September 7, 2023 - 10:30am
Is anyone prepared to stand up against the spread of trans ideology in schools? Rishi Sunak said as much, but now he appears to be backing away from it.
Long-delayed guidance on how to deal with pupils who claim to have changed sex still hasn’t been published, and now it looks as though the Prime Minister is having second thoughts about bringing in a law to enforce strict new rules.
If reports from “Whitehall sources” are accurate, it would represent another climbdown by politicians who have repeatedly buckled rather than face the wrath of trans activists. Sunak was told in July by the Attorney General, Victoria Prentis, that legislation is needed to prevent “social transitioning”, where pupils who claim to be trans demand to use new names, pronouns and the uniform of the opposite sex.
But it’s far from clear whether a change to the 2010 Equality Act is needed to issue robust guidance. Some lawyers believe the Attorney General’s advice is an overly strict interpretation, based on the questionable proposition that the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” requires teachers to accede to every demand made by children who claim to be trans. They say it is hard to believe that schools have to ignore their safeguarding obligations and allow 14-year-old boys to use girls’ toilets. Or that they should be expected to lie about a pupil’s sex — and compel other children to lie.
All of this raises the question of whether Sunak is convinced of the need for legislation — or whether he is hiding behind the Attorney General’s advice. He may think he has enough on his plate at the moment, without walking into the media storm that would follow publication of the kind of tough guidance we’ve been led to expect. But that is how trans activists operate, using bullying tactics to frighten critics of gender ideology into backing down. And while the Prime Minister would be attacked by a handful of Conservative MPs who are signed up to this nonsense, most are firmly on the side of reality.
If Sunak publishes watered-down guidance that avoids the issue of “social transitioning”, it will be an act of rank cowardice. He knows that time is short, that the Conservatives are likely to be in opposition in less than eighteen months, and the Labour Party has an alarming number of trans activist MPs and parliamentary candidates within its ranks.
Many people who are not natural Conservatives have put their hopes in Tory politicians like the Women and Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, who has been outspoken about what is happening in schools. If the Prime Minister caves in, the consequences will be dire. Teachers and children will be left in fear of being disciplined simply for asserting a belief in reality.
Teaching children to lie has no place in the curriculum, even when it’s done to avoid hurting another child’s feelings. The opposite is true, in fact. One of the things pupils need to learn is how to think critically, equipping them for a world in which they will be bombarded with false claims and conspiracy theories.
Crumbling concrete is not the only threat to children’s health. Bad ideas are just as dangerous, and few are more insidious than telling kids they can change sex. Sunak needs to get trans activism out of the country’s schools, and he needs to do it quickly.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
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SubscribeAt my kids high school the trans-fad seems to have faded substantially. In the period immediately after lockdown it was all the rage with some pupils declaring their “re-assignment” almost weekly.
This ebbing away may have something to do with the fact this particular school is pretty good at not indulging this sort of stuff so much. So maybe it is still a big thing in other schools, I’m not sure.
Either way, women and girls have the right to protected single-sex spaces for legitimate purposes such as safety and personal dignity. Nobody should be able to simply identify themselves into them. This applies doubly so to children as they are even more vulnerable due to their age and physical/emotional immaturity.
Apart from that I don’t have any particular problem with kids finding out about gender, just as I don’t have any particular problem with them finding out about Islam or Buddhism. People who want to present themselves as a gender other than their sex clearly exist just as muslims and buddhists do and the fact that I personally believe they are all different varieties of woo-woo doesn’t change that.
My objections start when kids (and all of us more generally) are taught unscientific nonsense about “changing sex” as if it is fact and compelled to validate this magical thinking, at risk of being punished, bullied and ostracised.
The ethical issue is that they change gender in their minds. Then a whole cohort of dubious adults indulges and facilitates the medicine and surgery that attempts to change their sex. Otherwise, you’re right that gender identity has the same status as any other religious system of beliefs.
Yes, I hadn’t specifically mentioned my objection to conducting irreversible medical interventions on confused and distressed children, but I hope that was implicit in my comments.
One of the reasons I think its probably better to talk to kids about sex and gender alongside each other is that otherwise the only people they think understand them are precisely those people who believe its ok to give children life-altering drugs.
It should be entirely possible to tell kids that its ok to feel confused about gender and that some people will grow up and live entirely happily identifying in the gender other than their sex. But also to tell them that you don’t actually change sex by having bits cut off (or stuck on) and the reason sex-based rights exist, especially for women, is because it is sex not gender which is operative in respect of things like fairness in sports, vulnerability to physical and sexual assault, embarrassment about periods, risk of harm or death in childbirth etc.
“some people will grow up and live entirely happily identifying in the gender other than their sex”
Not so sure children should be told this. I know someone who has lived as a transwoman for 50 yrs. She is in poor health and has had to stop taking cross sex hormones. She is the first to tell anyone who asks that her life has been very lonely.
