Trans guidance for civil servants must stay secret, ministers say

[IwantToRetire]

Ministers have refused to publish transgender guidance for civil servants, raising concerns about whether the rules respect women’s rights.

The rules about <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/vIObJ/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/03/civil-servants-defy-official-trans-guidance/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">how transgender civil servants should be treated at work were sent to government departments in May.

But the Cabinet Office refused to share the draft policy with The Telegraph because “ministers and officials may not feel comfortable sharing their views”.

This decision not to publish the guidance has raised concerns that it may not respect women’s rights, with Claire Coutinho, the shadow minister for women and equalities, accusing Labour of “running scared of scrutiny”.

Full article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/18/trans-guidance-civil-servants-stay-secret-ministers-say/ and at https://archive.is/vIObJ

They always do.

Sure some people feels unsafe around trans people - partly because anti trans activists keep scaremongering and creating fear. Some people are scared of people from other races or religions - we call those people racists or, for example, islamphoic. Experiencing fear doesn’t make something true, although of course it’s horrible to feel.

I’m sorry someone thinks I’m flouncing. I’m just being realistic - none of us are going to change our minds, and I’m not going to reply any more. I dont have de-radicalisation training after all!

You haven;t bothered reading anything anyone has written have you?

Do you understand how insulting it is to pretend you think women are just scared of difference?

I am scared, yes.

But not of the TW in the ladies loo especially.

I am scared of an ideology that seeks to redefine womanhood as a personality trait. That seeks to disconnect and obscure the reality of the female body and the social and physical consequences that come with it from the existence of woman-only spaces and resources.

I find the army of people who seem to think inserting men into all thing women because those men are believed to think in womanny ways as terrifying as I do the reactionary right wing that would force women back to the home and the kitchen.

Both groups see female live experiences as subservient to male. Both groups see female people as resources for their taking. Both groups seek to deny us our own existence defined on our own terms.

The TW in the ladies loo is just a symptom of the deeper threat to female people. And that is why it matters to call this out even when said TW probably isn't going to do anything openly problematic.

Either women are female, or we are a mixed sex group and female people lose our legal, social and cultural name and history. It really is that simple.

This is what you are really supporting when you agree some men are so like women we might as well pretend they actually are.

Are you honest enough to admit it?

Men are the risk, whether they say they are men or not.

Can you at least explain how a man changes into a woman and why the risk factors change?

The only ones who tried to radicalise me where the trans and TRAs.

"No, we don't talk about This:"

"No, you're not allowed to say That."

Open discussion is not an attempt to radicalise anyone, quite the contrary. Radicalisation cannot stand open discussions.

It shocks me to hear the civil service is very happy to break the law when it comes to treatment of its female employees.

Given the unions are unwilling to support women too, maybe women working in the civil service should coordinate some sickness absence due stress?

💯

Why do you think it is 'radical' for women to want their legal rights to single sex spaces supported?

Fuck!

People who have legitimate reasons to fear male people, have just been aligned with racists and Islamophobic people.

Did you even read back what you wrote?

So female people who legitimately want single sex provisions to exclude all male people are just bigots in your opinion, the equivalent of racists and islamophobes. Thank you for explaining.

What you have now shown though is that you cannot distinguish between illegitimate discrimination and legitimate discrimination. It absolutely would be illegitimate discrimination and would be racist and Islamophobic to exclude female people from single sex provisions based on their race and religion.

It is LEGITIMATE discrimination to exclude all male people above the age of about 8 years old from female single sex provisions.

Male people remain male people even if they belief they are female people. For the risk assessment needed to uphold strong safeguarding principles to protect female people, any group of male people would have to be proven to have the same rate of risk of harming female people as the general female populaton or lower. This cannot be proven for male people at any stage of transition. Quite the opposite, in fact. That group of male people in the UK have been shown to commit sex crimes at least at the same rate as the general male population.

Safeguarding principle for publicly accessible provisions work on a blanket policy. In this case, ALL male people are excluded.

This is also a discussion about legitimate and illegitimate discrimination. To allow any male group of people to access female single sex provisions and not others would be considered more illegitimate discrimination.

No fucking way are female people who wish to have female single sex provisions like racists and Islamophobes.

“I didn’t have de-radicalisation training after all!”

I think in light of what you have posted, it is you who is radicalised.

I’m not scared of “trans people”, it’s men I’m extremely wary of. As a survivor of male violence that’s a rational response. I don’t want a group of men to use female only spaces because that threatens my safety, and violates my privacy and dignity, and disregards my lack of consent.

Now I know you don’t have any reasoned arguments for why I should feel differently because I’m sure I’d have heard one by now and in a decade I’m yet to do so, but you should really be honest that you’re not morally superior, you just think your luxury belief and your friends are more important than other women and girls. Judge away. I’m judging right back.

As someone who's part of an "ethnic minority", I find this special flavour of force-teaming from transactivists so annoying and bigoted. Last time I checked, BAME or religious people do not commit over 90% of sex crimes, no race does, but men do. And that's why they need to stay out of female only spaces and services. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Wind your neck in and stop trying to paint women's rights as racism, it's so pathetic and transparent.

And we are back with the direct comparisons of women wanting single sex provisions as framing traumatised women as racists.

Didn’t we see Wadhwa do the same thing? And cause female rape victims a great deal of distress?

“I also think anyone who genuinely cares about women’s safety has bigger fish to fry.”

However, the post shows again that statement above has again been directly contradicted by the poster who made it. And yet, they believe that they have some kind of moral superiority.

