Staff at the DWP reportedly objected to the clothes of Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who co-chairs the LGBT+ Civil Service Network
Staff at the DWP reportedly objected to the clothes of Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who co-chairs the LGBT+ Civil Service Network
Here’s an archive of the page.
She’s trans and her attire led to a minister stating that kind of “fetish gear” cannot be worn at work. Others working with her say it’s highly inappropriate and unprofessional. That’s the gist of it.
Is that relevant?
Apparently, as the Telegraph decided to give this nothingburger of a paragraph its own heading
I was asking about OP’s comment, not the Telegraph’s article. Of course the Telegraph will include irrelevant detail in order to sensationalise (in their view) the story. Others repeating that irrelevant detail is questionable though.
Well, the article itself dedicates a section to how she’s been targeted for “gender ideology”, which is dog whistle for “trans”. Calling non-cis gender expression a “fetish” is another dog whistle. Those two points in combination make her trans-ness relevant, even if the author isn’t going so far as to explicitly call out that this anti-trans behavior.
Being trans does not give extra dress-code rights, and nor should it. None of the other women are allowed to dress that way, so why should she?
Now, if she wants to challenge the dress code for more esoteric modes to be allowed, that should be taken under consideration by whoever is in charge of that, but in the meantime, she should at least try to conform. Then if the decision was to go against her, she’d have the requisite conforming clothing already.
(Tangentially, there’s an argument that gender non-conforming people might want to define other professional dress codes that don’t strictly fit with male and female norms, but that’s doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here.)
I understand that it’s difficult for trans folk who deal with transphobics everywhere they turn and thus every discrimination could be transphobia, but this one seems pretty easy to test.
And I have to wonder how she’d react if she won the dress code change and other people, cis people, started dressing more like her.
Again, I wasn’t talking about the article.