Mick Hartley

Transphobic dog whistles? According to the Ministry of Justice, that would includes phrases like "adult human female" and "same sex attraction".

From the Telegraph:

Staff at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have been told they should not use the terms “gender critical” and “protecting women and girls” in order to be trans allies, The Telegraph can disclose.

Thousands of officials were emailed for “transgender awareness week” and told it was “vital that we keep scaremongering and misinformation at bay”, with trans hate crimes up 56 per cent in a year.

The email, marked “official sensitive” and sent this month through the HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) diversity and inclusion team, has been leaked to The Telegraph.

In order to “be an active ally”, staff were given a glossary titled “recognising transphobic coded language”, which contained 35 everyday phrases that it claimed were “turning what would be considered overt discrimination into covert behaviour”.

The list of “coded language” includes the phrase “gender critical”, which is used to refer to campaigners who believe biological sex is binary and immutable.

However, the document claims it is a “self-selected label to denote holding anti-trans views, it’s a term used to make anti-trans discrimination sound palatable or a respectable opinion” and warns staff to look out for social media accounts that hold this view.

Also listed is “protect women’s spaces/protecting women and girls”, which it says “relies on equating trans women with being predatory men, to play on unfounded fears and convince people that supporting trans inclusion threatens their safety”.

The dossier claims that this “dog-whistle” relies on “selective information” including the case of Karen White, a rapist jailed for life in 2018 after attacking women in female prisons, as well as five sexual assaults by trans prisoners in female prisons over a decade.

So…what? Was Karen White – and the others – some kind of made-up fantasy? The message would seem to be: ignore the facts and stick to the ideology. Facts are transphobic.

Some staff inside the Government have expressed disquiet. An MoJ staff member told The Telegraph: “When I first read the attachment in the email, I could not quite believe it – the worst thing was that I was unable to raise it safely at work for fear of being labelled a transphobe.

“It came across as very aggressive and antagonistic towards anyone who believes in biological reality. I feel upset and powerless.”

A second MoJ source told The Telegraph: “Nonsense like this undermines decent progress on creating a genuinely fair and respectful environment in prisons.”

The list of words also flags “adult human female”, a phrase that it claims “manipulates people into supporting bigotry while creating hostility towards trans people and their allies”.

The document goes on to say “same-sex attracted” is a “coded term refusing to recognise trans women as women and trans men as men” and aims “to cause division among the LGBT+ community, by claiming attraction is solely based on genitalia”.

It also takes objection to the campaigners stating “sex is real/immutable” because sex “isn’t rigidly binary as there are many variations”, including intersex.

The list even says the word “transwoman”, which it claims is an attempt to “other trans people” by removing the space between adjective and noun in the term “trans woman”, thus “placing them in a separate category as a whole separate noun”.

The leaked document has come under attack from women’s rights campaigners.

Maya Forstater, executive director of the sex-based rights group Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “It is chilling that an official MoJ staff group email is telling civil servants to view ordinary language as transphobic. This is likely to lead to harassment and bullying of anyone who challenges gender-ideology-based policies in prisons and the justice system.

“It is telling staff that any critical thinking in regards to this ideology is offensive. This both creates a hostile environment for staff who don’t buy into gender ideology, and makes it impossible for them to speak clearly and honestly about prisoners, when undertaking risk assessments, and to protect prisoners.”

In effect, then, not only is normal language transphobic, but so too is science. Whoops, your postmodernism is showing. Someone's been reading Judith Butler….