Oxfordshire CC withdraws transgender toolkit after girl's legal challenge

This is great news, congratulations to all involved.

Another concern is the number of these organisations who have suddenly reinvented themselves and self identified as suitable people to teach children about Sex & Relationships. Lobby groups are using SRE as a Trojan horse to enforce their views on children - Peter Tatchell has a campaigning group that visits schools and has openly spoken about his interest in grooming girls (and boys) into accepting the presence of naked adults.

Hopefully parents will be asking questions. I certainly would. They pay for this don’t they?

MrsSnippyPants All of those schools are independent girls schools - members of the Girls' Day Schools Trust. My guess is that the Trust is another organisation that has been regulatory captured and failed to exercise due diligence and actually look at the activities of that organisation and some of their people.

Has anyone complained to the ombudsmen for the councillors?

This is worth looking at more closely. In Scotland, COSLA is the main source that has pushed the trans agenda - LA's take their lead from COSLA & they've had people in high profile, key strategic positions for quite some time. The Equally Safe funding scheme designed by scotgov to frame the remit on those orgs who apply for funding to include an LGBT inclusion plan as part of their application to qualify for funding was partly written by a councillor who is, shocker, responsible for the equality & diversity remit for COSLA. Have a look at their Migration, Population & Diversity team. Their president's social media tells you all you need to know on how captured this org is in Scotland.

It's definitely worth looking at whoever is the equivalent in England/Wales/NI.

If you look at the Warwickshire one (which has supposedly been withdrawn, but is still available):

headsup.warwickshire.gov.uk/assets/1/r0566_trans_inclusion_toolkit_for_schools.pdf

And go to the Acknowledgements section, you'll see the following:

"The following local authorities and organisations have contributed to the creation of this toolkit: Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Birmingham City Council, Derbyshire County Council, Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, Kent County Council, Leicester City
Council, Leicestershire County Council, Lincolnshire County Council, Nottinghamshire County Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Sheffield City Council, Warwickshire County Council, the Young Transgender Centre of Excellence at the Leicester LGBT Centre, and
Joe Butler at SEND Support (Special Educational Needs and Disability Consultancy and Training).
Special thanks go to Brighton and Hove City Council and Allsorts Youth Project for allowing some of the content of this toolkit to be based on their ‘Trans* Inclusion Schools Toolkit’, and
to Gendered Intelligence for commentary on the final draft."

All those councils are using the same guidance, with minor variations.

THANK YOU MrsSnippyPants. Remember - if you know a kid at those school...

I confess to not reading everything new on this but I know the background.

Has anyone complained to the ombudsmen for the councillors? I ask as o wonder what the next steps are, as there is not JR now?

If that particular domino fell it could knock a lot of others down too.

Petra there is a YouTube link on that ReSisters thread so you can see what kind of things they have spoken of. sarahstuartxx has written a running commentary on it. Lots of sexual stuff.

My bet on determination on defending these guides would be Brighton.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3433540-School-in-Brighton-with-76-trans-gender-fluid-kids

Agree about the desirability of a judicial review, but I'm sure this won't be the last LA that refuses to back down until dragged towards a courtroom.

So how can we tell if our LEA is using it? Does a quick google reveal, or might they be buried?

Maya did a thread on Twitter listing a number of other LA's using the same guide that's been ditched by Oxford. SSA I'm sure will have more details of others (or will be working on it) and TransgenderTrend I'm guessing will be aware of what is being used in many schools.

Look at LA websites & social media a/cs for details of their equality & diversity work & follow for details of what resources they are linking to. Where resources aren't publicly linked, look for anything online that mentions what LGBT schemes the schools are signed up to & check those groups' websites/social media for links to what resources they are using.

A lot of this stuff appears to be huge & overwhelming to tackle but it can be done. One frustration I've had with the recent spats in feminist circles is the fact that too much time & effort is/has been spent on procrastination over personal political integrity while the real progress is actually happening where those discussions are not relevant to the work needed & being done. It doesn't matter what your political leanings are when it comes to safeguarding & protecting the rights of children, especially girls. Getting caught up in tone policing or smearing & sneering at work others do - which is having an impact - is a waste of everyone's time. The work that the likes of SSA, Fair Cop, Maya, FPFW, TransgenderTrend, MBM, WGiS etc. are having on the ground is a far better way to focus & achieve gains that wrangling over internal party politics.

