It's time to abolish the Government Equalities Office

Carys Moseley comments on the bias of the Government Equalities Office and calls for its abolition.

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) has just published its Strategic Plan for the coming year 2019-2010, and it makes for rather concerning reading. At least it’s honest – despite its name, the GEO only really concerns itself with an ‘equal outcomes’ feminism and LGBT rights. A careful reading of the plan shows all too clearly that the GEO has no serious intention whatsoever of taking into account public concern and opposition to its crazy plans, such as making changing gender easier, pushing for a ‘must-stay-gay’ law to punish counsellors, therapists and pastors, and nodding towards more abortion rights and appointing more women to public leadership roles – but only as long as they toe the ideological line.

Apart from a few token nods to disability issues (which have their own independent Disability Unit within Whitehall), there is no mention of all the other characteristics protected under the Equality Act 2010, namely age, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and sex. Everything about women comes under ‘gender’ and ‘gender diversity’ – proving that the GEO is propagating the lie that there are more than two ‘genders’, i.e. sexes. Everything else is about sexual orientation (homosexuality and bisexuality only) and transgenderism and non-binary self-identification (refusing to say which sex you belong to).

Burning injustices?

The vision statement at the start of the Plan says this:

“The Government is committed to tackling the burning injustices that are created by the enduring  inequalities that exist in our country. Tackling these is an essential part of the Government’s vision to  build a country that works for everyone. We need to strip away the barriers that hold people back so that everyone can go as far as their hard work and talent can take them.”

So, what are these ‘burning injustices’? The truth is that for every ‘burning injustice’ assumed by the GEO (basically, not enough acceptance of homosexuality, transgenderism, equal outcomes and abortion) there is a real burning injustice being pushed by the GEO itself.

LGBT activists alarmed by public opinion

What really annoys the activists in the GEO is how public opinion isn’t where they want it to be. For homosexuality and transgenderism can only be normalised with the help of the 95% or so that is heterosexual. If they don’t want this to happen, it won’t. Public opinion is therefore a ‘burning injustice’ waiting to be corrected.

Several milestones in the LGBT Action Plan include targeting issues of representation, in other words normalising and mainstreaming homosexuality and transgenderism. One of the commitments is this:

“Develop a project to use behavioural insights to improve people's attitude toward LGBT people more quickly.”

This is very significant, because it is an admission that public opinion isn’t pro-LGBT. This despite the fact that the press in the UK is more progressive than in a country like the USA, and that there is less free speech than in the USA as well.

Recent polling by Harris Polling in the USA for LGBT campaign group GLAAD has seriously alarmed LGBT activists, because it has found that young adults aged 18-34 are becoming more uncomfortable around LGBT people, with young women in particular being increasingly unhappy. Between 2016 and 2018 young adults’ acceptance levels of LGBT people plunged from 63% to 45%. This means an 18% drop in the percentage of heterosexual people who can be ‘allies’ and thus be instrumental in the normalisation of homosexuality and transgenderism across the USA.

The reason for this is quite obvious – the aggressive media onslaught by transgender activists since Bruce Jenner ‘came out’, and the idiotic support for transgender rights by the US Democratic Party. This alone may well have been the reason for Republican  candidate Donald Trump being elected, despite the fact that he isn’t really a typical social conservative. Voters clearly found the idea of a female presidential candidate pushing males in women’s toilets ghastly and sinister.

It was never an accident that not one single UK government department or news outlet published the findings of the huge global survey on LGBT issues conducted by ILGA, the world’s largest umbrella group of LGBT organisations, in October 2016. This, together with the 2017 survey, showed how even in the UK, most people do not believe that people are born with same-sex attraction or transgender identification.

GEO civil servants are obviously irritated by the public opposition to transgender ideology, and to the fact that this has led to such a huge volume of responses to the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (over 100,000) that they have still not managed to publish the government’s response. The response was meant to be published in spring this year but has now been postponed. In a humiliating climbdown the Scottish Government has actually had to open a new consultation on the law in Scotland, because it had not consulted properly on the effect that easy gender change would have on women’s safety the first time round.