We all know people whose experience demonstrates the point we are trying to make, the question is whether they are representative.
People who for whatever reason want to live as a gender different to their sex clearly exist and, I suspect, are on the whole happier than they would be if they couldn’t live openly as they choose. I don’t see any reason to hide that from kids any more than we should hide the fact some people are happier being vegans, Hindus, Tottenham Hotspur supporters, or whatever hard-core Harry Styles fanatics are known as.
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I simply cannot believe that the Conservative Party has had these open goals in front of them for several years and have failed to even take a shot.
Trans-activism, open borders, “decolonisation”, taking the knee, Just Stop Oil activists, ULEZ – this should be Clear Blue Water between the Tories and Labour. How can Sunak and co not see that?
Perhaps they do but they personally identify with the Labour side of these debates, Very worrying!
A big part of it for the Conservatives is generational fear leading to confused policy and messaging.
Their vote has all but collapsed among young people. Only about 21% aged 18-24 voted for them in 2019. In 2010 that was 30% and in 1979 it was 42%. Young voters are, probably correctly, perceived as being more likely to think social justice matters are important and therefore be instinctively more sympathetic to issues like trans-rights. I have my own thoughts about how much of that is because they’ve genuinely thought the issues through and how much is social pressure, but the end result is the same if they will never kiss (or vote for) a Tory.
In the past this wasn’t such a huge issue electorally for the Conservative because young people grew up, got jobs, and bought houses. As a result they tended to then lean more towards the party which was seen as defending the status quo. But its going to be interesting to see to what extent that is still true as home-ownership continues to decrease.
Lots of good stuff in what you say though I don’t believe home ownership will decrease, I think it will increase over the next decade or so. 50% of all UK dwellings are owned outright (and this is rising by about 500k mortgages which are paid off each year). We are hurtling towards an under-discussed avalanche of inheritance which will change the picture significantly. When that happens, I suspect Tory messages on abolishing IHT and protecting the Greenbelt will resonate. I also think that the 40+ vote is very likely to respond to a tough line on Woke issues and are much more motivated to vote than younger people – remember the non-existent youth vote in the referendum or the various “youth-quakes” that have failed to materialise since?
I agree in respect that nobody seems to understand that the Boomers won’t live forever, so the wealth they are “hoarding” will inevitably be redistributed across generations at some point.
The question is though, who will end up with their houses? Will their Gen X children sell them on or rent them out? And even if they sell them, will they be bought by landlords or owner-occupiers?
The inheritance issue of course has two problems. Firstly without changes in how we fund social care and with an aging population much wealth may go on those fees. Average care home fee per wk for a self funder – £1500-2000. Yes, that’s per week and the costs are only heading one way due to labour shortages. It’s almost the same for domiciliary care at home. If you think you are inheriting get ready to go through some pain navigating this for Mum or Dad.
Secondly it’s unmeritocratic isn’t it and ratchet’s in unearned advantage. Some won’t give a stuff about that if they benefit, but one of the fundamental problems with UK economy is we have Asset Rich Brits vs Austerity Exposed Brits. Whether on the Right or the Left perpetuating unfairness and this division is toxic. Brits want fair play.
On the money, J!
The two big policy issues will be the funding of residential care and the rate of inheritance tax. And the pretty well-established arguments about personal property, personal responsibility, double taxation and economic fairness mean the political sides will cleave quite naturally I think.
There are other interesting questions like what happens if a swathe of the population no longer has to earn rent or repay a mortgage? Do they stop working? Or do they risk their capital on new business ventures? Do recent immigrants have no assets (because their parents and grandparents are overseas) while natives do? And what is the implication of that? Do people that inherit start families earlier because they have secure property?
The answers will be clear soon enough.
Lots of good points from both of you. I’m somewhat unusual in that while I did become more right inclined after acquiring property, the light bulb had already switched in my late 20s/early 30s when I was still relatively skint and renting. My question is the impact of higher education. While my cohort paid off moderate debts from the gradual withdrawal of maintenance grants with ease (although resenting the Tory government who introduced this at the time) I wonder what the impact of £50k debts will be, inheritance or not. There’s also being sold the canard of a degree. Easy for us old frats to see the root cause in Blairism, but the current younger generations will associate their expensive road to low paid work with Cameron. Throw in paying £50k to have your head filled with neo-Marxist/Post Modernist horse manure and you have a perfect storm.
The TV pundit Martin Lewis is very good on student loans. Worth watching his presentation on them to understand why they are not the burden on the graduate that they are believed to be. Basically you pay 9% on earnings above £27,295. So if you earn £37,295 you pay £900 a year or £75 a month. This is true regardless of the size of loan you take out.
The real problem with student loans is that they are wiped after 30 years (or rather they are paid for by the taxpayer at that point).
