Mick Hartley

More on the issue of trans guidance in schools, from Joanna Williams at Spiked:

The best way to protect children from gender ideology would be to ban social transition altogether, as Sunak and Badenoch suggest. Yet the attorney general has warned that this would be ‘unlawful’. This is because the Equality Act 2010 states that gender reassignment is a ‘protected characteristic’, regardless of age. The prime minister now faces a choice: issue a watered-down version of the guidance or introduce new legislation to prevent children socially transitioning at school.

The idea that discouraging kids from transitioning may potentially break the law should sound an alarm about the state of Britain today. Who is really in charge here – government ministers or lawyers and civil servants? And whose views are being reflected in the law and in policy – the views of citizens and voters, or those of a woke cultural elite?…

The government is in a mess. Parents are unhappy about children transitioning at school, especially when it happens without their knowledge. At the same time, teachers are unhappy about a lack of firm direction from the government when they are faced with growing numbers of gender-confused children. Guidance that has been watered down to meet the needs of the Equality Act seems woefully insubstantial when the safeguarding of children is concerned. Meanwhile, new legislation will likely meet opposition in parliament and will be time consuming to enact.

We also must not forget that this is a mess of the government’s own making. The Equality Act was passed in the dying days of the last Labour government, but the Tories have made no efforts to overturn it in their 13 years in office. What’s more, the government has largely sat back and watched as officials in the Department for Education, like so many other branches of the civil service, have been captured by gender ideology.

Been Stonewalled, in other words.

This is the bigger problem we now face. The government can issue all the guidance it likes. It can even seek legal changes to ban children from socially transitioning at school. None of this, however, gets to the heart of why growing numbers of children want to change gender in the first place. Schools lie at the heart of a culture that encourages children to question their gender and which celebrates those who want to transition.

Still, at least the prime minister recognises part of the problem. Whether he can do anything about it remains to be seen.

Whatever this government may or may not do, we can be sure that any future Labour government would be worse.