The French Lieutenant's Woman Part 2
Update 375
Here is Part 2, dear readers.
Sticking with The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Thanks as ever to two wonderful readers for suggesting pieces.
Whistleblower Takes Case
Camilla Turner in The Telegraph ( Whistleblower ‘forced out’ of Whitehall over gender beliefs 18 May) reports:
Eleanor Frances - David Rose for The Telegraph© Provided by The Telegraph
A whistleblower claims she was forced out of the civil service by a “politicised” culture which led to her being marginalised for her gender critical beliefs.
Eleanor Frances, who joined the civil service in 2019 after completing a PhD in engineering, managed a team of policy officials at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Her role, which involved working with government ministers, later moved to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
She is now taking both government departments to an employment tribunal on several grounds, including unfair constructive dismissal, and victimisation, as well as direct and indirect discrimination based on her philosophical beliefs.
Ms Frances believes that she was left with no option other than to quit the civil service last August after she blew the whistle on allegations of discrimination and breaches of impartiality on sex and gender issues.
She raised concerns formally about a series of issues internally, but claims that instead of being taken seriously, she was ignored and sidelined.
A ‘climate of fear’ around diversity policy
Her concerns included complaints about a “politicised climate of fear” around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies, with the risk of negative professional consequences for civil servants who questioned the institutional position on issues such as sex and gender.
Ms Frances also claims that an internal “Gender Identity and Intersex” policy was adopted, without proper consultation, following a workplace assessment by Stonewall, the controversial gay rights organisation.
She says the policy’s use of politicised language and concepts – for example, defining “transphobia” as including the “denial/refusal to accept” someone’s gender identity – meant that civil servants were effectively compelled to recognise male people as women.
She also claimed that the policy of “self-identification” in government premises meant that men were allowed to access female single-sex facilities, with the threat of disciplinary action against any women who might object.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images© Provided by The Telegraph
Ms Frances says that when she failed to get a response to her complaints internally, she went on to pen a letter to Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, on behalf of 42 staff from 16 departments warning that the politicised culture risks “improperly” influencing Government policy.
Mr Case was told in the letter, sent last year, that ideology on gender promoted by trans activists has become embedded in the Civil Service in a “significant breach of impartiality”.
It says the concept that “everyone has a gender identity which is more important than their sex” is “treated as undisputed fact”.
Approach to gender ‘not impartial’
Ms Frances told The Telegraph: “I asked [the Cabinet Secretary] in that letter to take urgent action to ensure civil service impartiality is upheld and freedom of belief is respected.
“I coordinated it because I had lost confidence in DCMS processes and felt I had nowhere else to turn. Two and a half months later, the response was telling me to use the departmental processes that had already failed me.”
Ms Frances said she believes the civil service’s approach to sex and gender issues is “not impartial”, adding: “Government departments officially adopted internal policies which took one side of a major political controversy, and which compelled civil servants to do the same. In doing so, they compromised the privacy, dignity and safety of female staff.”
Another instance of the lack of impartiality demonstrated by her colleagues was following the death of the late Queen last September, she claims.
Ms Frances said: “Following the death of Her Majesty, a senior colleague put a post in a team WhatsApp group. She said ‘Having to make that woman pm would be enough to send anyone over the edge tbh’.
“That woman was Liz Truss, the then prime minister. I challenged the comment and complained that it breached civil service impartiality. In response, my manager reprimanded me. The same colleague was promoted the following week to be a senior civil servant and my new line manager.”
Ms Frances told The Telegraph that she raised concerns internally that her department was taking a “politicised and discriminatory” approach to EDI.
‘I was stripped of my team and responsibilities’
She said: “Whilst investigations into my concerns were ongoing, I was stripped of my team and responsibilities by individuals who are named in my complaint. I was given unsubstantiated and derogatory feedback including in relation to my approach to EDI.
“Every time I raised a concern, I was told to follow a process, but the process took months and did nothing. I sought help from senior civil servant leadership but they didn’t protect me. When the investigation resulted in no action and I was forced out of my role, I had no choice but to resign citing constructive dismissal.”
The Free Speech Union (FSU) is launching a crowdfunder to pay for Ms Frances to have legal representation at her tribunal, which had a preliminary hearing last month with further hearings expected for later this year.
Jill Levene, legal counsel at the FSU, said: “Impartiality is the cornerstone of a well functioning civil service. Eleanor’s treatment is a clear example of a civil service that has been captured by radical progressive ideology.”
A Government spokesman said: “We cannot comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”
Best of luck to Eleanor. Another very important legal case!