Continued push for LGBT indoctrination in schools

Despite a wave of protests from parents, the GEO is absolutely determined to steamroll through plans for LGBT indoctrination in schools regardless. One of the Education milestones for the LGBT Action Plan is this:

“Update the statutory guidance on Relationships Education in primary schools, and Relationships and Sex Education in secondary schools and ensure that the guidance supports teaching that is age appropriate and relevant to all pupils, whatever their developing sexual orientation or gender identity.”

This goes hand-in-hand with this:

“Reach a further 500 schools through the third phase of the anti-bullying programme.” 

There is no mention of the need to check for misuse of anti-bullying measures, such as in the case of Heavers Farm Primary School in Croydon, where two mothers are suing the school for unlawfully excluding a boy and a girl, both Christians, for asking their teacher for permission not to take part in an LGBT lesson during Pride Month.

In an interview the girl reveals how fellow pupils were starting to feel confused about whether they should be male or female after having LGBT lessons. The GEO Single Departmental Plan offers no support whatsoever for children or young people who are distressed by gender confusion and want help to live as members of their biological sexes. No acknowledgment is made that gender confusion is actually being suggested by LGBT lessons in schools and that as such it is clearly being promoted. This is child abuse, pure and simple and the GEO should be sued for it.

Then there is this commitment:

“Publish comprehensive guidance for schools on how to support trans pupils.”

Given the dismissal of Joshua Sutcliffe for calling girls ‘girls’ in a maths lesson, and the undercover recording lead to the Mail on Sunday of a Mermaids training session for a Church of England primary school telling teachers and governors “you are all now honorary mermaids...whether you like it or not”, it’s not hard to guess what this will involve.

Pushing for ‘non-binary’ identity

The Plan includes a long table devoted to the government’s LGBT Action Plan. This includes a commitment to issue a “call for evidence on non-binary identities.” In other words, the GEO wants to know how many people there are in the UK who refuse to be known as male or female and want the right to hide their sex from the authorities. I have already explained that some people inside government have admitted that this could be a worldwide border security risk.

It’s obvious that this is all being done in order to push for legal recognition of ‘non-binary’ identities. If the GEO were against all this, they wouldn’t bother with a call for evidence. If the government were against this, it would farm out the job to psychiatric hospitals instead.

Lack of support for motherhood

Unsurprisingly, there is no support offered for stay-at-home mothers in this new Single Departmental Plan. Also, there is no support offered for women who have more than two dependent children. The reason for that should be obvious – the change to Universal Credit has meant the Department for Work and Pensions no longer helps those mothers. When the policy was first announced Life Site News reported that Clinton Somerton of Canada's pro-life, pro-family lobby group, Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) was of the view that this amounted to ‘stealth population control’. The churches belatedly protested Universal Credit on the grounds that it could push parents to choose abortion where they would not otherwise have done so. Naturally, no word about that from the GEO. Equality clearly does not apply to children.

Instead, the GEO says that it will work with the Department for Health and Social Care to implement a Reproductive Health Action Plan, without saying exactly what is involved. Of course not, because what feminists in healthcare want is to decriminalise abortion in the United Kingdom altogether. This would make the UK like Canada, a truly alarming prospect.

GEO plans will harm women

One of the goals of the GEO is to have “Increased gender diversity in prominent public roles.” These would be public sector roles and such in thrall to the government’s reigning gender and LGBT ideology. Thus, the only women who will be appointed to such roles will be those who are fully paid up members of the feminist-and-LGBT club. Essentially this means being paid to push a set of complete lies and utopian nonsense.