The Institute For Fiscal Studies estimates 83% with English student loans won’t clear the debt (including interest) within the 30 years! So almost all loans are actually picked up by the poor old taxpayer. Which is probably not a sustainable system.
This is a good point. In theory you could, of course, inherit enough to buy property but remain below the income threshold for repayment. Of course, they will join the cohort of the taxpayer on whom the burden falls, but I doubt that will even occur to them. Essentially, this has perpetuated the system of free education and shifted a huge burden onto general taxation via sending too many school leavers to university. We need politicians willing to tackle this. It’s clearly unsustainable apart from the problem that the Blob in general has a habit of rolling on unreformed and paying useless people to do nothing.
The consequences of not banning “social transitioning” in schools is entirely predictable. Disruptive students will exploit the opportunity to misbehave and cause staff trouble. There will be increased social contagion of trans nonsense, particularly amongst girls having a hard time dealing with puberty and those seeking attention and wanting to be seen as “special”. Then there is the obvious danger of allowing boys in the girls lavatories and changing rooms. One can imagine how much extra trouble this creates for staff: having to remember all the stupid pronouns of the children , dealing with the disruptive students, having to play along with the absurd fictions of trans ideology and living in fear of committing the unforgivable act of “misgendering” a pupil.
Just from a practical basis, the argument for a ban is overwhelming. But what makes the government’s craven response particularly foolish is that polling of the public shows a sizeable majority of the public are against this trans nonsense, and are increasingly so the more it is dragged out in to the open and people hear what has been going on.
For a party facing defeat at the next general election, it would naturally be expected that they would go for an easy win and ban “social transitioning” in schools. It would certainly put Starmer in a difficult situation of having to defend it. But for all the Leftists’ talk of the Tories cynically stoking a culture war for electoral gain, they are doing the opposite. The Tories seem to be in the grip of a fear of inciting the the wrath of the likes of the BBC, Guardian and the rest of the “progressive” class. But this is precisely who they should be upsetting. The more they howl the more the government is probably doing something right.
Nailed it.
The Tories have form here, getting in early to claim that any opposition to gender-affirming care was an example of conversion therapy (normally concerning a sect trying to ‘cure’ alternative sexualities). Naturally, they received absolutely no political opposition or critique from the British political class for this position.
In other words, for a while the British government officially recognised that anyone who questions clinical or sexual interventions on young people with bodily dsymorphia is engaging in a sinister form of conversion therapy by denying the kid/person’s right to accede to their own gender identity.
They have reined back on this since but there seems a lot of pressure from the British public/education system to return to this position.
The Tories have spent years pandering to people who basically never vote for them. Where are all the homosexual men and women who became loyal Tory activists? It’s been a decade since the same-sex marriage was introduced by the Tory Party and I can’t see a single one praising them for it. It was a total waste of time, electorally speaking. Still, it’s no surprise that the modern Tory Party would pander to the powerful trans rights lobby and its wealthy financial backers (Open Society Foundation, Arcus Foundation, Tides Foundation, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs etc.)
It is of course possible that the Conservatives WANT to lose the election because they know from the inside that everything is pretty awful and then Labour get to inherit the mess. I too don’t understand why they are so unwilling to oppose the trans-cult!!
I’m an admirer of the author’s writing, and once again she’s on the mark with this article. However… i wish she – and everyone else – would stop using the has no place trope in their writing or speech. It’s part of the language used by those seeking to police our thoughts, and there are much better alternatives than using it to make a very important point.
This is all about giving 16+ kids the vote.
On UnHerd everyone is adamant that they won’t bother to vote. But there will now be the added possibility of agitators in schools.
This is a Government that has spent almost a decade and a half announcing that things will change, that quangos will go on the bonfire, that freedom of speech will be protected in universities, that conservatives won’t concede acres more on the subject of LGB and T rights, the list goes on. Then when the policy announcement is forgotten, months later, it is quietly dropped. What has this Government actually done that is even remotely conservative in character? What do these people actually do each day? They’re clearly not scrutisinising legislation. Why are they even in power if not to make laws that empower their supporters and weaken their opponents?
My only possible conclusion is that it is not inadvertent weakness, paralysis and incompetence, but intentional stalling by politicians who are nothing more than creatures of Finance. At the very least the next Labour administration may be able to give the Tories some pointers in how to actually use the state apparatus to your benefit since it seems like ever since Thatcher was thrown out they’ve, like a dog chasing cars, had no idea what to do with the vehicle once they’ve caught up to it.
Spot on.
Rishi Sunak’s stance on gender transition in schools seems to be flip-flopping, and it’s causing confusion among educators and parents alike. Education is a crucial aspect here. Consistency in policies regarding gender education(Essay Writing Online ) is essential for creating inclusive and safe learning environments. It’s important that our leaders take a well-informed and unwavering stance on such matters, prioritizing the education and well-being of all students. Clarity and consistency in government policies will ultimately benefit our education system and promote understanding and acceptance among students.
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