Revealed: Details of PSNI transgender training course which force wanted to keep hidden
Police officers in Northern Ireland have been given training to accept that being male or female "is a social construct".
The training course also teaches them to recognise new identities such as "greysexual" and "pangender", encourages them to be "vocal allies" and "challenge queerphobia", and instructs them that children can be transgender from the age of three.
The News Letter can reveal all of this thanks to a major freedom-of-information (FOI) victory that could have ramifications across the UK.
The PSNI had attempted to keep the details of this training secret, and it has taken a nine-month battle to obtain the documents.
The training had been provided by the Belfast-based LGBTQQIA+ advocacy group Cara-Friend, which likewise objected to the public seeing the documents.
But after fighting against disclosure for months, the PSNI has now relented and handed the training documents over (more on the details of this case at this link).
Cara-Friend has 11 staff members. Its income is £419,000 per year of which about 60% comes from public bodies.
Cara-Friend has also provided training to the Ulster Unionist Party too; a PR photo in 2018 showed the entire top team of the party posing with their trainers.
Its training materials for the police run to 39 pages long.
For reasons that are not explained, they also bear the logo of the US investment bank CitiGroup.
The course begins by asking police officers to "write down how many sexual orientations and gender identities you know – you must be able to define these terms".
It then goes on to list factors which inhibit "LGBTQIA+ people" such as "queerphobia" and a "lack of knowledge in society".
Another slide teaches officers Cara-Friend's definitions for a litany of sexual orientations.
These include bisexual ("attract their own and at least one other sex/gender"), pansexual ("attracted to people and not their gender - gender blind"), omnisexual ("attracted to all genders – with a preference"), allosexual ("the opposite of asexual"), greysexual ("a person who has limited sexual attraction"), and demisexual ("a person who is attracted to others physically only when there is a deeper emotional connection").
One slide teaches officers that biological sex is not simply something people have, but rather something which is "assigned at birth" to them by doctors.
It says the notion that there are only male and female is a "historical view", and that the "modern view" is that "gender is a social construct".
It also describes everyone who is not transgender as being part of "the cisgender community".
Further slides give details about new pronouns such as "xe/xem" and "ve/vir" and new gender identities such as "agender", "pangender", and "bigender".
At one stage a survey (the origins of which are not clear) is presented, claiming that the vast majority of transgender people using Northern Ireland's publicly-funded NHS gender services had bad experiences, whilst almost everyone using private gender services has positive experiences.
Another slide tells officers children can be aware of their true gender identity from "3/4 years".
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Drawing the training to a close, officers are encouraged to "challenge queerphobia", "use inclusive / neutral language", "ask for, offer and use preferred pronouns", "signpost to sector organisations” (such as, for example, Cara-Friend itself), and "be a vocal ally".
The course ends with a list of LGBTQQIA+-themed shows to watch on Netflix.