Thanks for sharing MrsSnippy. Clearly a foot in the door with the GDST then. Why do girls need to know about the transgender community?

I do hope that none of the parents at Putney/wimbledon happen to watch or record the online ones....

I’m not a parent there but I know loads who are...any obvious places to look to see why this person should not be talking to the students? And so I’m prepared if they get to my school?

^^ I'm sure you clever lot know this already but others may have not

twitter.com/resistersu/status/1258496113784623110?s=21

Upcoming speaking engagements with youth under 18

10 May..Wimbledon High School....London, England (Online)
14 May...Putney High School...Putney, London England (Online)
23 June..NewcastleHigh School for Girls...Newcastle, England (Online)

Quick note as due to start work, but this document is important as it describes how/why the EHRC Guidance is flawed.
This is where we need Truss, Nicholson, Lucas etc to focus

uncommongroundmedia.com/the-2010-equality-act-is-being-undermined-by-official-guidance/

Parents also need to know who is coming into the school to speak to our kids. I found out (after) that ferret and vile came to speak, and also a person who talked about the trials of being a woman in business (you can imagine the itty bitty question I had for that person). I’m sure I saw a listed dates on twitter of a particular mermum doing talks in the coming weeks to girls schools.

I can’t abide the staff member who arranges the guest speakers at the school. He seems rather... ‘focussed’. No feminists/women role models ever invited.

Spero and WTF thank you, that's very interesting to hear.

Standing by with spade if the new EHRC guidance turns out to be as anti-female in fact as we know they would prefer for it to be.

It was hard to see why Oxfordshire seemed determined to stick to its guns once Warwickshire buckled on the same issue. I am pleased but like others, I would have welcomed the clarity of a judicial review to knock this on the head once and for all.

I doubt the EHRC will give up, though. It will be looking for some sort of workaround. That means more scrutiny and more challenges. It's like playing Whack-a-Mole.

So how can we tell if our LEA is using it? Does a quick google reveal, or might they be buried?

Are lots of LEAs still using these? Should people be writing in pointing out these judgements?

Yes. Anyone who lives in an LA using the same or similar guides should absolutely invoke the legal challenge & ask their own LA to withdraw the guides. Hopefully SSA will be working on this and strategising on how to tackle other authorities. I'd also say that if anyone else has a child who feels as strongly as the other 2 amazing teenagers who stood up for all girls' rights, contact SSA & see if they can help guide you through the approach necessary. It does seem to need an active case to push LAs to have to act, but if they get lots of people challenging why such guides are still being used/relied on in light of the SSA cases, while SSA find other girls willing to challenge other LAs, all that helps sharpen their focus on the risks they're exposed to in failing to act & remove the guides.

The EHRC are clearly not that confident in their school guide they intended to publish last autumn, otherwise as Spero says, they'd also be dealing with a challenge to it. If the TRA strategists have deemed it necessary to pass the buck to the EHRC re school guide, rather than take on the challenge of a JR, then the pressure on EHRC is greater now too. They're sitting on that guide for many reasons & the success SSA has had is certainly going to make them far more twitchy than they already were over that guide.

I cannot stress enough the importance of SSA's impact here. Every legal dept & legal advisor LA's rely on now have to factor SSA's success here into their 'prospects of success' evaluation. This is huge. Testing the law with an active case is still important, but equally, these victories still have as much of an impact on the level of risk LA's face by maintaining support & use for the same or similar guides.

Are lots of LEAs still using these? Should people be writing in pointing out these judgements?

It’s great that LAs have been challenged on their discriminatory guidance and backed down. What depresses me is that it has exposed how little consideration girls’ needs were given and how willing public bodies were to steamroller over girls’ rights. If you gave it even a moment’s thought it was outrageous. I hope to God the blatantly discriminatory guidance isn’t replaced by more insidious, indirect discrimination. Eternal vigilance is called for!