School Pupils Allowed to Change Gender Under Labour Trans Guidance
Pupils will be allowed to change their gender at school, according to new guidance published by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson that critics have said encourages a “dangerous fairy tale”. The Telegraph has more.
The guidance, published on Thursday, confirms teachers must consult parents and proceed with “caution” but should accept a child’s request to transition socially.
Sex Matters, the women’s rights campaign group, criticised the guidance, saying it would encourage “a dangerous fairy tale” and put pupils at risk.
The guidance, the publication of which was delayed, states that before allowing a child to transition socially, schools must consider any clinical advice the family has received and consult parents, unless there is a genuine safeguarding reason not to.
While pupils will have their preferred pronouns respected in the classroom, children older than eight will still have to use facilities in line with their biological sex.
Toilets, changing rooms and any overnight residential trips will remain single-sex spaces.
The guidance, which addresses how to deal with gender-questioning children, says no child should be made to feel “unsafe” through mixed-sex sports, toilets, changing rooms and dormitories.
There is continued criticism of the refusal by Phillipson, the Education Secretary, to publish separate guidance to businesses on single-sex spaces.
Phillipson said: “Parents send their children to school and college trusting that they’ll be protected. Teachers work tirelessly to keep them safe. That’s not negotiable, and it’s not a political football.
“That’s why we’re following the evidence, including Dr Hilary Cass’s expert review, to give teachers the clarity they need to ensure the safeguarding and wellbeing of gender-questioning children and young people.
“This is about pragmatic support for teachers, reassurance for parents, and above all, the safety and wellbeing of children and young people.”
The guidance for schools on how to deal with gender questioning children is backed by Baroness Cass, whose review warned that children who thought they were transgender should not be rushed into treatment they could regret.
Her review, published in 2024, recommended families should be able to see a medical professional such as a child psychologist or paediatrician as quickly as possible if a primary school child wants to socially transition.
She concluded that under-25s should not be rushed into changing gender, but should receive “unhurried, holistic, therapeutic support”. She said “life-changing” decisions must be properly considered in adulthood, noting that brain maturation continues into the mid-20s.
Her review also said that children’s wellbeing and safeguarding must be at the centre of every decision and schools cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach.
Dr Cass welcomed the new schools guidance, saying it ensures “proper accountability” for teachers. …
However, Maya Forstater, Chief Executive of the women’s rights charity Sex Matters, said allowing children to transition socially at school was encouraging “a dangerous fairy tale”.
She said: “Schools are still being left with the idea that they can facilitate ‘social transition’ – which remains undefined – and that they should negotiate this on a case-by-case basis.
“They are being encouraged to think that children have a ‘birth sex’ as well as some other concept of sex. This has no basis in law or reality, and undermines safeguarding.
“It should be clear by now that allowing children and parents to think that a child who starts their education as a girl can graduate as a boy or vice versa is a dangerous fairy tale.”
Worth reading in full.
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What could possibly go wrong?
(See canada).
These unfortunate kids are ill and need guidance and hopefully putting straight, and not indulging their delusion and absolutely not surgical or pharmacological intervention.
These kids are unfortunately vulnerable to predatory adults trying to ‘queer’ them because they suffer from some kind of other condition, eg, depression or autism. They need to gender blah-blah whatsoever, neither surgical nor pharmacological nor psyschological. They may need help or support because of the actual conditions which made them ripe for being exploited in this way. And they need protection against those who did that.
This whole gender self-identification business is just a further stage in the process of adults stepping back from exercising authority over their children and being actively involved in helping them grow into mature, well-balanced adulthood.
We’ve already seen how parents are encouraged to negotiate with their tantrum-throwing two-year-old rather than imposing discipline.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the parent in the supermarket asking their seven-year-old “What shall we have for tea tonight, darling?”.
Asking a child “Which would you like to be: a boy or a girl?” is just another step.
Parents send their children to school and college trusting that they’ll be protected – from dangerous ideologies and mentally ill teachers.
No child will ever come up with the idea that it might be transgender without some adult flooding children with gender ideology and encouraging them to do so. Philipson’s guidance just confirms that this continues to be standard practice at schools taken over by the woke mob with the express intent to make proselytes among people who are much easier to influence than grown-ups. Talking about safeguarding is laughable in this context. Children need to be protected from these people and not by them.
