“I Was Sacked After 20 Years as a Teacher for Standing up to Gender Ideology”

Kevin Lister was sacked after 20 years as a teacher for standing up to gender ideology at his college. The new guidance “vindicates” him and is welcome, he says in the Mail, but we must go further. Here’s an excerpt.

It was around 11am one February morning last year that my two decades-long teaching career was unceremoniously terminated by an HR manager at the college where I taught A-level maths.

I was told, to my bewilderment, that I was being suspended with immediate effect over transphobia allegations and I was then escorted off the premises — never to return, as it happens, because I was later sacked.

What was the terrible, bigoted offence I had committed that ended my life’s vocation? I dared to challenge whether my colleagues and I should be affirming a 17-year-old female student’s assertion that she was “a boy” without first speaking to her parents.

That morning, I realised I had become a casualty of the culture wars — the frontline of which is in our schools.

My real crime was that I had questioned a dangerous gender ideology that has infiltrated our education system and countless other institutions, threatening to undermine the very foundations of objective truth by telling children they can change their biological sex.

But on Tuesday, after I had endured almost two years of vilification for ‘transphobia’, my scepticism was finally vindicated when the Government published transgender guidance for schools that will put child safeguarding and parental rights first.

It was announced that teachers will be told, apart from in the most exceptional cases, that parents should be immediately informed if their child expresses a wish to change gender at school.

Pupils and teachers will not be pressured to use a student’s preferred pronouns or be sanctioned if they choose not to do so, as I was.

Schools will have to protect single-sex spaces — like toilets, dormitories and changing rooms — and will not have an obligation to provide gender-neutral facilities.

Nor will boys partake in contact sports with girls, and single-sex schools will be told that they do not need to accommodate transgender pupils. That is, if the guidelines are followed.

Within hours of publication, the biggest teaching union in England suggested that schools could flout the new guidance. And, Kate Osborne, Labour MP for Jarrow, called on schools to “put their students’ needs ahead of” the Government’s “hate”.

This is why, as the former Prime Minister Liz Truss said yesterday, the rules needs to be statutory. Ms. Truss also warned of a backlash against the guidance from Tory MPs who would like to see an outright ban of social transitioning in schools and want the new guidelines to be backed by law.

Worth reading in full.