Google Take Action!
EDI Jester informs us about some great news!
Sex Education
Following publication of the draft government guidance on RHSE teaching in schools, very interesting piece on the subject from Kathleen Stock on Unherd. All comments gratefully received.
The agony of sex education Knowledge isn't power — it's just TMI
MAY 17, 2024
“In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites”, said Freud — a sentiment that came to mind as I watched reactions to the government’s announcement about sex education on Wednesday. Responding to criticism that existing “Relationships, sex, and health education” (RSHE) resources tend to be outsourced to dubious commercial agencies and hidden from parents, a curriculum overhaul is on the cards in English schools. Under proposed new guidelines, teachers rhapsodising about inner gender identities will henceforth be silenced, but that’s not the only welcome change. Information about the birds and the bees will be withheld to the ripe old age of nine; and “explicit discussion of sexual activity” put off until 13.
Whereas in some bastions of puritanical repression (like, say, France) these age limits would likely be met with incredulity at their laxity, here opponents have reacted as if the Education Secretary had mandated lottery-funded chastity belts for Key Stage 4. “Politicising sex education is unforgivable dangerous & reactionary …This is worst kind of arm-chair politics bigoted & ill-informed” fumed former Greens leader, Caroline Lucas; nicely voicing the perennial fantasy that, whereas conservative initiatives are always highly ideological, going gender-divining with toddlers or discussing sex work with primary school pupils are actions shining with the clear unfiltered light of moral truth. Generally, most responses seemed unnecessarily outraged, talking about an imaginary version of the new guidance or else in complete denial about any existing problem. Not for the first time, I was left musing about why the modern Left is so defensive about attempts to protect tender minds from the adult marketplace of sexual ideas.
Various critical commentators wheeled out the gender zealots’ favourite analogy — “It’s like Section 28 all over again” — but didn’t mention that back in 1988, when the promotion of homosexuality in schools was first outlawed by the Tories, few of even the government’s most vocal opponents would have dreamt of insisting that primary school kids should be in the front line for detailed intelligence about what goes where. The difference, I suppose, is the internet, drastically curtailing the age of innocence relative to Eighties standards by potentially exposing much younger audiences to explicit material on a larger scale. Hence the popular protest that if kids don’t hear about it from teachers early enough, they will encounter eye-opening stuff anyway, in a much more direct and less psychologically manageable fashion.
I know that this is a canonical objection; still, I have some doubts about it. For one, the general stance it suggests — that is, relative acquiescence to the colonisation of children’s minds with incomprehensible images of writhing bodies — is a cop out. Other solutions are available; and indeed, many parents already employ internet parental controls or avoid smartphones altogether for those of primary school age. For hundreds of thousands of young children, protected at least temporarily from the excesses of the prevailing sexual culture, sacrificing their happy ignorance about grown-up matters in order to get ahead of the internet traffic for a relative few seems like a social bargain worth re-examining. It also seems possible to teach all young kids about bodily integrity and autonomy, in a way that helps safeguard them from sexual abuse, without going into the nuts and bolts, as it were — indeed the NSPCC already has one such programme.
But really, whether school sex education is successful or not — or indeed too permissive or too strict — depends on the prior question of what it is for, exactly; and I submit that nobody really knows anymore. Whereas once upon a time it was aimed at informing adolescents about basic biological facts, and then immediately persuading them not to put their newfound knowledge into practice until safely within the confines of a Christian marriage, it is now a mishmash of competing purposes and narratives.
To establish this, I went looking for an example of a complete RSHE resource currently used in an English school. Though hampered by paywalls, I did find an equivalent Scottish version freely available: described as “developed by a partnership of local authorities and health boards, with advice from Education Scotland and the Scottish Government”, it is presumably widely used north of the border. Here, as in an excavation of some ancient archaeological site used by different tribes over centuries, I found residual traces of various historically fashionable framings of sexuality, with little apparent thought about how they are supposed to cohere.
Shorn of Christian trappings, avoiding unwanted teenage pregnancy is still presented as a clear objective, along with helpful normalisation of ordinary bodily processes such as menstruation and ejaculation. But more recently acquired, less compelling cultural artefacts are also present. One of these is an emphasis on sexual pleasure: for instance, in the somewhat awkwardly named “masturbation activity plan”, recommended for 11-15 year olds. In the Nineties, liberal feminists used to get annoyed about the fact that women didn’t typically experience as many orgasms as men, treating it as an equality issue. Whether or not increasing the amount of sexual pleasure in the world is a serious political objective, it still seems jarring to encounter the ghost of this once-fashionable imperative in the context of a school lesson plan.
