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

I'm afraid that looks very like a few parting insults AND a flounce! 😁If you do decide to "unflounce" again, we'll be happy to ask you the questions again, in case you've forgotten them.

My question is: If men are men, but trans-identified men are actually women, how do we tell which is which? Is it just how they dress? Because we've heard from a lot of posters here that "trans just is" and people are whoever they say they are.

One answer I received yesterday was "No, I can't look inside someone's head and tell you whether they're genuinely transgender or lying. Neither can you." So I'm confused. Perhaps you know how we can tell?

Because obviously the men who are actually women need to have access to female spaces. So, of course, we'd need to know a way to tell who is who.

Thanks in advance!

Tosh. Obvious tosh.

For this to be true, it would have to be 'like racism' (and other very silly false equivalences) for men and women to have separate sex based provisions as normal and standard.

It is not. It's necessary, it's normal.

This is a requirement that women pretend a man is not a man when he says so, and indulge a whole lot of emoting about how he is afraid and at risk from men in his sex based space while wholly disapparating the fears and risks of women as entirely stupid, cruel and unreasonable. On a sexed basis.

This is as ridiculous as calling homosexual people 'sexual racists' for not wanting straight sex.

Look, if you're delighted as a woman to undress with men with gender identities, you can take your opinions and go and have a lovely time with them in the mixed sex provisions, no one is stopping you. Make your choices, express yourself. Your problem is, let's be honest, that women have rights that mean they have choices and inner selves and needs too, and that a small group of men find this a really inconvenient boundary to being able to use those non consenting women to their own agendas. That's the bit you'd like to stop. Those women getting away.

Well done! You're braver than me (and that's a good thing)

Some women are scared of men because of their experiences with men. 99% of sex offenders are male and virtually all women have had experiences of male sexual violation from groping through to rape. So tell me why women should accommodate men, often the worst of men who see women as a costume and a fetish, in their spaces?

disciplinary offence to deliberately call someone by the wrong pronouns etc

Is that even legal?

I suspect it would not stand up well in court. Particularly when compared to the not enforcing the actual legal protections of women, and the equality of treatment of different protected characteristics. But it looks like some poor woman is going to have to do the leg work on this to get that on a judgment.

After which there'll be another year of thinking and grumping and muttering while the clique determines how to continue to enforce male privilege and avoid permitting women their legal protections and equalities. Or until Farage comes into power because the electorate are so utterly fucked off with all this overprivileged idiocy and just sacks most of the civil service.

Has Tinycatclub definitely* *left this time?
Pity, because I was going to ask them how they square lecturing us about respect, and then calling this discussion a 'cesspit'.
One-way respect, it seems.

And since you think this is a cesspit, and you know you're never going to convince us or vice versa, may I very respectfully ask why you joined the discussion in the first place? It seems like an odd thing to do, all things considered.

I was nervous at first but then I thought that I'm not saying anything controversial and it's a Cabinet Office approved group so no one should be able to complain. Then again, this was before I heard of the DEFRA/SEEN tribunal! I'd probably remove it if I were emailing the only TW I have come across in work, so I guess I'm not that brave. Incidentally I recently requested access to a different Teams server so I could access a SEEN teams group, I didn't specify the group, just said it was to get access to a cross giv support group. The request happened to be picked up by the TW.

Bathrooms? Or toilets?

It shows us how transactivism has been driven from the USA and copied here.

How? It's just not a big deal to those not terminally online, doom scrolling away incessantly with another form of tds

A non story. Foi legislation has clear exemptions for the formulation of policy or to prevent prejudicing the effective conduct of public office. There's also a clear exemption where, if something is planned to be published, you don't have to release ahead of schedule just because someone asks.

The Telegraph is taking its readers for ignorant fools.

OMG LOL so hard I'm crying!!!!

Literally the only people who truly buy into this TWAW guff - not just as a polite pretence but the full bloodied actual replacement of body sex with mentail identity - are the terminally online!

There's a reason this stuff came to dominate Wikipedia and Tumblr first, and then later Facebook, Reddit and all the special interest fora ... it's because the terminally online people who tend to be mods can control the discourse and ban things they do not like.

And it's obvious why it took hold there first as well - a virtual world of avatars, anonymity and mediated self-described identity allows people to go very deep into a fantasy life unchallenged by the demands of actual physical reality and by how other peple really see and react to them.

It's not a coincidence there are a disproportinate number of trans identifying men in tech.

But y'know, thanks again for proving you consider the reality of female existence a non-material detail.

Pleasure to remind you there is more than one way to view that reality.

Really? Do explain to me what "view of reality" you have that makes the material fact of female bodies interchangeable with a subset of male ones becaise of something in those men's minds.

And please, do explain to me the "view of reality" that explains why it is reasonable that the female half of humanity doesn't need legal, social or cultural recognition, or even its own unique name? Why the differences between the half of the human race that has the type of body that bears children and the half that doesn't are less deserving of recognition than the differences between people who live on different banks of the Mersey?

After all, it's not like our bodies stop existing or havng consequences for us just because we aren't allowed to name them, nor will the history of abuse, exploitation, objectification and marginalisation of the female body somehow not have happened after all if we no longer acknowldge it. So I'm super super interested to have you explain to me why it doesn't actually matter at all, certainly not as much as the feeling inside a man's mind that he is the same as people with female bodies despite non of this ever applying to him.

Really excited to hear your thoughts.

Bonus points if you can find a way to answer without looking cringingly sexist!

The guidance is to ask people to use toilets and spaces appropriate for biological sex but they will not actively enforce it,

I do not think that a policy that refuses to take action to address an unlawful failure to provide single sex toilets would survive a judicial review. You cannot have a policy of de-facto opting out of a statutory requirement because you claim on your own say-so to be unable to meet that requirement.

I do not think that a policy that refuses to take action to address an unlawful failure to provide single sex toilets would survive a judicial review. You cannot have a policy of de-facto opting out of a statutory requirement because you claim on your own say-so to be unable to meet that requirement.

It wouldnt work with H&S. Providing hard hats isnt enough, the culture needs to be one of compliance.

And you can review that reality your way to your hearts content, with men, in mixed sex and gender neutral spaces. Have a lovely time.

Why do you wish to force non consenting women to do it?

Why do you see those women's consent and voices of so little value? And why do you feel they should be given no choice or escape from having their body used for the validation of a man who may be a man with boundary issues and no consent or care for women at best, and a rapist at worst?

What is with this? Is it an exciting thought for you or something, a distressed woman having no choice but to be used by a man?

Quite. I have face blindness, so half the time can't get further than 'the man by the window in the IT room', 'the woman chairing the meeting'.

At the last place I worked we had a non-binary man - had a beard, wore a men's suit. I couldn't have picked him out of a lineup of the other 30-something bearded men in the office, so how on earth could I remember which one of them was a 'they'?

Good luck taking that to a disciplinary. Preferred pronouns are a fact about another person I have no way of remembering. Whereas everyone knows their own sex, so has no excuse for using the wrong facilities.

More press coverage - just wish more people in the media would speak up.
At lease I am assuming its the same report and "not another one"!
https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/civil-staff-set-sanctioned-misgender-132200000.html