Not to be outdone by the Halifax and it’s policy of encouraging staff to declare their gender pronouns on their name tags, NatWest will pay for transgender staff to get privately-funded hormone treatment from next month as part of an overhaul aimed at making the bank more inclusive. The Telegraph has more.
The bank, which earlier this year said branch staff could display their favoured pronouns and phonetic name spellings on new environmentally friendly bamboo badges, said it was “challenging the status quo” and overhauling its policies to better suit trans customers and staff.
Its package of changes includes adding trans healthcare services to its private healthcare plan from September, which will mean that gender identity support, hormone treatment and counselling will be made available for workers.
It has also reviewed the wording of its employment policies to “ensure language and scenarios are LGBT+ inclusive” and changed its absence and sick leave rules to include time off for people who are transitioning, a spokesman confirmed.
The move comes as the banking sector tries to shake-off its “pale, male and stale” image in an effort to attract a younger and more diverse workforce.
The changes at NatWest come years after Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs told London staff they can have free sex-change surgery and fertility treatments, months after it became the first company in the U.K. to offer to ship working mothers’ breast milk home if they work overseas.
NatWest’s decision earlier this year to introduce pronoun badges for branch staff has caused some of its high street rivals to follow suit.
Halifax, which went on to also add pronoun badges, became embroiled in a row over the matter after it told customers that they can close their accounts if they disagreed with its stance. Responding to critics, Halifax said the badges prevented “accidental misgendering”.
Formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest almost brought down Britain’s financial system in 2008 when it was bailed out by the government for £45 billion after then-chancellor Alistair Darling was told it was within hours of running out of money.
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I must be a lot older than I thought. I can still remember when banks looked after your money, and paid you a bit of the interest they made by lending it to other people who were good risks.
This woke stuff starts out with one or two fairly reasonable plausible things, but just gets pushed and pushed to absurdity and beyond. Each step into folly justifies the next one.
We shouldn’t discriminate against women. Agreed. Or Gay people. Agreed. and many steps later, we are giving special rights to people who’s sexual pleasure is putting hedgehogs up their backsides, and calling themselves Fifi, and any word to the contrary is at the pain of being labelled a bigot.
My only hope is that there is a line of maximum woke, where everyone just goes ‘hang on a minute. WTF is this all about.?’ and abandons it as a ludicrous waste of time and money. We don’t seem to be anywhere near there yet. Maybe next year.
The trouble is that it’s much more than just being nice to whatever minority groups you pick as your pet causes – it also includes being nasty to other groups, especially if they dare to challenge any of this nonsense.
I’m done with totalitarians pretending they are nice. Please bring back people who are just unashamedly selfish and we all know where we stand.
“and many steps later, we are giving special rights to people who’s sexual pleasure is putting hedgehogs up their backsides, and calling themselves Fifi”
So are they also going to pay for HRT for the women, sorry, “people with vaginas” who are going through menopause?
I’m on YouGov and I often get questions about what my firm’s policy is on supporting people going through menopause, and a variety of other specialist conditions/groups. It appears to be a thing, to have a policy for everything. I always answer that my firm’s policy is to offer what support we can to all our staff, whatever their issues, treating each one as an individual.
Cat flaps in the walls for those identifying as a cat
What about those of us who self identify as a giraffe, paid leave until our employer makes all of their doors and ceilings 12 feet high so we can safely go into the office?
“…[Goldman Sachs] became the first company in the U.K. to offer to ship working mothers’ breast milk home if they work overseas.”
My goodness me. I had to read that sentence five times before I understood it. And now I do, I still can’t believe it.
It’s like companies are trying to outdo each other on the absurdity scale.
The behaviour of the banks at the moment is akin to a psychopath trying to make friends.
They know it is in their best interests, so they they smile, pat people on the back, ask people about their family — but always end up saying exactly the wrong things at all the wrong times.
