I was reading Graham Linehan’s Substack recently and one of the stories there was about the capture of the Civil Service by trans ideology and the willingness of those who promote it to misrepresent the law when it comes to gender identity. It’s a piece well worth reading because it shows just how thoroughly proponents of one particular ideology can unduly influence the training and day to day activities of Britain’s Civil Servants.

However what caught my eye was one of the comments. In particular a comment about the Parliamentary Petition system in which the commentator makes an allegation about petitions supporting gender critical causes are basically suppressed and sidelined.

The commentator named Repeal the GRA said: On the Parliament.uk petition website the petition committee can reject petitions on the basis of a negative focus on gender identity. Even though this is not a protected characteristic.

In practice this means TRAs have raised multiple petitions for GRA / Equality Act reform but any trying to change it from a gender critical perspective are automatically rejected and not published.

The standards for petition say: “We’ll have to reject your petition if: It’s offensive or extreme in its views. That includes petitions that attack, criticise or negatively focus on an individual or a group of people because of characteristics such as their age, disability, ethnic origin, gender identity, medical condition, nationality, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation” https://petition.parliament.uk/help

I have checked this allegation by going to the Parliament website myself and it is indeed correct that the ‘standards of petition’ section has an ‘equality’ bar that is so wide in its scope as to forbid petitions that criticise aspects of the gender ideology or ask Parliament to look into the effects of the cult of trans. What this means is that pro-trans petitions are waved through but a petition that asked for example for the right of women to have sex based rights would be immediately junked.

Whilst I can see that those who have completed gender reassignment are given additional rights, more than the general public get, under the 2010 Equality Act, these additional protections and rights do not extend to gender identity. The Parliamentary Petitions Office is going way beyond what even the law demands here by including gender identity. Parliament is silencing those who have awkward but necessary questions to ask of gender ideologists and especially silencing those women who are increasingly seeing their right to to have sex based services and to feel safe in toilets and changing rooms, increasingly removed from them. In effect we have an aspect of our Parliamentary system, in this case the petitions office, that is undeniably biased towards those who promote and sustain the ideology of trans but biased against those who believe in biological reality.