The result of this anti-reality bias in gender quotas is that employers will start to assume that women really hold such views and will be treated as unemployable if they do not. Public sector employment for women who are actually reasonably sensible and independent thinkers may get worse, as they are expected to toe the line on lying nonsense such as ‘transwomen are women’ or ‘pregnant people’. This will rob women in the public sector of their voice and of any moral authority that they may have acquired through work experience and education.

Furthermore, how on earth is the GEO hoping to make good on its promise to tackle sexual harassment when it has not backtracked on its dangerous plan to allow easy gender change, with the inevitable result that we will have males in female-only spaces? What on earth makes the GEO think it can square the circle?

Clinging stubbornly to unenforceable ‘conversion therapy’ ban

In line with its long-standing hostility to vulnerable teens and adults developing heterosexual attraction and relationships, the GEO insists that it will bring forward legislative and non-legislative proposals to ‘end conversion therapy in the UK’. This is despite the fact that we have shown several times that this would breach most of our rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It is also despite the admission that they cannot even agree on what ‘conversion therapy’ is or how they could make a ban work.

In May this year Dr Igi Moon, the Chair of the Coalition Against Conversion Therapy, admitted to the Women and Equalities’ Committee that ‘conversion therapy’ was proving very hard to define. It was revealed that whenever member organisations of the Coalition got together to discuss the issue, they could not agree on how to proceed. One of the reasons was that some people wanted to protect the right to therapy for gender fluidity, but also wanted the right to say people should only be identifiable as male or female.

In plain words this means that even the current professional ban enshrined in the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK is unenforceable because people who want a ban on therapy for same-sex attraction do not also want a ban on therapy for gender confusion. As the government is fully committed to incorporating transgender with LGB issues, this debate will continue to go around in circles. Nobody wants to admit that ‘conversion therapy’ is a deceitful term invented by a gay activist psychologist who conflated studies of voluntary therapy clients with a study putting together 100 clients in the UK in the 1950s, 30 of whom were homosexual sex offenders, 17 of which were convicted paedophiles, who were clearly not motivated to change either attractions or behaviours. This would tarnish the self-righteous public image of the Government Equalities Office.

The GEO is unpopular with mainstream government departments

The GEO now has a permanent home in the Cabinet Office, which is bad news because it is the Cabinet Office that is responsible for principles on how consultations work as well as the Ministerial Code, which covers ministers’ conduct.

The real reason for all this is that the GEO was rather unpopular with most government departments, around which it was required to move as the portfolio of (part-time) Minister for Equalities would move with each cabinet reshuffle. We know this because it was said plainly, if rather apologetically, to the Women and Equalities’ Committee’s inquiry on the work of the GEO in May 2018. Janet Veitch, former head of Gender Mainstreaming at the GEO, told the Committee

“in practice what tended to happen was that the priority [equalities] was dropped as soon as the ministerial brief was lost from the department”.

This is small consolation for most civil servants, however, because the GEO will now work across government ‘to ensure equalities are taken full account of in planning and policy development’, in each department’s Spending Review, Single Departmental Plan and Strategic Framework. This will go down like a lead balloon.

Foisting LGBT ideology on other countries

If this laundry-list weren’t enough, the GEO says it will be “delivering an international conference on LGBT issues around the world, in partnership with DFID and FCO” next year. What this really means is promoting all the harmful and immoral policies it is now pushing over here around the world. Given that most of the world’s people hold traditional views, this is going to spell big trouble.

Time to abolish the Government Equalities Office

The Government Equalities Office was formed in 2007 after Gordon Brown became Labour prime minister. Its remit has always been gender-equal outcomes and LGBT issues much more than anything else.

It has the gall to call itself the ‘Equalities Office’ when this is really just about snuffing out and punishing all vestiges of basic Christian morality and living that have kept society at least half decent for hundreds of years. This is why the Government Equalities Office must be abolished. It has picked a fight with created reality so those who defend reality must fight back. If that means taking the fight not just to Whitehall and Parliament but all the way to the United Nations bodies that are closely tied to it, so be it. The time to fight back is now.