My neglectful council is fixated on pronouns while my family lives in disrepair

[IwantToRetire]

... for residents in Wandsworth council housing, where roofs leak, lifts break and bins overflow, focusing on fringe gender views when basic services are falling short feels misplaced.

Chris Georgiou, 36, has lived in Wandsworth, south-west London, her whole life and moved to the Winstanley estate with her two daughters three years ago. “People here don’t care about that,” the teaching assistant says of the pronoun guidance. “It’s not time or money that should be spent.” ...

From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/22/taxpayers-money-on-bin-collections-not-pronouns/

Can also be read at https://archive.is/poUir

I do agree that many areas are in chronic disrepair, but realistically, how many hours in the day can be spent pondering pronouns? The headline is giving Reform vibes.

Mine is similar. A consultation on housing allocation asking about 'Gender ID' and to add insult to injury they didn't cover all the 'protected characteristics.

They left out 'Maternity'.

Maybe if everyone stopped fixating on trans people being able to pee in peace, councils would be free to focus on their actual jobs.

or maybe even, they’re not actually fixated at all, and a very small team who aren’t related to fixing housing issues at all, have developed some guidance on how to include everyone (probably to try to help avoid getting dragged through tribunals), and the right wing press have jumped on it for something to further ostracise a minority community for, and you fell for it and want other people to share in your outrage.

maybe.

Yes OP I agree. If they weren’t paying salaries for DEI junk roles, and weren’t spaffing money up the wall on rainbow zebra crossings and weird symbols in traffic lights, they could spend that money on more important things that actually matter. It reminds me of Russia immediately pre-revolution or France’s “let them eat cake” but people obviously rush to defend their own jobs, don’t they? Especially when it’s a cushy number with no real point to it.

My DSIL used to work in a DEI office in the public sector and she quit after a year because it was the biggest load of crap, not at all focused on D, E or I, and a toxic bitchy environment of people trying to outdo each other with batshit ideas to spend their substantial budget, some of which were enacted with much fanfare and self-congratulation. They focused excessively on gender because it was fairly easy to implement “what gender ID are you” questions and erasure of the word “woman” everywhere on a website, not for any other reason.

There’s a reason no country in the world has ‘DEI officer’ on their skills shortage lists.

Exactly . If trans people stopped demanding access to spaces they are not entitled to, and demanding language and categories be changed or they’ll be upset, maybe councils could concentrate on actually providing the services they’re supposed to.

Councils don't have 'DEI' roles, as Reform have discovered. All Reform councils are still putting up council tax to the max despite claiming making this claim and that getting rid of them would result in tax cuts.

Equality of opportunity is everyone's responsibility, especially in the public sector.

What's your point? A Gov which isn't far right wing won't help you when you're in need?

You could try voting Reform and you'll have £75,000 worth of flags around your town:

www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdr3npe33do

Yes, it's all the fault of trans people.

🙄

The dei dept has their budget and the maintenance dept has their budget, which will be much larger. Councils have been seriously strapped for cash since Cameron changed the funding system.
What would really make a financial difference is if they'd stop issuing contracts to shit companies for long time spans, in some instances a decade. And instead issue competitive shorter contracts and if those companies don't measure up, get another one in.
Having said that, I don't think any organisation should insist any staff use a pronoun if they don't want to. Making it voluntary would show us how many people care about them.

Maybe not.

allowing men to urinate “in peace” in female spaces is a betrayal of everything. Literal truth, civil society, equality, everything.

no tribunal in the UK cares if pronoun nonsense has been liked at and a vast majority of the country and the world find it offensive.

get back in your box, all of you, and don’t come out again.

quite a lot plainly is.

it’s quite easy to prove that Trump won a second election because of them for example.

What absolute fucking nonsense 🙄

On here literally everything is the fault of either trans people or any individual or org who supports trans people.

If the President of one of the top 3 most powerful countries in the world only won because of trans people then damn these trans people must hold a lot of power.

no. They just fuck a lot of people off.

He didn't, though being anti DEI departments probably as with Reform gains some support. Closed racists can say they are against it as seemingly a waste of money or not needed anymore, it is an alternative to being anti-migration as a proxy for being racist.

I don't think transgender issues are much in many people's minds.

I was going to say the same. The council in my area can barely afford to deliver on their statutory obligations, let alone having a dedicated DEI officer. I would assume that some of the HR roles have it within their job description.

Demonstrably true that Biden / Harris support of gender nonsense and Trumps position on sex realism flipped a state to Trump and won him re election.

even the most authoritarian of websites (I don’t use left wing any more) know it. https://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2024/11/trump-victory-anti-transgender-ads/

Blaming pronouns for poor council services is utter tripe. Reform took over councils with the promise that they would cut “DEI” waste and found that made sod all difference. They themselves are raising council tax and implementing further service cuts.
And why are councils financially screwed?
Under Tory austerity in the 2010s, local councils’ funding from central government was cut by a massive 46%. So they put up council taxes, sold off assets and cut things like libraries and bin collections so they could keep statutory services like social care above water. Funding’s gone up a bit since Covid, but if anyone’s to blame for some councils going bankrupt it’s Cameron and Osborne, not councillors overspending on ‘woke’.

Pleeeeeaaaassseee will someone tell my teenage sons that their use of our family bathroom is a BETRAYAL OF LITERAL TRUTH AND EVERYTHING 😂😂😂

also, you literally use pronouns every single day, only those with little to do are as offended by common language as you seem to be

honestly do you ever actually hear how ridiculous you sound?

Literally just a damning indictment of the US’s education system and overall IQ level though, isn’t it?

Literally just an inditement of authoritarian purity spirals.

And a lac of understanding of what individualism is and why, of all places, the USA values it more than anything.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that maybe 1-2% of Councils budgets are spent on worthless DEI initiatives. Brighton for example far more.

What a load of trash that article is. Trying to link the poor condition of council housing with an internal council document about pronouns is Daily Mail level of "journalism".