Civil servant given warning after ‘inappropriately’ saying there are two sides to the trans debate

[IwantToRetire]

Work and pensions official investigated and found guilty of breaching department’s behaviour policy and rules on harassment

Among the remarks made by the civil servant, and branded as “inappropriate comments relating to trans women” by a DWP investigator, were the comments: “One of the things I struggle to understand as a lesbian myself is, how can trans women be lesbian as lesbian is same sex attracted, not gender?”, “I find the term cis very offensive”, “Sport is segregated because there is a difference” and “What if you don’t believe in gender? I don’t”.

Discussing the comment, “It’s useful to hear both sides of a subject,” a DWP investigator claimed that the “event did not appear to be a forum designed to generate debate on both sides of the subject” and therefore it was “inappropriate” and made in the wrong context.

The department’s investigation led to an official warning against the civil servant.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/06/civil-servant-warning-inappropriate-trans-debate/

On first reading I thought this is clearly against the now legally established right to the belief in sex being a biological reality.

On re-reading I still see that but would also say that it is homophobic of whoever accused her, because she was making statement about her protected characteristic of being same sex attracted.

Article can be read at https://archive.ph/c043P

Funny it was the DWP. Did any trans women miss out on their pensions when the age for women was raised?

I'n glad it seems to be old news being reheated, I was concerned it was a current disciplinary and the woman had been recently admonished, after Forstater.

I think @Signalbox and @PermanentTemporary are probably both correct.

That remind me - IWD 2024, theme ‘Inspire Inclusion’. Can I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means?

Is it just TWANW the Civil Service doesn’t allow people to think, say or believe - or are they as controlling about other scientific facts such as the earth being round, the sun rising in the East, and the existence of gravity?

Fucking hell, the world is stuffed.

Sadly I am not surprised and expect other cases will come to light in the Civil Service. The unions are captured as well. I am in another CS department and the comments on a SEEN intranet article before Christmas were off the scale. What I could bare to read were all about compassion for our poor oppressed trans colleagues and calls for the network to be disbanded. Moderation was very strict and clear that the network is worthy of respect which gives some hope. Comments were turned off/ deleted. I am still too scared for my livelihood to say anything even vaguely GC to anyone at work. WFH is a relief.

I've put my name in the pronouns section 😂

The reference to 'drink the kool aid' is an odd one, as I suspect most people don't know the significance and it has become more commonly used. I recall Nick Clegg said it a lot after the Brexit referendum and I don't believe he was subject to any disciplinary or equivalent investigation for it.

Civil Service capture is frightening. They have working groups to write policies on how best to support LGBTQ+ staff members, the trans staff network gets to present to leadership group how they should be managed, the howling down of SEEN is really quite distressing. There is no balance.

When the people whose job it is to ensure equality for all have pronouns in their email sigs, you know you're not getting a fair hearing. It's very heavily biased towards 'inclusion', which basically means the TQ people always take precedence.

I had assumed it was a reference to Tom Wolfe's book 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test', but it appears to be a reference to Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre. I wonder how many other thought as I do, I'm in my 50s and while I am aware of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters I didn't know about the Jonestown Massacre at all.

I interpreted the kool-aid comment as you did, thought it was a referring to people believing nonsense because they were tripping, not the much grimmer Jonestown reference.

Anyone GC in the civil service should join SEEN to get support for believing in reality.

yes as I understand it the warning was prior to the Forstater judgement. Nevertheless the case that there is a public interest in making sure future staff training in the civil service and other uk public institutions is properly updated to reflect the legal situation (some people believe a / some people believe b) seems sensible.

The poster suggesting the pro tory papers will be doing what they can to make labour look bad ahead of the election is also I'm sure partially correct. But in this area Labour really don't need any help to look bad. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

Fascism at its finest.

Also homophobia. And misogyny.

Fucking chilling.

The archive link is at the bottom of the OP.

