Janice Turner informs us that civil servants (in the UK) are being told appalling drivel as official “training” – by people who are secretive about it.

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.

So by “inclusion” the people who send civil servants to these workshops mean exclusion of women. Interesting.

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.

Ok so why, I wonder, does government assign that job to this particular network? Why does government have civil servants attend such ludicrous and damaging “training”? They might as well send them to Catholic mass.

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 is indoctrination government employees are told to listen to by their employers.

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.

…

Then Emma turns to the controversial debate about reform of the Gender Recognition Act. The government recently decided not to introduce “self-ID”, whereby a person can change the sex on their birth certificate with a simple declaration. “Many anti-trans groups spoke out in a very clever way [to stop it],” says Emma. “Like you could wake up and identify as a man and we’d be legally obliged to treat a person that way. If that was the case, there’d be nothing to stop someone identifying as trans in bad faith, a violent male prisoner could be transferred to the female estate.”

Er, yes, which is what does happen. Paying attention much?

“I’m a civil servant,” says Emma. “I’m not allowed to be an activist. I’m just sitting in my back bedroom in fluffy slippers.” But she is training government employees to disregard laws, while agitating for change. Most concerning, she tells us to perceive colleagues who defend existing sex-based protections as transphobic.

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”.

The Emmas are ruining everything.