For instance, pupils are told that “if you masturbate, you get to know your own body and what you like” and — sounding a bit like an advertising campaign by Sport Scotland — that “masturbation is a good way to reduce stress, relax the muscles, and can often help improve sleep, mood, and self-confidence”. You don’t have to be an unreconstructed Fifties throwback to think that students might be better left on their own to discover these things; that practically nobody is seriously worried about self-pleasure making you go blind or feeble-minded anymore, so there is no need for the enthusiastic overcompensation; and that hearing such points from a teacher might be a bit weird and disturbing. Indeed, as I read this part of the text, I started thinking it might not be a coincidence that asexuality is such a big trend with the kids these days. In the arena of sex education, knowledge is not always power; sometimes it is just TMI. [ Dusty - too much information]
Another facet of the resource I found, presumably inherited at some stage from Seventies and Eighties Second Wave feminist framings, stressed that stereotypes about masculinity and femininity should be rejected. One part of a module even had “I understand that how I look, how I behave, or my aspirations should not be limited by stereotypes, my sex or expectations of what boys and girls should do” as a learning outcome. Yet in the next topic was some very 21st century material, in which “cisgender people” were defined as those who “identify with or express themselves in line with gender expectations associated with their sex”, and transgender people were those for whom “the sex they were born does not fit with how they feel inside”. There is no satisfactory way to join up these pedagogical dots.
And there are other tensions in the documents for inquisitive minds to mull over. If consent is the be-all-and-end-all of human relations, then how does this fit with the fact that social pressures inadvertently change our sexual choices? If sex is often just harmless fun between consenting adults, then why — as the teaching resource also intimates — might it be better for young people to wait, and why are some of them reported as regretting it afterwards? If, contraceptive worries aside, choosing between vaginal and anal sex is no more fraught with complexity than choosing between ice cream flavours, why do women prefer the vanilla version much more? Since adult society can barely address such questions, we should not expect those of school age to sort out the answers; but equally we should acknowledge that they are likely to be left deeply confused too.
Ultimately, though, the big problem with a lot of RSHE is that it tends to treat what is essentially a practical activity — namely, learning how to be a fully realised, happy, assertive, suitably respectful sexual being, properly tailored for the modern world and with all the emotional skills this requires — as if it was a theoretical subject like mathematics or history. It is as if we were trying to teach people to cook, only by giving them cookbooks, and then judging our degree of success by how accurately they repeat recipes back to us or describe meal plans, without letting them near a kitchen. Yet as in all “how to” subjects, you can’t really understand a set of instructions until you try to put it into practice. (Equally, nobody responsible would suggest hands-on classroom tutorials here.)
Devoid of a feedback loop with real-world experiences, for those children who have yet to hold another person’s hand let alone anything more involved, excelling at RSHE will have little relevance to how they end up behaving and feeling in the romantic wild. We can lecture them about appropriate boundaries, consent, partner satisfaction, privacy, trust, and all the rest of it, but until behaviour starts to connect with libido, it won’t mean much. Viewed in this light, anxiously micromanaging youngsters’ budding psyches to make sure they end up parroting all the right opinions looks rather more for our benefit than theirs. Perhaps, then, we might do some healthy boundary-setting of our own, and leave them to their blissful unawareness of contemporary sexual paradoxes for just that little bit longer.
Queens’ Speech
In the latest excellent episode, Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh discuss, amongst other things, a petition started by Clive seeking a ban on private ‘gender affirming’ care for children. Please sign this if you have not already done so - see below.
They also discuss the hearing of Allison Bailey’s case against Stonewall. Readers may recall that Allison was a barrister at Garden Court Chambers who won her case against the Chambers for discriminating against her because she expressed ‘gender critical’ views. At first instance, she lost the case she took against Stonewall as second defendant on the basis that they caused the Chambers to take the discriminatory action. This is the appeal against that decision and will be an extremely important decision because, if she is successful, it would appear that Stonewall were acting against their own charitable objectives. Best of luck, Allison.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/661751
https://clivesimpson.substack.com/p/episode-91-the-rise-of-the-lanyard
JK Rowling Teacher Sacked
Readers may recall this teacher whose video went viral where he helps one of his students to apply critical thinking to the student’s belief that JK Rowling is a transphobe (and change his opinion). He has now been sacked!! Here is the report from Sky News Australia. Unfortunately the precise reason given for dismissal is not yet apparent. Hope he takes a claim against the school!!
Sex Matters
One piece from the most recent excellent Memo newsletter from Sex Matters.
