by Jim Chimirie on X
He was not rude. He did not shout. He did not threaten or abuse anyone. By all accounts his tone was calm, firm and respectful. David Toshack, an army veteran in the final week of training as a prison officer, said one thing in a classroom in Edinburgh: he would not call male prisoners “she” or “her” because that would be a lie. Within hours he was removed from the session, taken into a corridor, HR was consulted, and he was dismissed with immediate effect. Not suspended. Not warned. Gone.
That detail matters. This was not a case of misconduct. It was a case of belief. More precisely, it was a case of a man refusing to say something he believed to be untrue after being told – falsely – that the law required him to say it. Toshack pointed out that this was company policy, not statute. He was right. UK law does not compel pronoun use. Parliament has passed no such requirement. Courts have not imposed it. Yet a trainer stood in front of a room of recruits and declared it “the law” anyway. That lie is the heart of this case.
Once an institution starts presenting contested ideology as settled law, the transformation is complete. Training stops being about competence and becomes about belief. Policy hardens into doctrine. Disagreement is no longer something to be answered, but something to be managed and punished. This is not mission creep or confusion. It is the end result of a long capture by a left-progressive worldview that treats language as a weapon, truth as optional, and dissent as a form of harm to be neutralised.