In other words teaching staff with transphobic views are now worried they won't be able to get away with expressing them anymore?
What is it with the moronic takes all the time? I mean this doesn't just misrepresent what the Scottish Secondary Teacher Association said, it vomits it back up in a wholly unrecognizable way that is just beyond stupid.
And I don't say that lightly.
Here's the situation:
We have laws Scottish schools must abide by. They include The Human Rights Act 1998, The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Equality Act 2010, Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), school building regulations, statutory guidance and a whole range of other regulations, safeguarding framewoks and education policies that schools must also adhere to.
What has happened here is that the Scottish Government has created guidance, which (if implemented as written), will see staff violate a range of the above.
What the Scottish Government has also done is passed the buck. They have made it unequivocally clear that all responsibility, including legal liabilities, for implementing the guidance rests with the schools doing it. At best, that means the head of each school, at worst each individual member of staff, from teaching assistants to learning support to teachers.
It doesn't matter what individual teachers or staff members believe about self-id and trans-inclusion in opposite-sex spaces and information sharing - they are bound by law to uphold the rights of all children in schools, to safeguard them all and to include all parents who have not officially been designated a concern for the wellbeing of their child in all decision making about them. (For those parents who have, slightly different rules apply, but as long as they have parental rights, they also must be included.)
And the official guidance from the Scottish Government gives advice that goes against much of the rules schools are bound by.
At long last the only specialist union for Scotland's high school teachers has twigged that this guidance is a danger to their members, because it leaves them wide open to legal challenges, and all without having the backing of their government.
It was obvious that this would happen. The last guidance, commissioned by the Scottish Government, paid for and endorsed, by them, was nonetheless not written and published by the Scottish Government but an outside advocacy group. So when that guidance was found not to be legal, the Scottish Government washed their hands off it.
The new guidance repeats much of the old guidance (how could it not, given who had input again). Although it avoids some of the most egregious breaches, it still gives advice that would lead to violating the rights of children and safeguarding rules. That's because no one writing this new guidance seems to have been willing to engage with campaigners seeking to uphold the rights of all children or the rights of female children or the rights of disabled children or the rights of children from faith groups.
But this guidance is coming from the government, so it cannot be simply ignored.
The union has one job here: protect its members from suffering the consequences of the mistakes made by the Scottish Government.
And someone at that union was brave enough to do this now, with an excellent statement that calls out the Scottish Government for its negligence.