You are exactly correct. When I was at school quite a while ago now there was NEVER any talk of this —NEVER. —–I recall being on a train a few years ago and there were two teenage girls in the seats in front of me. Being young they did not have the maturity or discretion to speak quietly. They spoke about all manner of gender nonsense that could only have come from what they were being fed in school. It was totally absurd and I NEVER in all my time at school and further education heard such utter garbage.
Her review also said that children’s wellbeing and safeguarding must be at the centre of every decision cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach.
Code language for: Dr Hilary Crass counts herself among those who want to transgender school children but urges caution lest this upsets parents who don’t support the cause too early, that is, before their children have been irreversibly damaged for life.
As an aside: this was voted through here in the EU today. An utter disgrace. Both male AND female woketard MEPs shatting on female sex-based rights from a high height and pandering to the gender identity cult. They’re being named and shamed online and rightly so; ”BREAKING: The EU Parliament has voted to recognise “trans women” as women for all purposes, explicitly calling for them to be granted access to women-only domestic violence shelters and refugees. An EU delegation will present this radical recommendation at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York next month. It is not binding, but intended to be adopted/followed as an “international standard”. It also demonstrates the ideological makeup of the European Parliament. Few speakers mentioned the “trans women” part of the recommendation during the debate leading up to the vote. Parties could have asked for a vote on the individual paragraph, but having failed to do so, MEPs were left with a choice between rejecting the entire resolution, or adopting it with no possibility of removing the trans paragraph. The chamber was almost empty for the debate. Left-wing parties and centre-right parties concentrated on the Epstein files, “gender” stereotypes, the “gender… Read more »
“recognise trans women as women for all purposes”. ——But wait a minute. They have already called them women. That is like saying we recognise bananas as bananas, and that is perfectly fine if it is actually a banana that is being recognised. ——–But what is happening here is that we are all expected to recognise something that clearly is not a banana as a banana. ——But surely we all have powers of recognition don’t we. We can recognise a hyena, we can recognise a giraffe, we can recognise a banana and we can recognise a woman, and we know what isn’t a woman. The Supreme Court agrees.
Gender doesn’t exist. You can’t change something that doesn’t exist. You can pretend to be a different sex to the one you are- that is called “lying”. You can try to force people to say that you or someone else is something that they are not- that is called being an evil bastard.
It does exist as category defined by gender theory. Because of this, anybody can change gender fifteen times per day. Or insist he doesn’t have one in case he simply doesn’t believe in socially constructed roles/ behaviours which can meaningfully be described as male or female but which nobody can precisely define because no two women and no two men are ever really identical and every supposed female character trait or mannerism can be found in some men as well and vice versa.
Gender (as applied to people) doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s just an abstract category some people use to describe this real world. This is really idealism¹ gone completely bezerk, without any regard for reality whatsoever and people ought to be made aware of that. This is stuff people make up about the world solely based on their imagination and their ability to construct texts which seem plausible on their own. But so does a lot of SF literature for as long as the underlying assumptions aren’t questioned (first illustrative example I could think of).
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
If words mean whatever people want them to mean then meaningful communication is impossible.
If gender means something different to sex but sort of related to it then there are an infinite number of genders and therefore the word means nothing.
Background Used properly, gender is a property of nouns in languages (eg, German or French) where nouns are gendered. Terms used to designate these genders overlap with those used to designated sexes¹. In German, there are three genders, male, female and neutral. The gender of a noun doesn’t indicate any particular quality. Again in German, girl – das Mädchen – is neutral and not female and in French, table – le table – is male while machine gun – la mitrailleuse – is female². — The following is seriously abridged. In particular, I’ve left out anything which links this to Marxism. — Gender Theory Gender theory is an American social science theory which started to become popular in the 1970s. It postulates that sex is irrelevant or even imaginary and that what we know as male or female isn’t a characristic decided by sex but gender roles certain people have learnt to play because society expected them to and societal mechanism for punishing transgressors stopped them from doing something else instead. Role is here to be understood as something like character class in a role-playing game or a certain kind of theatre character, eg, the dashing hero, the insidious villain,… Read more »
My take on “gender” is that it’s an attempt to “escape” from some perceived straitjacket where people of a particular sex feel like they are expected to look and behave in a certain way: “My sex doesn’t define me”. I would totally agree with that statement. Where they go wrong is thinking they need to do anything about it other than be themselves and to hell with what people think. They proceed to try and put themselves in some different but as far as I can see equally restrictive box, which doesn’t make a lot of sense and seems unlikely to lead to happiness. You don’t like generalisations, which is fine. I think they can be useful. But they are just that – generalisations. No-one with any sense gets obsessed with them or thinks they are definitive or have anything whatsoever to say about an individual. It’s all very sad.
