on here, quick to leap to condemnation at the mere whiff of anything they deem transphobic.

Yep.

Christ.

Thank you to every civil servant who joined SEEN. You are making a difference. Every time anyone condemns the network, it makes a difference. It may not be apparent yet, but this kind of calm, rational stance is invaluable, in beginning to counter the authoritarianism.

And every time it is smeared and insulted, it proves the need for its own existence, and it proves the bigotry in those smearing and insulting.

Eventually the imbalance becomes so overt its undeniable.

“It is your choice and we will support you to access the toilets, showers and changing rooms that feel right for you at that time. It may be that you access both male and female facilities, which we support.”

This part always gets me. One side gets to do whatever the hell they want, but the other side who wants single-sex spaces, does not. The hypocrisy is off the charts.