Teachers saying they’d rather be fired than tell parents their children think they’re trans should be sacked
SCHOOL is supposed to be a safe place for children.
Teachers have a responsibility to report any signs that kids are in trouble: suspicion of sexual exploitation and abuse; drug and alcohol use; self-harm or mental health problems.
Yet as draft guidance on transgender issues for schools is set to be published by Education Secretary Gillian Keegan today, parents and others concerned about the welfare of children brace themselves for a battle.
The guidance is a response to an outcry from those against the transing of children in school, also known as “social transitioning”.
Since transgender ideology captured the nation, children at nursery are being questioned if they are content being a boy or a girl, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Rishi Sunak has been promising to deliver guidance for schools on this matter for several months, but it would appear the Government is worried that a blanket ban would be challenged under current equalities law.
For the moment it would appear that social transitioning cannot be banned — despite that it very often leads to kids being prescribed puberty blockers and, subsequently, cross-sex hormones.
The law doesn’t currently allow an outright ban on transitioning for all children, including in primary school.
This means parents are reliant on teachers acting entirely in accordance with Government guidance and choosing to share information with them.
One problem is that many of our schools are staffed by trans activists, some of whom say they will refuse to follow advice if it compels them to interrupt the social transitioning of a student, claiming this would be akin to “outing” a child.
In other words, they liken it to telling a parent when a student has revealed in confidence they are lesbian or gay.
As someone who was outed as a lesbian at school, aged 15, I could not be more offended at this comparison.
Being a gay teenager does not require hormonal or surgical intervention, and nor does it involve the creation of an entirely new persona.
It is a major safeguarding risk to leave parents in the dark.
Social transition can have terrible consequences for children.
It can lead them down a path from which it is difficult to return.
Teaching resources designed by trans lobby groups are sold to schools as though they are anti-bullying initiatives, or simply to help understand “diversity” among children, but they contain material I would describe as indoctrination.
From age seven, children are taught, for example, that being transgender is “someone who does not feel like the gender they were given at birth”.
But there is no gender given at birth, only biological sex.
The way the organisation Diversity Role Models describes this in its literature used in a number of schools appears to be reliant on sexist stereotypes of how boys and girls should behave.
We should be allowing children the freedom to play with whatever toys they wish and not be constrained by harmful gender stereotypes.
We need to stop teaching our boys that they should be hard and macho, and our girls frilly and feminine.
It’s about allowing both girls and boys to live comfortably in their bodies without being told they are in the wrong one.
Organisations such as Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall are driving a social contagion of transgender identities — and it is a safeguarding risk.
Back in the 1950s, a boy who preferred dolls to guns might have been mocked for being a girl, but at least no one really thought he was one or suggested that becoming one was an option.
Once children are allowed on to the social transition pathway they are much more likely to be swept along by gender ideologues, some of whom are their teachers, all the way to irreversible and harmful medical and hormonal intervention.
These teachers saying they would rather be fired than tell parents their children are presenting as the opposite sex at school consider themselves modern-day martyrs.
But they are causing harm and should be sacked.
Posturing teachers
Research clearly shows that children who question their gender often have other challenges going on in their lives, including autism, bullying, bereavement, mental health trauma and coming to terms with same-sex attraction.
These children need the support of their families as well as specialist clinical assessments.
How dare these posturing teachers think they can ride roughshod over a child’s guardian when so much is at stake.
A policy which encourages children to hide distress about their birth sex from their parents denies them the basic familial support they need.
And any assumption that families will harm their kids is itself harmful to those families.
Teachers who will not comply with Government guidance on this issue, having been made well aware of the harm that results from telling children they can change sex on a whim, should be forced to transition to the world of the unemployed.