That’s not a take on gender I’ve put to discussion but a short summary of (US-originated) gender theory which is the theoretical (or ideological) framework for this nonsense. It’s another offspring of post-marxist so-called “critical theory” which calls itself “critical” because it’s principally opposed to everything and seeks to deconstruct everything into an oppressor – oppressed scheme which proves that whatever is currently being ‘critically’ analyzed must be eliminated to further the progress of mankind towards (communist) utopia.
NB: This text may suffer from factual shortcomings but it’s literally meant as written. In particular, it doesn’t represent my opinion on anything.
Sure. I am sure what you say is accurate. I guess what I set out was intended to be what appeals to the “be kind” layman who doesn’t really have much of an ideological view but wants to be seen to be nice to people who feel uncomfortable in their own skin.
The problem with these “be kind” laymen is that they’ll remain kind even after having been pushed over a cliff by those they’re supposed to be kind to until them hitting the ground eliminates all further options.
Repay them in kind makes much more sense. If they’re not kind to me, I’m not going to be kind to them.
[Obviously a bit of an aside]
Hear, hear. It does make me laugh when people insist on dealing in stereotypes and thus generalizing entire sexes or large groups of people in order to bolster their argument, which falls apart as soon as you begin looking at people as individuals, then the contradictory facts come to the fore. One example: you can look at any amount of news reports or data sets which demonstrate women are highly represented as culprits in child cruelty cases. But we’re supposed to be the nurturers, right? Well, anyone who was brought up by an emotionally unavailable, cold and indifferent mother, who wouldn’t know how to show affection if her life depended on it, might beg to differ. Women are more highly represented with regards to neglect and emotional abuse of children and men for sexual abuse and serious violence. Therefore, it is a fact that some people should definitely not be having kids because they’re either incapable, dysfunctional or both. ”Of the 192,321 unique perpetrators in the data set, 89,028 (46%) were male and 103,293 (54%) were female. More than half of all male perpetrators (51%) were biological fathers. In comparison, among female perpetrators, 86 percent were biological mothers.” https://aspe.hhs.gov/male-perpetrators-child-maltreatment-findings-ncands-research-summary ”In… Read more »
Labour show an unhealthy interest in children and sex, In my opinion
So someone can “identify” as something they are not. But why is everyone else expected to “identify” them as something they are not. Surely we all have powers to “identify” things as well and that includes whether a person or animal is male or female. But no we are all expected to deny reality and the law will insist we do that.
The granddaughter of a friend suddenly announced at around age 3 or 4 that she wanted to be a boy. A year previously her baby brother was born. That may be connected, or may not, but it is perfectly possible that it was simply a case of “penis envy” that could have been dealt with differently by her (loving) parents.
Instead, her parents went along with it. Her name was adapted; she was allowed to dress as a boy and that has carried on ever since.
She is now age 7 / 8 and is now being home schooled because she had no school friends and school life was becoming difficult for her.
And that is all this governmental nonsense will achieve: confused children who struggle to make friends and who will have a very difficult school life if they are treated as one sex in the classroom but a different one when it comes to bodily functions.
Children have absolutely no idea what “transitioning” will require or the misery it may lead to.
The nonsense should be nipped in the bud, not encouraged by the government and the left-wing Civil Service/teaching blob.
I wonder how this will work out in single-sex schools? Will a boy who then goes on to identify as a girl have to leave? I suspect not. Instead, I expect schools will be obliged to tie themselves up in knots making costly provision for one or two anomalous pupils.
A thought that might be unpopular with some but how about increasing single sex education?