THE civil servants’ union “silenced” debates on trans rights during its annual conference, The National can reveal.
The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) took legal advice and banned motions which related to the landmark ruling which found that sex is defined by biology in the Equality Act.
Delegates had submitted motions for debate at the union’s annual conference in Brighton, but these were binned by PCS high command after lawyers from Thompsons Solicitors said they put the union at risk.
A delegate said: “It feels like the legal advice and the rule that allows the complete rejection of motions under legal advice has been used to completely silence us.”
One motion, which the delegate said had become a “lightning rod” for attendees seeking a debate on trans rights after other pro-trans motions were knocked back, put the PCS at risk of being sued, lawyers argued.
The motion, A57, called on the union’s national executive committee (NEC), its ruling body, to “oppose exclusionary ideologies” such as gender-critical beliefs.
Lawyers said these beliefs were protected in law and coming out against them opened the union up to claims of discrimination and harassment.
Another motion called on the NEC to “ensure that trans women are not excluded from women’s spaces within the union”.
Lawyers warned that doing so could lay the PCS open to claims of “harassment” if trans women were using spaces reserved for biological women.
The letter said: “This is on the basis that it encourages [trans women] to access biological women’s spaces, which is unwanted, related to the protected characteristic of sex and violates her dignity and creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”
A delegate told The National: “There's no logic to the legal advice because we hear motions on Palestine, Ukraine, racism, basic employment law and a lot of it is rejection of the law or disagreement with the law but, seemingly in this particular instance, the legal advice is that we're not even allowed to say that or even think it, or even discuss it.”
The final standing orders of the conference allowed two motions pertaining to trans rights to be debated.
One responded to the Supreme Court ruling and criticised the PCS’s delay in responding to the judgment.
It called on the union to create a process for faster communications to members to respond to “emergent situations” balanced with “the need not to expose the PCS to any legal liability”.
The second called on the union to reject the findings of the Sullivan Review, which urged the Government to require people to give their sex and gender on official forms like their health records.
The PCS union declined to comment.
