Originally Posted by
mgahan
What TWFlyboy said.. Recently the Australian Minister responsible for Defiance told the Chiefs to tell the boys and giirls to get on with the business of preparing for defending the nation and drop the fancy dress morning teas. What a novel idea!!.
Something I’ve noticed here in the UK is the gulf between the stances of the governing party and the civil service on this issue. The equalities minister and her deputy have made robust interventions against gender self-identification and the critical studies agenda, have scrapped ‘unconscious bias’ training as being unproven and possibly counterproductive, and are in the process of banning public agencies from subscribing to Stonewall’s employer scheme. Yet the upper echelons of the civil service are bought into the agenda to such a degree that there has been no visible change despite the political direction being clear. And senior military officers fall over themselves to impress the key senior civil servants due to their influence over appointments.
It is a performative nonsense at the moment. One 2* has gone so far as to mandate the use of personal pronouns in signature blocks, despite this being *against* Stonewall guidance as it could force closeted trans people to uncloset themselves before they’re ready. I think it will eventually need explicit ministerial direction to moderate the approach being taken across the whole of Whitehall. Even Tony Blair recently commented that he is increasingly unsure of what it is and isn’t OK to say any more. You can see a reckoning coming in the increasing media chatter about the proportion of young people going to university. On the face of it it’s about the utility of their qualifications versus their debt burden, but unspoken is the question of why the Conservatives would continue to push students into the tender care of an academic sector obsessed with critical studies and so make their electoral hurdle ever higher? Progressive complaints of a “culture war” are down to them being aggrieved that the other side has finally started to push back…