However, setting out the plans for the new appointment, Mr Copple told staff in an email on Friday: “We know that from 2015/16 to 2019/20 there was a 200 per cent increase in reported hate crime aimed at the trans and non-binary communities.

“Following the decision last year for the MoJ to not renew its membership with the Stonewall diversity scheme and wider issues in the press, MoJ transgender staff are feeling increasingly vulnerable.”

He said a senior member of staff who is currently the department’s LGBT+ senior champion had “therefore been looking at ways we can better support our transgender staff. A key part of that is a new role of Transgender Employee Support Officer.”

An HM Prison and Probation Service spokesman said: “An existing member of staff has taken on this additional, unpaid responsibility to be a point of contact for transgender employees seeking information and support.”

‘Woke’ public servants subverting ministerial authority

The move has, however, raised concerns. One insider said: “This feels like a workaround in defiance of the clear instruction to ditch Stonewall trans ideology.

“It’s another example of woke senior public servants in the prison and probation service subverting ministerial authority when it suits them. Meanwhile, the services they are in charge of continue to deteriorate.”

In February, it emerged the House of Lords had pulled out of the Stonewall scheme, following the BBC and the Cabinet Office.

Guidance from the Cabinet Office, published in the same month, said ministries should no longer engage with “external assurance and benchmarking organisations – unless an exception is granted by the permanent secretary.”

Instead they should bring such schemes in-house. A government source said that would mean departments would be expected to pull out of the Stonewall scheme.

“The strategy recognises the civil service is out of touch with the British public it works for,” the source said.

“This is the first serious attempt by the Government to get Whitehall to change course by cutting out the wokery, ending the reliance of dodgy diversity schemes and getting more jobs outside of the London metropolitan bubble.”

In May, Nancy Kelley, Stonewall’s chief executive, claimed “gender critical” beliefs – the belief that a person’s biological sex cannot be changed – were akin to anti-Semitism.