Education Secretary Gillian Keegan confirmed in front of the Education Committee this morning that trans guidance to be issued before Christmas will not restrict social transitioning. Keegan faced a fiery line from Tory MP Nick Fletcher, who asserted he  “can’t go to bed at night knowing a Secretary of State is allowing current trans situation in schools“. Keegan hit back: “Never go to bed at night thinking you care more about children than I do”. She is the Education Secretary after all…

Keegan explained that banning social transitioning in schools would require a “change in the equalities law,” a matter for Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch to deal with. Kemi has been positioned as taking the more hardline approach on the issue of social transitioning in schools, having been brought in to help draw up new guidance, while Keegan has been criticised  for being “too liberal“. Though if star of the Tory-right and “culture warrior” Kemi was so passionate about the subject, then it’s up to the Equalities Minister to change the law…

Keir Starmer has insisted that Labour has “clarified” their position on trans self-identification, telling The Standard that Labour would update the law to make it easier for people to change their gender:

“We have clarified our position. Huge strides have been made in terms of women’s rights within the Labour movement and nobody wants to roll back any of that, in fact there are still battles to be had. But there is a small minority of people that don’t identify with the gender they were born into and I don’t think we can simply disregard that. We need a fairer way of dealing with it.”

This ‘clarified’ view isn’t quite the same as his previous positions. He’s previously said that a policy of self-identification without a medical certificate was not the “right way forward“. He claimed in July that a “woman is an adult female“, and that he “disagreed” with Scottish Labour on their continued support of the self-ID policy. In 2021, he was fully on-board with the very same policy. This clears things up… 

Labour have vowed to crack down on transphobic hate crimes, moving attacks on people’s identity into “aggregative harms“. Proposals for those who use the wrong pronouns or name to fall into the same bracket as assault and harassment driven by racial or religious hatred were first introduced in 2021, and will be reinforced by Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary Anneliese Dodds. Speaking at Labour conference, she said Labour would introduce:

“stronger laws so those who carry out anti-LGBT+ hate crime get the tougher sentences they deserve…we will modernise the gender recognition law to a new process.”

So if you muddle up Suzy with Eddie deliberately – which seems hard to prove – you could face jail time. This crosses a legal line where we are expected to not just be tolerant of people’s beliefs but share them. We don’t do this with religion, people have different religious beliefs and there is no expectation that protestants have to believe in Roman Catholic transubstantiation. Gender critical people will be forced to accept that transwomen with penises are women or got to jail. They will be committing a hate crime by “mis-gendering” even if they are correctly sexing a person. Madness.

With Labour’s lead in the polls, misgendering people could soon see people dragged off to the gulag for up to two years…

Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour have heard the mood music from Team Starmer and rowed back on their support for the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, despite having claimed it was “right” to vote for it just six months ago. Now, the party have decided it’s “deeply flawed”… 

According to The Times, Sarwar no longer supports the idea of self-ID – which allows anyone over 16 to change their gender without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – and although Scottish Labour still supports it “in principle”, the SNP’s refusal to accept Labour’s amendments to safeguard women’s spaces is now a problem. Six months ago they said the same thing, yet backed it anyway. “Principles” don’t get you very far in politics…

Yesterday Sarwar offered this word salad when asked if he’d vote for the Bill again:

“I’ve been reflective about this since the passage of the GRR Bill and I’ve said it feels like everybody has lost. I don’t think our trans community feel any more protected since the passing of the GRR Bill […] I don’t think women feel any more reassured since the passing of the GRR Bill, but I still continue to believe that it’s right for us to want to remove the indignities and the humanities in the process of obtaining a [gender certificate].

“We still have work to do to make sure that we are protecting single-sex spaces based on biological sex [and] I think the government should reflect that they didn’t go far enough and accepting amendments…”

Starmer saw the winds blowing in a different direction many weeks ago, now Sarwar is playing catch-up…

From long covid and strikes, to two millennia of stress-related sick days, we all know civil servants will take any excuse for time off. Well, today Guido reveals the simplest way for Whitehall employees who are averse to work to avoid it. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the Cabinet Office spelled out their policies for annual leave, and employees going through gender reassignment get an especially good deal:

“Up to 13 weeks special leave with pay may be considered for absences directly related to gender reassignment or intersex variations, in any 12-month rolling period.”

To repeat, that is 13 weeks, or three months, per year.

The obvious question is: how does the Cabinet Office define gender reassignment? Could a civil servant identify one way one year and another the next – just to claim their three months? Could they come up with a new medical procedure to go through every year? Guido would forgive co-conspirators for thinking this was just another case of the government failing to get a grip of their work-shy employees. It is not. Whilst trans employees get 13 weeks per year, paternity leave is 12 days. And for disability related leave… just 5 days.

A vigil for murdered trans teen Brianna Ghey turned on Keir Starmer last night. Congregating outside the Department of Education, the crowd decided that one of the people to focus on for the teen’s death was none other than the Leader of the Opposition, beginning a chant of “F*** Keir Starmer”. Classy…