New gender-critical NHS group ( 17 May)
This week saw the launch of a SEEN (sex equality and equity network) in health. The new gender-critical group aims to give a voice to NHS staff with concerns about gender ideology.
In a post on X, the group said its mission “is to create an environment in the NHS where staff feel safe and encouraged to discuss issues related to the protected characteristic of sex, so that they can speak up for themselves as employees and on behalf of patients”.
The network will ensure the specific sex-based needs of different staff and patient groups are represented in discussions within NHS organisations.
There are now 13 SEEN groups, in industries ranging from journalism to sport.
Royal Horticultural Society
I previously reported here about the RHS going with the Gender Woo!
I said then that I was going to resign my membership but I then had a re-think:
I have been an enthusiastic member since I was a young man. I used to regularly visit RHS Wisley Gardens when I lived in London. I have been to every Chelsea Flower Show since the mid 1980s (apart from when there was no show due to the Covid lockdown);
No members were consulted on this adoption of support for gender madness. If they had been I am convinced that this would have been completely and resoundingly rejected.
So I am fighting this nonsense from within the RHS for the time being and my wife and I will be attending the Chelsea Flower Show this Wednesday - and we will be keeping a keen eye open for rainbow flags and any other promotion of gender ideology. We will report back.
All thoughts gratefully received.
Women’s Rights Network
One piece from their latest excellent newsletter.
WRN and the FA (19 May)
WRN appreciated the Football Association’s (@FA) invitation to discuss its Transgender Policy, and we encourage members to raise their voice to the governing bodies of their own sports.
Over 2.5 million women and girls play football in the UK. The FA confirmed it knows of 72 males currently self-identifying into the UK women’s game. Countless more females will have self-excluded because of fear of injury, on religious grounds, or not wanting to play with or against males.
The current policy earned the FA a spot in the Rotten Tomato category of the WRN Fair Sports Awards – for being unfair and unsafe for females.
We are pleased that the FA is reviewing its current policy (now ten years old) and hope to see a new policy that places fairness and safety for females first.
This is a brief summary of some of the points we discussed.
The FA said that there’s no proven greater risk of injury to women and girls playing with or against males.
That’s not what @WorldRugby found when it assessed the data. Rugby's guidelines state that males are excluded from the female game: “Because of the size, force- and power-producing advantages conferred by testosterone during puberty and adolescence, and the resultant player welfare risks this creates.” Like rugby, football is a contact sport. We call on football to be more like rugby – put women's and girls' safety first.
The FA said that the science is unclear on male advantage being retained after testosterone suppression.
We say the science is entirely clear. Males who reduce their testosterone to ZERO retain their male advantage in terms of speed, power, and strength. Males NEVER lose their advantage because bones, heart, and lungs don’t shrink and skeletons don’t change shape. We draw your attention to the 2021 review published by Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg.
The FA’s policy allows for mixed football up to the age of eighteen. We believe that the majority of girls do not benefit from the ‘it’ll bring their game on by playing boys’ attitude. We have a crisis in girls’ sport and activity levels with 55% of girls giving up on sport between Year 7 and sixth form. We need to nurture girls. Lumping girls in with boys is NOT good for girls AND puts them at risk of serious injury.
We call on the FA to:
Comply with the Equality Act 2010 and exclude males from the female game.
Write clear policies that protect the female game.
Write policies that apply from grassroots through to elite.
Consider the implications of the Cass Review 2024 and the government’s advice to schools. Allowing children to self-identify into sports and facilities of the opposite sex is social transition.
Protect women and girls on the pitch and in their changing and toilet facilities.
Listen to women. The vast majority do not want males in their game, or in their changing rooms / toilets.
If you want to make your views known on football (or any other sport that’s unfair for females), have a look at the template letter on our website and use it to write to the Chairman and CEO of your sport. Make your voice heard!
Title IX
Former President, Donald Trump has said he will repeal the disastrous changes to Title IX brought in by the Biden administration recently. See my report on this here:
The full details of what Trump is saying are here:
Dear readers
Firstly, some great news. Ros Adams has won her claim against the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre 😊
Secondly, if you can, please push around the latest updates.
Thirdly, a heads up for a real Terfy evening.
The latest Mess is at 17.00 GMT.
Then there is a Menno Special ( about Daniel Radcliffe - boooo) at 21.00 GMT.
Dusty
When I read about sex education in schools these days I keep thinking of the Monty Python sketch from one of their films The Meaning of Life where John Cleese is teaching a class of children about sex and gives a demonstration with his wife - excruciating!