I imagine that the important bit is ‘they know it is in their best interests’ — it suggests to me that there are problems ahead, and the banks want to be able to say ‘I know we’re screwing over customers, businesses and even countries — but we’re very inclusive and just look at our efforts on climate change!’
Indeed – anyone who thinks the people that run these things really cares much about their staff, or cares especially about trans people or whatever, needs their head read (to quote the late, great Kerry Packer).
I wonder how much they pay their cleaners.
I think it’ marvellous the way the banks are becoming more inclusive, and that includes opening their doors to billions of pounds of laundered drug money from all around the world. Bravo!
“…when it was bailed out by the government for £45 billion…” – it wasn’t bailed out by the government, the government has no money of its own, it was bailed out by the taxpayer. The government took our money, my money, your money, and gave it to NatWest. The government didn’t ask us, the government doesn’t ever feel the need to, because the government treats the people with contempt. The government demands our money and does what it wants with that money – bailing out banks, paying furlough, paying Sharon to stay at home with her 8 kids, paying for bend-the-knee training, paying for experimental shots that are killing and maiming people, paying to promote hatred and division of those that didn’t do as they were told. It doesn’t, however, bother to use our money to fix the roads, to get people back to work, to ease the self-imposed cost of living crisis, to put food on the damn table. The government has not only failed us, it is actively engaged in a silent war against its own people, and it using our money to wage that war. It is well past time that the people clearly drew the battle lines. I want this mob out of my home and I want my f*ckin money back.
Brilliant.
Unless I’m much mistaken, the government is also at least moving towards manufacturing crop failures by prohibiting irrigation in summer due to climate change and then claiming crop failures were caused by climate change. And that’s decidedly crossing the line from being disorganized and incompetent to being outright evil as food production cannot be reduced without people dying. Even when it’s (very likely) not going to hit us first. Rather the people in food exporting third-world countries, at least for a while. But killing black people in Africa is something even the most ardent anti-racist is always fine with.
Alright, I know I am delving into the realms of total fantasy here, but one could almost imagine that, sometime in the fairly recent past, we were invaded by an alien species that is ruthless, acquisitive and dual, or even multiple gendered. Slowly they have worked their way into every part of our lives and are trying to make us accepting of all things trans so they can blend in better. The WEF young leaders would be another battalion tasked with creating a totally digitally managed world and population.
Okay, a bit of daftness for a Sunday morning, but when I look at people like Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Whitty and Bill Gates, I do wonder if they have just zipped themselves in!
And Tony Blair – the lizard features are literally breaking out on his face.
Could just be the monkeypox, I suppose.
Honestly! I couldn’t give a bloomin’ toss what pronouns, sex, clothes, ideas, interests the staff at Halifax, or any other bank have.
I just want them to do good banking!
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‘Stale, male and pale’: racist and sexist in four words! If there was any bank in the UK that refused to engage with this woke crap, I would move my personal and business accounts there right away, as clearly they don’t want a hard-working, conservative man as a customer! Unfortunately, I don’t know of any banks in the UK not up to their eyeballs with this nonsense.
I suppose from their point of view it isn’t a big deal: they’re owned by the state, they can offer staff the silly badges and pronouns at no cost and very few employees are likely to have any trans work done on them, given how trans people represent a tiny percentage of the population, no matter how many groomers in schools are messing with our children’s heads!
But if there were an alternative, I would tell NatWest to shove my old Woody’s Wobbly Wallchart and piggybank up their behinds and go elsewhere after 40 years of custom!
And if the trans people Nat West fund subsequently decide they made the wrong decision and were badly advised, I trust it will be Nat West paying the compensation as well.
I’m glad I’m not a customer of Nat West. It’s such a pain switching bank accounts.
I’ll never knowingly save or invest at NATWEST.
As wacky as this is; it’s an issue for the bank’s shareholders and management. If they agree then so be it. Those members of the public who still bank with this useless company and disagree are free to withdraw their money.
Drat, I was going to open a current account with the Nazi West after taking AndyM’s advice and closing my Halifax account but my cash is not funding Pagan activity. Byeeee.