Mick Hartley

A Times report today:

Civil servants are being told in equality training that it is impossible to define a woman and the phrase “adult human female” can be transphobic.

A:gender, a network supporting trans and intersex staff across government, gives lectures to thousands of civil servants each year. Videos obtained by The Times show a course leader saying a woman or female cannot be defined and there is “no conflict” between women’s rights and transgender rights.

She insists that calling someone an “adult human female” — the dictionary definition of a woman — is bigoted and claims that “transphobia is increasingly presented as feminism”. That appeared to be veiled criticism of prominent feminists including JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author.

Well – not just JK Rowling of course, but she's inevitably the name that gets trundled out on these occasions. The overwhelming majority of women, whether "prominent feminists" or not,  feel the same.

Civil servants fear that the voluntary courses clash with the Equality Act and breach the civil service code, which requires them to act with impartiality.

After the course, a person who did not want to be named said: “I thought it was propaganda. It’s the promotion of one view — how to think about gender and gender identity — which is not supported by legislation or common sense.

“What horrified me so much is that for anyone at the heart of the civil service interested in supporting transgender people, this is the education they are getting. Civil servants are then implementing legislation and government directives. They sign up for these courses and get told what to think.

“It is definitely against the civil service code, which says we should be dispassionately following the law and government directives without any concern for our own opinions. It’s the corruption of what should be an impartial body.”

In the videos, the presenter, who describes herself as intersex, says that while sex is randomly “assigned at birth” there is a “biological component to gender identity” which makes it innate. She uses a “genderbread” man to make her points. She claims that transphobic hate crime has skyrocketed by 800 per cent in the past nine years, and says gender identity is a fluid sliding scale of “woman-ness” and “man-ness”.

She says gender is “something you are born with” and is “no more a choice than your height, your ethnicity, your sex”, and that referring to someone as a “transwoman”, using one word instead of “trans woman”, on purpose is equivalent to racism because it “others” them.

She sounds deeply confused, especially in the matter of the distinction between sex and gender. But then much of the trans debate is fueled by the confusion between sex and gender. It's particularly unfortunate, then, that she's passing her confusion on to civil servants – and being allowed to pass on her confusion to civil servants.

Janice Turner has some thoughts – Civil servants are being fed gender drivel:

Here are some facts I learnt by watching an “inclusion workshop” for civil servants. A brain in a jar “knows” if it is male or female and, if transplanted into the “wrong” body, would exhibit distress. This country has no legal sex-based rights. It is impossible to define what “woman” or even “female” means. There is zero conflict between women’s rights and trans rights, so beware colleagues asking too many questions; they’re probably bigots.

A:gender, “a network supporting all trans and intersex staff across government”, trains thousands of civil servants annually, from the NHS to the Cabinet Office, yet it forbids its presentations being recorded. Having endured 90 minutes of anti-scientific, legally fallacious twaddle, I can see why it avoids scrutiny.

Concerned women civil servants secretly taped and sent it to me, as they believe this “training” violates central principles of the civil service code: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. In particular it breaks the rule that they cannot frustrate policies once decisions are taken “by declining to take, or abstaining from, action which flows from these decisions”. It is their job to implement decisions, not to undermine them.

This A:gender session is conducted by Emma, who tells us she is intersex, having a vagina and uterus but XY chromosomes. She claims that as many people are intersex — 1.7 per cent — as have green eyes. The more precise figure is about 0.018 per cent. But intersex here is deployed to muddy the very idea that human sex is binary.

Indeed, the difference between sex (biology) and gender (a social construct) seems to confuse Emma. “You’d look at my nails and make-up and realise I am female,” she says. We are asked to position ourselves on spectrums of “woman-ness” and “man-ness” and told if some days we wake feeling more manly or womanly than others, we may be “gender fluid”….

This might just be tiresome gender woo-woo if it wasn’t being taught as fact to people who write and implement the small print of public equality guidance. Emma warns that defining a woman as an “adult human female” is a transphobic dogwhistle, equivalent to antisemitism. She claims that sex-based rights, which feminists speak of defending, don’t even exist. “We have equal rights!” she cries.

Although a civil servant herself, Emma seems unfamiliar with the 2010 Equality Act in which “sex” (explicitly defined as male or female) is a protected characteristic, and single-sex spaces are allowed if they are a “proportionate means to achieve a legitimate end”. Female sports, domestic violence refuges or changing rooms are among our sex-based rights. But Emma isn’t fussed about exact wording: “gender identity” is not a protected characteristic in law, but she tells us to think like it is.

Unfortunately, this matters. These people have influence:

Women civil servants say they are scared to speak up for fear of bullying and suffering professionally. Their union, the FDA, won’t protect them. It has passed a conference motion stating there should be “boundaries” on gender-critical speech, while banning “trans-exclusionary language”, which could just mean insisting that NHS cervical smear guidance retains the word “woman”.

So much government policy reveals civil servants have absorbed the A:gender view that “gender identity” always trumps sex, regardless of the impact on women. The NHS Annex B guidance tells hospitals anyone can ask to be put in an opposite sex ward, and compares women who feel unsafe housed with male-bodied patients to racists. The Ministry of Justice says female prison officers must (barring “genuine religious or cultural reasons”) search any prisoner who identifies as a woman. The Office for National Statistics removed the sex question from the census, which was overturned in court. If civil service training so flagrantly breaches its own ethical code, no wonder public servants don’t follow the law.