We all keep hoping that the recent legal decisions pushing back against gender ideology and DEI would have settled the matter, at least at government institutions.
But that is true neither in the United States nor in the United Kingdom, where bureaucrats are busy ignoring their legal duties to abide by court decisions and Executive Orders.
As usual, when a lefty says something like "Nobody is above the law" or appeals to longstanding norms, the definitions of what the laws are and what norms have existed are determined solely by the imagination of those people.
The longstanding norm that everybody calls a man "he" and a woman "she" was not a norm at all, but systemic oppression, while legal decisions protecting girls in women's sports can be ignored should they so choose.
DEI is banned? Just call it another name.
Second Amendment yet against confirmed by the Supreme Court? Just pass another unConstitutional law and make you defend your rights in years of court battles.
In the United Kingdom, women's rights advocates won a tremendous victory, in which the Supreme Court explicitly affirmed that biological sex, not imagined categories, is the legal standard determining women's rights. They answered the basic question that Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn't before the United States Senate: What is a woman?
Fifteen months on from the Supreme Court ruling, leaked Government documents suggest civil servants could still face disciplinary action for referring to colleagues by their biological sex.
Meanwhile, another government-commissioned report frames belief in biological reality as “misinformation” and recommends using psychological techniques to prevent supposedly false or “misleading” narratives from taking hold.
Last April’s Supreme Court clarified that the words man, woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to biological sex.
Requiring an employee to affirm a gender identity is, in principle, no different from an employer requiring an atheist to say they believe in God.
So what, exactly, was the Supreme Court ruling for?
My latest for the Telegraph (link below) ⬇️
Janet Murray in her Telegraph column is right to ask, "What was the point?" After all, the government bureaucrats have decided they can overrule the court, because they are the technocrats who really run things in our modern world.
according to leaked Cabinet Office guidance, civil servants may be punished for referring to a colleague by their biological sex rather than how they want to be identified.
The document – which sets out how transgender staff should be treated at work – acknowledges that transgender employees may not use single-sex facilities designated for the opposite sex, regardless of gender identity.
This reflects last year’s Supreme Court judgment, which confirmed that “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the equality act refer to biological sex.
Yet the guidance also states that referring to a colleague by the “wrong” pronouns could result in a formal sanction. Which means a manager could, conceivably, be disciplined, simply for reminding an employee of the facilities rule.
Gender-critical campaigners were delighted after the Supreme Court ruling last year
This feels like an extraordinary contradiction by Whitehall, a year after the ruling. What, exactly, was the Supreme Court judgment all for?
For someone with gender-critical beliefs – which are protected under the equality act – the requirement to address a male colleague as “she”, or to use they/them pronouns for a “non-binary” colleague whose biological sex is obvious, is not a matter of courtesy. It is a requirement to use language that affirms a belief they do not share.
It’s no different, in principle, from an atheist being ordered by their employer to say that God exists.
As you can see, the technocrats don't deny that the Supreme Court made a decision; they are just trying to narrow its meaning as far as legally possible, and to threaten "gender critical" employees with sanctions for not toeing the company line.
One of the most potentially harmful parts of the leaked guidance warns that “deliberate deadnaming or misgendering to deny, mock or invalidate a person’s trans identity is unacceptable and should be investigated as potential misconduct”.
But where might employers draw the line between an honest slip-up, a conscientious refusal, and deliberate mockery?
And what safeguards are there against vexatious complaints? After all, you have to be pretty self-important to insist that colleagues describe you as the opposite sex or as having no sex at all.
Wrongthink will be punished, and there are concrete examples of this. One university employee slipped up and was disciplined for saying the wrong words, and had to plead in court that they had a disability to avoid discipline.
I guess you can still pull out an intersectional oppression card to get some victim points.
All these efforts are aimed at bludgeoning people into asserting that what the Supreme Court ruled was wrong. Control the mind, control the actions.
But for those who hoped the Supreme Court ruling would restore some much-needed sanity to government departments, this is a depressing reminder that many institutions remain trapped with the shibboleths of gender ideology.
Nor is this isolated. A recent government-commissioned report framed belief in biological reality as “misinformation”. It urged the Government to use psychological techniques to prevent supposedly false or “misleading” narratives from taking hold.
The Government insists the report was independent and does not represent official policy. But it was commissioned to inform policy – and reveals the same troubling mindset that seeks to punish those who state biological reality.
"Misinformation," which, as we know, is punishable, up to and including imprisonment. The report suggests more gentle means of "persuasion," though, including psychological manipulation to shape what people think.
Anti-transgender views have been classed as “misinformation” in a government-commissioned report.
The study urges the Government to use psychology to prevent the spread of narratives it views as potentially “misleading”.
The tactics are recommended for use in schools and public communications to stop “false” ideas taking hold in society.
The 136-page report, by a group of seven academics and commissioned by the Government Office for Science, categorises “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives” as a type of “false and misleading information” seen in the UK.
In other words, time to double down on Newspeak. If you can control the language, you can manipulate the mind.
Very Critical Theory of them.
The study, from May 2026, was designed to inform government policy on “identifying and tackling harmful misinformation”.
It uses data compiled by EU-funded fact-checkers to identify 11 key categories of “false and misleading information”, backed up by a list of examples.
One of the categories included is defined as “anti-LGBTQ+ narratives, ‘gender ideology’ claims targeting schools and public institutions, Pride event misrepresentation and transgender athlete controversies”.
The examples – published alongside the report – include the case of Imane Khelif, the Olympic boxer who became embroiled in a row over biological sex when competing as a woman in Paris in 2024, despite allegedly failing sex tests the previous year.
Khelif won gold but was subsequently banned from competing in all future World Boxing events in the women’s category in the absence of proof of being biologically female.
The list suggests that saying “Imane Khelif is a man” would be an example of “racist/Islamophobic misinformation”.
This report was commissioned by the Government Office for Science, which determines what The Science™ is. There is now a furious effort to stop its recommendations from being implemented. Not because the Office for Science recognized it as absurd, but because activists got hold of it and opposition politicians started banging the drums.
Technocrats see themselves as the "real" and permanent government, and view democratic mechanisms as an impediment to doing their jobs. They need not be in active conspiracies to subvert the will of the people or the courts, although some genuinely are. All they need to do is identify with the priorities of their bureaucracies and be obstinate.
This attitude, of course, has generated the populist backlash they all fear will take them down, which is why they are so focused on suppressing speech and ideas.
Populism is hardly an unalloyed good; it can empower demagogues. But it is also the best immune response to technocratic rule.
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