Mick Hartley

After gender-critical social worker Rachel Meade's court victory this week – from the Times:

Social workers at Westminster city council have been scared to speak out over transgender issues, a whistleblower has said after an employee was discriminated against for holding gender-critical beliefs.

The local authority and many others across the country have been too quick to affirm the gender identity of vulnerable children, sometimes without consulting GPs or parents, a former child protection manager told The Times.

She said that staff felt unable to raise any safeguarding concerns due to their fear of being reported to Social Work England, the regulator, for harbouring “unacceptable” views.

Both Westminster city council and the professional body were found to have discriminated against Rachel Meade, a social worker, this week after she was suspended for sharing gender-critical opinions on Facebook….

“There don’t tend to be conversations within the workforce about what’s happening to children and the impact on child safeguarding that this ideology is having,” the social worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.

“When I raised worries about the speed at which children were getting their gender identity affirmed, I was quietened quite quickly. So I knew it wasn’t a safe environment to raise worries about safeguarding for children.”

Pleas to “slow down”, and to consider that the small number of trans-identifying children they were dealing with were in vulnerable situations, were said to have been dismissed by a “biased” council boss.

“These things would happen in isolation, so children’s services would be happy to go ahead with changing the name of a young person and encouraging the parents to change the name without there being any input from healthcare,” she added.

“So the GP might not be aware of it. There would be no referral to gender identity services. This was done in isolation.”

The council denies that healthcare and psychiatric experts were not consulted in what it described as “complex” issues around children.

However, the source said that while she worked for Westminster its investigating manager, Helen Farrell, had been uncompromising on the issue.

“Helen was very clear that we were a progressive organisation and we should be affirming trans identities as soon as they were raised”, she said. “I felt like Helen had a personal view. I would be very, very, very carefully saying things along the lines of: ‘Can we just slow down? What do we think of the view of getting a GP?’”

Farrell, the interim director of family services, was repeatedly named in Meade’s employment tribunal judgment, which described her as holding “bias” and said she wrote a “hostile” report of Meade’s conduct.

Are we surprised about this? No, we are not. The battle here may have been won, but the war, clearly, is far from over.