Mick Hartley

Oh dear. Gender is a ‘spectrum’ says top girls’ school formerly attended by Princess Royal:

One of Britain’s top private girls’ schools has said that gender is a “spectrum” and pupils can have “lots of different” identities. Benenden School in Kent, the boarding school formerly attended by the Princess Royal, includes the contested theory of gender in its equality, diversity and inclusion policy for pupils.

The policy states that while “some people may identify as a boy or a girl”, others “may find neither of these terms feel right for them and identify as neither or somewhere in the middle”.

It adds: “While many people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, for others gender is more of a spectrum, with lots of different possible identities.”

The school states that it considers “the full spectrum of gender identity” within its policy, including people who identify as non-binary.

The policy also applies to staff and parents, the school said….

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at Sex Matters, the gender-critical campaign group, said: “School policies that talk about gender identity, sex assigned at birth and non-binary identities have no basis in either UK law or biological reality.”

She warned that schools could be at risk of breaking the law if they act on the contested notion of gender identity, for example by recording pupils’ gender identity instead of their sex or by allowing boys into girls’ spaces.

It would help, of course, if the government actually got off the fence and committed itself to providing reality-based guidance, instead of this Stonewall nonsense.

School leaders have warned that they have been left in limbo on how to respond to pupils who are questioning their gender because the Government has failed to deliver guidance.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, promised that transgender guidance for schools would be published before the end of the summer term. However, it has been delayed by a Cabinet disagreement on whether a law change is needed to ban children from changing their gender pronouns at school.

A draft of the guidance in April, which was never published, said that single-sex schools would not be forced to accommodate transgender pupils.