Mick Hartley

A powerful article from Janice Turner in this morning's Times – Schools fuel trans angst by sidelining parents:

When the homework email from her daughter’s school referred to Leo not Libby, Emma assumed it was an error. But when questioned, a teacher admitted her 14-year-old had asked to be called by a male name and pronouns but wanted to keep this secret from her parents. The school treated this request as no more significant, says Emma, “than ticking the vegetarian option for lunch”.

But this “social transition” is not, as the eminent paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass concluded in her independent review of child gender services, a “neutral act”. Rather it is an “active intervention” with “significant effects” on “psychological functioning”. It can crystallise a teenager’s transient unease about her developing body into a rigid identity — imagine the humiliation of changing your name back — setting her on course to hormones and adult surgery.

Libby was among a dozen pupils at her girls’ school in southeast England to identify as a boy. Her parents were supportive when, at 12, she came out as a lesbian. Then at 13, Libby watched a presentation by an external trans speaker, a pivotal moment which sent her deep into online gender forums.

Emma learnt that the school, a Stonewall Champion, had adopted the charity’s “trans tool-kit”. This is a deliberate deceit whereby a child’s new name and pronouns are used in class but only her legal identity in parental correspondence. (The homework email was an error.) When Emma asked why this profound change in her child’s life had been made without her knowledge or consent, the school referred her to social services as a safeguarding risk.

That's chilling. A safeguarding risk?? It's clearly the Stonewall-affiliated school which is the safeguarding risk: leading the child into the world of medical intervention in the name of a cult-like ideology, while keeping it all hidden from the parents.

This is no isolated case. Teachers in every school are navigating pupils’ requests for social transition, the vast majority girls. From every direction children are fed the notion that not conforming to sexist stereotypes about clothes, hairstyles or preferred pastimes means you’re in the “wrong” body. It’s embedded in sex education materials which schools often outsource to trans activist groups. It’s promoted in books like Welcome to St Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure, shortlisted for the Waterstones children’s prize, with a drawing of a naked teenage girl, her breasts captioned “fatty lumps that need to be gone”.

The core principle of school safeguarding is that if a child has a problem teachers are unqualified to treat, such as anorexia, self-harm or ADHD, parents must be informed. LGBT groups compare a child changing gender to a gay child from a homophobic home coming out at school. Yet sexuality has no wider consequences. Schools ask for parental permission to apply sunscreen. But they won’t tell you if your child has gender dysphoria, a mental health condition treated with irreversible drugs.

That's the problem in a nutshell: the assumption that this is equivalent to gay children having to deal with homophobic parents. It isn't. There are no "trans children". No one is "born in the wrong body". It's a social contagion. It's like claiming that there are children who are born anorexic, whose "real selves" are waif-like skeletons with skin, and who need to be protected from their horrible anorexophobic parents.

Emma has joined the Bayswater Group, now representing 850 parents. They share the trauma of beloved sons and daughters being estranged by schools or encouraged by activist groups to seek instead a “rainbow family” online. Bayswater parents insist they know their children best and that gender issues emanate from complex histories including autism, depression and anxiety.

Their views are wholly borne out by the Cass interim review, which led to the closure of the Tavistock child gender identity development service (GIDS). A new NHS model is being created, treating a child’s problems holistically, focusing on exploratory therapy. But this cannot slow the conveyor belt which drove GIDS referrals up by 5,000 per cent in ten years. The off-switch lies in schools.

The Department for Education has long promised guidance. Teachers are terrified of being sacked for reporting safeguarding concerns or being sued if they don’t. Parents are forbidden to see the unscientific, ideology-driven teaching materials that fuel their children’s confusion. Schools act as if they have the authority to remove parental responsibility, which lies in a court. Social transition taken to Stonewall’s logical extreme means male trans pupils in girls’ showers.

Clarity is urgently needed. Yet the education secretary Gillian Keegan, instead of drawing upon the deep, extensive research of the Cass review, is starting again from scratch. A months-late draft DfE consultation document has not yet been sent out. Is Keegan reluctant to loosen Stonewall’s grip? She has refused to meet the Bayswater group and said she agreed with Nicola Sturgeon that a child is capable of changing legal sex at 16. (She retracted after an outcry.)

In a government which largely seems to understand the problem, the appointment of Gillian Keegan as education secretary is a major disappointment. She hasn't a clue.

DfE guidance needs to separate gender from sex; to state that however children wish to express themselves — boys in make-up, girls with short hair — is embraced. It should insist schools teach “gender identity” as an unproven theory, not fact, and that bodily self-disgust at puberty is entirely normal. Social transition should only be allowed after a clinical diagnosis and with parental consent, but does not override a child’s sex or other students’ rights. Above all, schools should ensure children are supported by those who love them best: not online “friends” but parents.

Eventually Emma was referred to a sympathetic social worker who told her daughter that she was lucky to have a “loving family”. It was a turning point: “You could see her visibly relax. She’d been told we were abusive, that she needed safeguarding from us. So she’d gone through years of trauma alone. It was so cruel. But at last she felt safe.”