The New Schools Guidance on Gender Ideology is a Disgrace

In 2019 when the Conservative government introduced mandatory ‘Relationship, Sex, and Health Education’ Guidance in schools, it required schools to teach pupils about ‘gender identity’ – an ideological concept with no science behind it.

Even before the guidance went live, parents were raising concerns with MPs and government and forming grassroots groups to combat this promotion of harmful pseudoscience to school children.

Their concerns were justified. In the years to follow, Stonewall produced material for primary schools which taught children that “everyone has a gender identity”. Swindon Council’s school resources contained the ‘Ggenderbread Person’ explaining to children that gender identity is their sense of “women-ness and man-ness”. Collins, an established schools’ publisher, updated textbooks to teach children that “trans women are women and trans men are men”. One-man-bands formed to flog pseudoscience to school children via online worksheets, paid for by the taxpayer.

No wonder so many children became confused. The most vulnerable and impressionable queued to be seen at NHS Gender Clinics in their thousands. Children who accessed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will have been irreversibly damaged.

Untold hours of campaigning against this reckless harm reached its culmination when in 2024 the Conservative government published, and took to consultation, new draft guidance which was clear that the concept of gender identity should not be taught to school children.

But then we had the July 2024 election. Progress plateaued. New Labour Ministers explained that they were looking at consultation responses and re-engaging stakeholders.

So when the Labour Government finally did publish its own revised RSHE guidance in July of this year it should have been a big moment. The relative lack of public response has therefore seemed mystifying. Parliament was heading into recess. Gender critical campaigners were focused on maintaining the momentum of the For Women Scotland Supreme Court judgment and the need to embed its implications for women’s rights across organisations. The promotion of gender ideology to school children seemed to have moved into ‘nobody’s paying too much attention’ territory.

Which will suit the gender activists. Because when the new guidance goes live in September 2026 for the next school year, children will continue to learn in RSHE lessons that some men claim they are women and should be treated with respect and dignity for doing so.

The disastrous 2019 RSHE guidance required children to be “taught the facts and the law about… gender identity in an age-appropriate and inclusive way”. Pseudoscience was woven into the guidance as if it were an established concept: “It must be recognised that young people may be discovering or understanding their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The new 2025 RSHE guidance reverts focus to the concept of “gender reassignment”, legitimised because it’s a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. The fundamental human reality of biological sex and this “protected characteristic” are given a bizarre equivalence:

Pupils should also be taught the facts and the law about biological sex and gender reassignment. This should recognise that people have legal rights by virtue of their biological sex which are different from the rights of those of the opposite sex with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

The equivalence is ridiculous and legitimises these concepts being taught as equivalents to school children. Let us imagine the conversation: ‘You might be comfortable living as your sex or you might want to consider gender re-assignment. Let me explain the ways.’

If we are to teach children about gender reassignment, it seems imperative that the complications and harms associated with gender transition should also be taught.  However, the guidance simply says: “Schools should be mindful to avoid any suggestion that social transition is a simple solution to feelings of distress or discomfort.” Yet there is ample precedent for schools to go much further than this ‘say nothing’ approach. School RSHE textbooks have pages and pages on the harms of alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling, FGM, eating disorders, sexting, fake news, racism, sexism, climate change, tattoos and piercings, bunions and corns, anxiety and depression – no wonder so many kids suffer from the latter. With large numbers of children being encouraged on social media to question their ‘gender’, and now if schools are to normalise ‘gender reassignment’, any discussion must point out the complications. Boys will never be allowed to access women’s spaces – nor should they wish to – no matter how they identify. Sex by deception is a crime. Gender medicine is experimental with accumulating evidence of very serious harm.

The guidance goes on to say that: “Pupils should be taught to recognise that people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment… have protection from discrimination and should be treated with respect and dignity.” Tolerance perhaps, but respect and dignity? Who says so? What might this amount to? Should school children be told to respect cross-sex pronouns? Why? Should they respect and dignify the presence of a man in a women’s spaces even if they know he shouldn’t be there? 

Schools still have no guidance from the Government on how to work with schoolchildren who wish to be affirmed in cross-sex identities, nor how to handle requests from teachers that the children should affirm them as opposite sex. The RSHE guidance suggests that such teachers should be treated with dignity, but what about the confusion caused for young children? Shouldn’t safeguarding and our duty to teach children the truth preclude the recognition of cross-sex and other neo-identities at schools?

Finally, the new RSHE guidance says that schools “should not teach as fact that all people have a gender identity”. This leaves it open for schools to teach gender ideology as a belief system.

In the run up to September 2026 the purveyors of gender ideology for schools and schoolchildren will be reviewing their current teaching materials to see what now needs to change. Not much I predict.

In fairness to the Labour Party, the 2024 draft RSHE guidance produced by the Conservatives also required that children learn about gender reassignment while at school. No coherent arguments were made. The centrality of the Equality Act and its protected characteristics to how we live and should treat each other is simply assumed as if the Equality Act is our national moral framework. How did we ever live without it? Yet is this really what politicians would have imagined when they debated and questioned the repercussions of passing the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, and then embedded the protected characteristic of gender reassignment in the Equality Act 2010? That by 2026, school children would learn about ‘gender reassignment’ as an either-or alongside biological sex, with a studied neutrality that will work to un-anchor children from their sex, body, intuitions and physical reality? 

If we really can’t find another way of backing out of confusing our children like this, we must consider removing the protected characteristic of gender reassignment from the Equality Act and repealing the Gender Recognition Act. They create implications that, at a policy level, we can’t seem to finesse our way around so as to retain our fundamental adult duty to teach our children the truth and protect them their harm.

A selection of trans-affirming ‘educational’ materials in use in British schools: