spiked93%
Civil servants are defying the Supreme Court trans ruling 91%
By Joanna Williams83%
7/23/2026, 2:52:58 PM
Keywords: Transgender, Wokeness
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 76.8% saturation with 635 hits. Analysis detected 2,337 faulty-reasoning hits from 827 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 84% and a BS Rank of 91% (2,148 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 90.20% of the article peer group.
What was the point of last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling that ‘woman’ means biological female?
The judgement should, by rights, have meant the end of trans-identifying males in women-only spaces.
It should have put a stop to journalists claiming that male sex offenders are somehow women.
And it should mean that workers no longer jeopardise their livelihood if they trip up over a colleague’s preferred pronouns.
Yet all of these things are still happening in Britain.
Across the UK, far too many organisations have either ignored the Supreme Court ruling and carried on much as before, or have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into compromises that please no one.
In this, they have taken their lead from the very top.
It was only in May, after a delay of more than a year, that the government finally got around to publishing guidance as to how the legal judgement should be implemented to protect single-sex spaces.
Now, Cabinet Office documents leaked to The Times show that even the upper echelons of the civil service, those working at the very heart of government, have failed to take the Supreme Court ruling seriously.
Across Whitehall, rather than ensuring that hospitals, prisons and schools enforce single-sex spaces, bureaucrats have been busy working out how they can continue to support transgender people within their own workplace.
In other words, rather than protecting the rights of women, officials have dedicated time and money to appeasing men in dresses.
The upshot is that a few begrudging compromises now sit alongside a doubling down on other gender rules.
Civil servants have been told that they must use toilets and changing rooms appropriate for their sex rather than their gender identity.
Good.
But, at the same time, the Cabinet Office guidance warns employees that they may face disciplinary action if they fail to use a transgender colleague’s preferred name and pronouns.
The document warns that ‘deliberate deadnaming or misgendering to deny, mock or invalidate’ a trans person will be investigated as potential misconduct.
This means that transgender-identifying men may not be able to use the ladies’ loo, but can expect to be treated as women in all other respects.
The Cabinet Office updated its guidance on gender after the Supreme Court ruling, but has refused to make public either this latest version, which it has labelled ‘official sensitive’, or an earlier draft.
This secrecy curtails discussion of the impact of such rules – or at least that seems to be the outcome that managers and transgender activists hope to achieve.
What this means in practice is that civil servants are not only forced to lie about someone’s identity and punished for stating biological truths – they are also unable to discuss the impact of such guidance in public.
Once the fiction that a man can become a woman, with a female name and pronouns, goes unchallenged, then protecting single-sex spaces – which was central to the Supreme Court ruling – becomes more difficult.
Of course, it is not just the Cabinet Office that is engaging in such fudges.
In hospitals, men with gender-recognition certificates continue to be treated on women’s wards and use female toilets.
West London NHS Trust has said that patients can use facilities based on their ‘legal gender’ rather than on their sex, despite the fact that this flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling.
The Ministry of Defence has also failed to update its gender guidance.
Instead, army chiefs have been told to assess whether transgender soldiers can use single-sex facilities on a ‘case-by-case basis’.
This could leave female soldiers, who are expected to share dormitories and bathrooms, at risk.
Numerous charities are also using outdated rules, to the potential detriment of both staff and people who use the services they provide.
The reluctance of organisations to implement the Supreme Court ruling that sex means biology is a slap in the face to the brave team at For Women Scotland, who worked hard to secure last April’s legal victory.
Worse, it shows that powerful institutions are prepared to ride roughshod over the law when they consider their own values to be morally superior.
It sends a message to women everywhere that Britain’s managerial class still prioritises the desires of transgender-identifying men above women’s sex-based rights.
It begs the question: what must women do to ensure they have access to single sex spaces?
It is impossible to imagine legal judgements in any other area of life being so explicitly disregarded.
The way national organisations – including the civil service – are behaving sticks two fingers up to democratic decision-making and the rule of law.
Some argue that the dominance of woke thinking has had its day.
Sadly, the entrenchment of gender ideology within our institutions shows this is far from the case.
Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won.
Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com
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