Civil Service staff networks to only meet outside working hours and have all events signed off by senior managers

[IwantToRetire]

New rules have been issued to all Civil Service staff networks to ensure their activities remain within the Civil Service Code.

Read in full at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/civil-service-staff-networks-to-only-meet-outside-working-hours-and-have-all-events-signed-off-by-senior-managers

The people running IT determine how data is recorded - including recording Gender rather than sex, and requests for ‘preferred pronouns’. Once these things are baked into the data system it is very difficult to get the system to consider sex or eg single sex spaces of for equality monitoring purposes.

These groups are also lobbying senior civil servants and embedding their belief through training which goes against the law. Or the insert information into reports or codes of practice that hugely impact services such as ‘Appendix B’ that removed single sex wards, or the Bench Book that required rape victims to refer their male rapists as ‘she’ (and get recorded as such in the IT system).

As for going against government directives - we see this constantly. Just look how few organisations have implemented the Supreme Court judgement.

This is a much spicer thread that the other one!

Spicier?

I must be missing the double entendre

I thought we were having a serious discussion about professional non biased public servants.

Spicy = lots of hot takes, strong criticism, and arguments.

This thread ate and left no crumbs, eh? Slay, fam.

Some of us use modern slang too, Goody Pete. 😁

Thanks - although it is often said that the US and the UK are 2 countries separated by a common language, there is no doubt that even in are smaller popultion there are many, many occassions when a word thought by the speaker to be innoncent turns out to be anything but.

When the NHS uses this language it gives authority to the idea that women who identify as 'transmen' or 'non-binary' are not women, and that having such an identity is something that society should recognise and accord respect, rather than treating it as a symptom of a mental health problem.

This in turn encourages distressed and vulnerable young people to seek cosmetic body modifications that will permanently damage their health, rather than the psychological therapy that might actually help them.

The NHS should not be supporting this nonsensical and damaging ideology in any way at all.

They could use their lunch breaks.
None of these 'networks' should ever have been meeting in worktime, because it's not part of the job they're being paid to do.

I actually agree with you, but in the captured state of today's NHS, my suggestion surely has to be preferable to the suggested removal of any reference to women. You can't honestly prefer a reference to "everyone with a cervix" or "anyone who menstruates" - or the Bristol Council's new preferred term "people with ovaries" - or can you?

I think they're equally bad to be honest.
One implies that women are unmentionable, and the other that we're just a state of mind.