Mick Hartley

Maya Forstater in the Telegraph – The Civil Service’s call for a trans equality chief proves the Blob still hasn’t accepted reality.

So the confusion continues. The Civil Service is advertising for a senior official to “lead on trans equality”. The policy manager in the Office for Equality and Opportunity – part of the Cabinet Office – will focus on the “implications” of the Supreme Court judgment that ruled that the term “women” in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.

Effectively then, the Cabinet Office is saying it does not know how to follow the law. In a letter to my charity, the department’s permanent secretary said it will not withdraw its model policy on “gender identity” in the workplace while it is under review in the wake of last year’s ruling.

And Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, continues to sit on guidance written by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that would force the Civil Service and every other public body, as well as businesses, to protect women-only spaces. The practical answer of the Supreme Court’s conclusion is obvious: wherever facilities and services are provided separately for men and women, that means sex – not gender identity.

The new job advert points to a wholly flawed approach. Civil servants should not be insider-advocates for interest groups, but rather impartial professionals who deal with public affairs fairly, efficiently, with integrity and according to the law. That is, after all, what we pay them for.

Over the past 15 years the Civil Service has got itself mired in a scarcely believable muddle that has led to a shocking corruption of public service values. It all started with words. “Man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, “she” and “he” were said to be offensive if used in the time-honoured fashion.

People were told to announce their pronouns at meetings. The NHS was to make an inventory of all patients’ intimate body parts and do away with accurate recording of anyone’s sex. People who declared themselves gender-fluid (crossdressers, in old money) were to be given two different security passes and allowed to use whichever facilities they liked. Everyone was to pretend they couldn’t tell whether someone was male or female.

This wasn’t just a bizarre and bewildering waste of time, effort and good sense. It caused real harm. Rapists were put in women’s prisons. Healthy children were put on sterilising medical pathways. And people with principles who refused to play along were bullied and harassed at work.

All of this should have come to an end on April 16 2025, when the Supreme Court made its elegant and robust ruling of the bleeding obvious. The law protects transsexuals from being harassed and discriminated out of public life – but doesn’t offer wish-fulfilment or perform magic. Legislation cannot change people’s sex. And laws that relate to the sexes rely on a coherent understanding of reality. Being a woman is not a matter of wearing women’s clothing or using she/her pronouns. Sex is real, and it matters.

Instead of taking the opportunity for a return to common sense, the Government has allowed the Civil Service to continue to run this circus through Whitehall.…

The Supreme Court judgment should have led to reflection about what went wrong. How did the entire state apparatus – the Civil Service, regulators, the Scottish and Welsh governments, police forces, NHS trusts and local authorities – get the law wrong and force public servants into this dangerous pantomime? Surely they should now apologise to the ordinary men, women and children whose rights they have trampled on? What happened to the principles of honesty, integrity and objectivity?

Instead, more people are being hired into partisan roles in the department that was the chief cheerleader for gender ideology in the Civil Service. This is no way to stop the wasteful, harmful madness. The harm, the costs and the court cases will keep coming until someone at the centre of government finds their integrity and the courage to say “no more”.

Are the government and Civil Service procrastinating because they’re scared of the trans lobby? Or do they really believe in gender ideology, but don’t have the courage to come out and say so? Either way it’s clear that those of us who celebrated the Supreme Court ruling last year were being way too optimistic.