I thought this too. It actually makes more sense. If you drank Ken Kesey's Kool Aid you might believe and talk all sorts of nonsense. If you drank the Jonestown Kool Aid (which was actually not Kool Aid but a similar drink called Flavor Aid), you'd just be dead.

Thanks for the prompt to the archive link.

This is the difficulty, isn't it. It does sound as if the woman was being fairly abrasive and taking the piss. But it's a bit tricky when agreed policy is based on actual nonsense. It takes a particularly unpleasant form of energy to stay quiet when workmates are saying silly things.

I always assume references to drinking the Kool-Aid are to the Jonestown massacre. It was a cult and, as the authorities started to close in on what was happening there, the leader of the cult ordered the members to queue up to get the poisoned drink and force it down the throats of their children. They all knew what was in it and what it would do but they did it anyway because they had been indoctrinated to believe all sorts of nonsense, including unswerving obedience to Jim Jones. Over 900 people died.

I'm in my early 60s. I have no knowledge of the Ken Kesey book. Drink the Kool-Aid to me means 'do what the cult tells you and don't try to make sense of it'.

Yes me too. I always assumed it was from the Jonestown massacre and highlighted that ppl can be brainwashed to believe and then do extremely harmful things to others and themselves

I thought the poison was mixed into applesauce?

I have my start date to join the civil service and know a member of SEEN. I will be joining SEEN as soon as possible!

No, great big tubs of Flav-Aid, which is apparently a cheap knock off version of Kool-Aid. Horrifying story. We saw a documentary about it a few years back. When I read The Running Grave, the latest Cormoran Strike book (JKR writing as Robert Galbraith) one of the things it reminded me of was the Jonestown cult.

Ah that was Heavens Gate that had the apple sauce.

I think 'drinking the Kool-aid' has passed into the lingua franca. many people using it will have no idea of it's dark origin. Scolding someone for using it is, in this context, barrel scraping. Especially, as I suspect, the same scolders would have no problem using the word 'queer', they seemed to be fine with 'terf' and 'cis'..

Just out of interest, even allowing for bad motives by the Torygraph (and lets remember this incident was during a Tory administration) does the CS recruit at Career Fairs (not sure if that is what they are called).

Is part of the problem that probably for the past 10 years, if not more, most graduates would have to some extent been part of the Stonewall, Mermaids transing of society.

Have a vision of these bright eyed new graduates arriving for their first day of work fully primed on the whole rainbow alliance.

Except of course, more senior staff must have approved the training or seminar or whatever it was.

So how did the senior echelons either not care or pro-actively approved this one sided presentation.

As an aside, when I read the article part of me wondered if the woman concern was on FWR. But either way, especially as a lesbian, I can imagine that after trying to be allowed to present the other side of the arguement, she just got exasperated and talked about kool-aid. I too took it to mean if not the Merry Pranksters some other stoned grouping. It would never have occured to me it was part of Jamestown, because as someone said up thread, then you would be dead, not prancing around having trantrums and telling people the sun is purple.

This is not about the case covered in the DT article, but looks at a workplace situation where the accepted attitudes where challenged by one employee's opinions, in this instance race. Other employees objected to what he said. (This was at ACAS!)

The tribunal said that it had "no hesitation" about finding that Mr Corby's beliefs were protected. His views were genuine and formed part of his identity and affected the way he lives his life. They were grounded in philosophical teachings aimed to eliminate racism in society.

Another tribunal will have to decide if Acas has discriminated against Mr Corby because of his protected beliefs. We don't yet have details of the alleged discrimination, but it may include harassment by his co-workers. We'll keep you posted.

https://www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/employment/312-employment-features/56030-expressing-lawful-views-at-work

So it would seem that the woman concerend in the newspaper article should not have been repremanded. Unless of course someone could prove she didn't really believe what she said and was just being disruptive or antagonistic.

(PS I found this whilst trying to see if there was further news about what had happened, especially given Maya Forstater case.)