When posters make those completely illogical comparisons, I don’t believe they think about it deeply. I think that most read it once and thought it was a great reasoned rebuttal for single sex provisions.

The accusations of bubbles, radicalisation and echo chambers always look completely absurd when posters use these tropish soundbites to reply.

Open discussion is not an attempt to radicalise anyone, quite the contrary. Radicalisation cannot stand open discussions.

Quite. The tell is when they fail to engage with the information and arguments put to them, and instead fall back on scolding, judging, and name-calling.

If they had a reasonable response or counter arguments, we would hear it. But they never do.

And privilege or self-interest are often at the bottom of it. Either the selfish demands of a TIM who just wants in on women’s spaces for his own gratification and fuck the safety, privilege and rights of actual women. Or women who are so embarrassingly blind to how enormously privileged they are that they can whine about never personally feeling unsafe in a toilet with a trans woman, without ever once stopping to imagine the fear and danger a woman in a prison might feel if she were banged up for 23 hours a day in a cell with a male rapist who calls himself a woman.

The sheer ignorance, unrecognised privilege, and selfishness is breathtaking.

If they had any self-awareness at all, they’d be cringing at themselves. But the self-righteousness is so intoxicating that it becomes though-terminating.

Wait are you really telling women that can’t say they feel unsafe around men? Really?!

That is how that statement of their’s extrapolates out. Of course, there will be attempts to deny it but essentially, it is commentary such as ‘women feeling unsafe in the presence of male people in situations where they expect to be only in the presence of female people, because those male people believe they are not male people when they objectively is the same as racism and Islamophobia’.

It is flawed thinking on multiple levels but we have seen academics and members of parliament use such fucked up rhetoric. All because they conflate illegitimate discrimination with legitimate discrimination. They use illegitimate to delegitimise legitimate discrimination.

Of course, let’s flip this around ….

“Experiencing fear doesn’t make something true, although of course it’s horrible to feel.”

Why then do a group of male people claim to need to use the female single sex provisions based on their safety and wellbeing?

If female people can be dismissed and told to suck up their ‘fear’, why haven’t the group of male people with transgender identities been told this ?

Do the people making these flawed arguments ever think their arguments through?

Of course, male people who feel unsafe should be listened too and steps taken to address that issue if it is found to be based on reality and logic and /or evidence. If additional provisions need to be created, that should happen. If a campaign is created to make all male single sex provisions safe for all male people, that also needs to happen.

It was never appropriate for male people to use female single sex provisions. It doesn’t matter how long they have used them, they should never have been there.

So transwomen claiming fear of using the mens, doesn't make it true, they're just being bigoted? Why are you fretting about them then?

And does this work the other way, just because you've never felt unsafe, it doesn't mean you haven't been?

Check your privilege, Missy!

The vast majority of women don’t share it. And they don’t want to share confined spaces with men, regardless of how well they do their hair and makeup.

Going back to the civil service, and the reminders of discipline over pronoun confusion…

My memory isn’t great. I don’t always remember names, and indeed faces. Expecting me to remember pronouns on a case by case basis is somewhat unrealistic.

So I’m really left with no choice but to use the standard ones we've always used.

You can try and discipline me for it, but given my menopause and fibromyalgia, it will make sod all impact on my ability to remember individualised pronouns.

I work in an arena of the CS where I can state I have seen that prisoners are also required to respect pronouns and refer to people claiming to have a trans identity as their chosen name / gender identity etc whether they are staff or prisoners.

Grown adult men in men's / women in women's prison, both staff and prisoners, are literally being indoctrinated into accepting all this and challenging the requirements would be very difficult. Career ending for staff, complicated for prisoners.

Refusal by prisoners to cooperate with this leads to interventions on this being recorded on their prison records. I'm unclear on whether this is capable of having an impact on their Parole but would be interested to know from staff who understand that side of the business better.

The more accurate figure is men commit 99% of sex crimes. You don't need any other reason to exclude all males from spaces where women are vulnerable. The idea that a sacred caste of men exists to whom this doesn't apply would need some extraordinary evidence. Please post it @Tinycatclub

Oh dear… so why are you on this site of it’s such a hotbed of bigotry? Research?

This is all such garbage. No or virtually no women are scared of transmen AT ALL! In fact I’d suspect they’d march alongside them in support of repeal of the law that stops them inheriting titles and estates upon securing a GRC as male. Funny that the legislature envisaged that one type of trans person would ‘pretend’ to be a different gender for gain….

What women - and gender critical women in particular are afraid of is MEN, however they identify. Yes call them misandrists if you wish, but they’re not transphobic!!

We need to bang this drum as often as we can. Naturally TRAs ignore this as it’s far harder to persuade even the thick, wet and credulous that women afraid - usually for good reason- of males in spaces where they are vulnerable - are unreasonable or evil.

An insightful comment from Alex Massey this weekend, in an article that summarises recent events. The article is primarily in response to Claire Methven O’Brien‘s coming court case.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/bcf537da-8153-41be-8c3b-94cc284de538?shareToken=91a445d484b9a342ec0c9f3bdce5f9b2

“A terrible amount of time and energy has been wasted attempting to note that “both sides” are to blame for this horribly “toxic” debate. Focusing on this has always been the hallmark of pusillanimous commentary and political leadership. For in reality the two sides are very different. One promulgates a revolutionary reinterpretation of material reality; the other, more prosaically, suggests that public bodies and other interested parties should follow the law. Anyone drawing a false equivalence between these positions is peddling a counterfeit version of history.”

A great reminder of the lack of symmetry of the ‘both sides’ accusations.