Mick Hartley

Remember the Genderbread Person? Civil servants, we learned, are being given presentations on trans inclusivity:

The gingerbread-man-style diagram is in use across government departments to illustrate gender identity, sexual attraction and biological sex as sitting on a spectrum of zero to 100.

New trans-inclusion workshops are being run by a gender, trans and intersex group that has expanded from the Home Office to become a cross-government membership network.

It says it wants officials to go beyond current equality legislation and use “appropriate language/names/pronouns” and “challenge inappropriate language or behaviours”.

The Genderbread Person was shown in a video call session for around 180 civil servants in February, seen by The Telegraph and organised between a:gender and the Civil Service Race Forum. The graphic has also been displayed in other major government departments in diversity meetings.

The revelation comes as public bodies have partnered with Global Butterflies, a little-known trans lobby group, which has also used the genderbread graphic in its guidance and urges employers to remove all gendered language from their policies.

Caroline Ffiske at The Critic takes a look at Global Butterflies. It's not easy, though: since they made the news a couple of weeks back, their website has disappeared, and many gender-critical commentators have found they've been blocked on Twiiter:

Global Butterflies has worked at the heart of our democracy — for the House of Commons, the Government Legal Department, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. Private sector clients include insurers, banks, law-firms and management consultancies: Lloyds of London, Unilever, Vodafone, Accenture… With such reputable clients, surely Global Butterflies exists to promote tolerance and inclusion? Why the twitter blocks? Why the disappeared website? Why the sceptical reporting from the mainstream press?

It turns out that Global Butterflies aspires to change the world — but not via open debate, not by bringing people along, not by open democratic processes. Instead they aim to undermine science, change language, remove women’s single sex spaces and opportunities, and eliminate the social role of the sex binary.

In partnership with Lloyds of London in 2019, Global Butterflies has developed a document called “A guide to trans and non-binary inclusion”. This extraordinary document reveals the teeny little (only four staff) Global Butterflies is pushing for a new social order. The scale and implications of the project make the document worth reading closely.

The introduction from Lloyds’ “Global Diversity and Inclusion Manager” talks about “non-binary” individuals, as if this concept were well-established rather than invented yesterday. It’s part of a growing trend: “Where once trans and non-binary people were less visible, more and more people are choosing new ways to express their gender identity.”

Shouldn’t we subject a growing trend to scrutiny: scientific, philosophic, the implications for wider society? No — we must be swept along in support: “What they need are understanding and active support from their employer, their team and their colleagues… The overall message of this guide is: be flexible, listen hard and provide your colleagues with allies who will support them all the way.” Right!

If you have any doubts, swallow them now because… “our hope is to help organisations adopt a zero-tolerance approach to transphobic behaviour and attitudes”.

Global Butterflies says, “recent data from the USA states that 12 per cent of the millennial generation no longer see gender as a fixed binary.” It predicts, “Over the next 10 years people who identify as non-binary, could rise by 12-20 per cent.”

The GenderBread Person appears and it’s awful. Gender identity is apparently your “innate internal programming”. This is surprising for a concept which most of the world’s scientific and medical community hadn’t heard of last week. “If your body is your hardware, this is your software.”

What's astonishing about all this – apart from the eagerness of organisations like Lloyd's of London and the Civil Service to embrace this nonsense – is the ambition. These people want to change the world.

Still hoping that this might be guidance for rare occasions, involving small numbers of people in need of support and kindness? No — this is a wholesale re-ordering of our social world. Global Butterflies recommends that firms “build it in, don’t bolt it on”:

• • How much unnecessary gendered language do you use? Could you strip this back?
  • Are your recruitment processes gender neutral?
  • Do you provide All Gender facilities? …
  • Do you use non-binary faces in your marketing materials and website?
  • Do you have visible trans/non-binary role models?
  • Do you celebrate one of the trans calendar events?
  • Do you have space for two genders only on your application forms?

…The Lloyds document is a 30 page plan for the re-organisation of our understanding of ourselves and our social world. Read the document looking for the words male, female, man, woman. You’ll find them once or twice, dismissed as a tendency, no more than a feeling. We’re unsexed now, existing on a spectrum, unanchored from the old reactionary reality. Biological science is binned. Evolved-over-millennia language is outdated. Protected spaces for women — not worth a mention.

Stonewall may be on the way out, but – in good whack-a mole tradition – another organisation pushing gender ideology seems to be rising up in its place.