£200k for group that likened gender critical feminists to the KKK

TAXPAYERS have spent at least £200,000 on a Civil Service staff network that gave training in which gender-critical activists were compared to the Ku Klux Klan.

The Cabinet Office gave the Whitehall staff network for transgender civil servants, a:gender, £82,000 last year. The Home Office gave the same group more than £110,000, with other departments spending unknown amounts.

The gender-critical group Sex Equality and Equity Network (Seen) said the training provided by a:gender was creating a “culture of fear” across government which has led to the bullying of staff who do not subscribe to the entirety of the trans rights agenda.

It comes a week after Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, wrote in The Telegraph that the UK’S diversity drive was “counterproductive” and criticised much equality, diversity and inclusion [EDI] training as “snake oil”.

The group wrote to Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, in October 2023 to complain about a:gender training courses and a presentation which compared gender-critical activists to the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

The presentation said: “Racism won’t come into your workplace as hoods and burning crosses but as ‘nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’.” It adds: “Transphobia is the same: ‘I’m just protecting women and girls’, ‘this undermines women’s hard-fought-for sex-based rights’,

“What rights do women have that men don’t? None, because we have the Equality Act. There is no such thing as women’s sex-based rights and, even if there was, how would a man transitioning and getting that right stop women from having that right?”

The letter said: “Together these statements repeatedly degenerate and ridicule gender-critical views by presenting them as ignorant or the direct result of anti-semitism ... they operate as an attempt to bully gender-critical people into silence by taking away the words we use to describe our protected belief.

“It also creates a hostile working environment by painting our position as the moral equivalent of racism, even (perhaps especially) when presented as part of a civilised discourse. We consider that this constitutes a clear example of bullying and harassment.”

Nick Fletcher, a Tory MP, asked the Cabinet Office how much it spent on the a:gender network, to which John Glen, the Paymaster General, replied that the figure in 2022-23 was £82,000. Mr Glen added: “A decision was made since then that no further funding will be provided.”

A Freedom of Information request revealed the Home Office spent £111,846 in the same year.

Maya Forstater, from the women’s rights group Sex Matters, said: “Unfortunately the Civil Service is using our taxes to pay its own staff to deliver unlawful and inaccurate training under the guise of ‘inclusion workshops’ but what these workshops really do is encourage civil servants to bully and silence anyone who understands that sex is real and sometimes it matters.”

She said they promote such ideas as “sex is a spectrum consisting of 62 categories” and “transphobia comes cloaked in concern for women’s rights’”.

Last night, a government source said: “The current funding arrangements for a:gender will cease with effect from April 1 2024.”