Tougher transgender guidance for schools is unlawful, Sunak told

I think she's been reading Mumsnet.

Collectively we're apparently more qualified to safeguard children than the whole of the DfE. It's so shocking and appalling. I really object to my taxes being wasted on this shower of shit. People need to lose their jobs over this total failure.

Existing statutory safeguarding guidance for schools is being broken in schools and apparently no-one cares and nothing is going to happen.

MN FWR hivemind could have produced decent guidance for schools 2 years ago and we're not even getting paid. They're incompetent fools.

I feel so angry about how children's mental health is just being destroyed by activists and the DfE is doing nothing about it. And the children who will be worst affected will be the 'trans' kids. We're already seeing the horror stories from the detransitioners.

Ah so you mean it's just about forcing less powerful people to pretend something which they know not to be true at great personal and societal expense especially to women? Now I get it!

This is social transitioning. It's pissing all over the right to freedom of expression of all the other children (article 10 of the Human Rights Act).

If the teachers use wrong sex pronouns, the children are being essentially told that they should too. There's such a huge power imbalance. Currently in schools it's the gender critical students who are receiving punishments and who are scared to speak up i.e. are being discriminated against and denied their article 10 rights.

I really don't understand how the government could get this so wrong - actually I do - there are activist civil servants and not enough people who are competent enough to understand that the Equality Act does not apply to personal relationships and that safeguarding law for children in schools of course takes precedence.

All this bloody hand wringing about the Equality Act and international law.

No one seems to give a flying fuck that the law, including international law - is being broken RIGHT NOW when it comes to girls in schools. Children have a right to access education, girls are self excluding during periods in schools with mixed sex toilets. Those girls assaulted in the toilets - how are they supposed to access their right to education now?

There are laws which require that schools provide single sex toilets - some schools are breaking those laws NOW.

And you can't say preventing a child from forcing wrong sex pronouns on everyone else in the school is discrimination unless you're saying all the other children in the school get to force everyone else in the school to use wrong-sex pronouns if they feel like it and one child is being denied that. Schools would not function if every child could choose their own special pronouns and enforce this for everyone else.

No-one is suggesting children can't ask their peers to call them by a different name or ASK them to use different pronouns or dress in a gender non conforming way - what is being opposed is the compelled pronoun usage and keeping secrets from parents. And teachers going along with the lie that you can change sex and punishing children who refuse to go along with this lie.

Failing to follow ECHR rulings means that the ECHR continually awards damages to all claimants from that country which the member state is required to pay. Along with the costs of the claimant having to bring the case. That would add up very quickly, especially as non-payment accrues interest until settlement

Thank you OldCrone IANAL but I have tried to pay attention to the story of why the GRA came about (Chesterton’s Fence etc) and so it doesn’t ring true that we’re going to become ostracised as a country if we don’t continue to put men’s rights first over women’s and children’s in the form of GRA
Happy to continue to say that GRA should be repealed then (and the EqA clarified the biological sex)

Now that we have the Equality Act, which came later than GRA, what reason is there to retain GRA? If non discrimination can be proven to be supported by other statute, then what’s the problem with scrapping GRA? There’s no general human right to change your legal sex status. Have we shown here that all the other countries in the group have a legal means to change sex?

I posted a link earlier to a Council of Europe document which says that of the 46 member states only 38 have a procedure of legal gender recognition, so since there are 8 which don't, this is not a requirement for membership.

The breaches of human rights in the Goodwin ruling could have been rectified by means other than the GRA. As you say, it is not a human right to be able to change your legal sex.

Yes. Add to that list the majority of labour MPs, the sad old lib dems and countless powerful men and women in society. Terrifying.

If Gillian Keegan can't define "girl" how can she possibly safeguard the juvenile human females attending our schools?

That Keegan’s statement mentioned schools acting in children’s best interests was a relief and made me think someone might be watching MN
As soon as schools have to make a best interests call it means evidencing why they think it is right thing to do for that child. That requires evidence. Best interests can also change over time. What the child or their parents or teachers ask to happen to the child, is not the determinant of what’s going to be in the child’s best interests. So it feels like a step forward that this requirement is being explicitly made by gov, assuming decisions aren’t already made this way. But there isn’t the evidence to back up social transitioning so I can’t believe it is..

on the GRA point- ECHR said to UK gov that needed to come up with a response to the Goodwin case, so they came up with GRA.
They could have come up with something else.

Now that we have the Equality Act, which came later than GRA, what reason is there to retain GRA? If non discrimination can be proven to be supported by other statute, then what’s the problem with scrapping GRA? There’s no general human right to change your legal sex status. Have we shown here that all the other countries in the group have a legal means to change sex?

We are definitely talking about men joining the Women's Institute, but not on this thread.

GNC women can see 'social transitioning' for what it is, probably more clearly than most.

Exactly. It’s a psycho-social intervention which is dependent on others for validation.

GIDS has long said that 'social transition' should not happen before they have assessed the child.

Hilary Cass has said that 'social transition' of a child is not a neutral act.

'Social transition' is most definitely a thing. How else would we all know what they mean by these statements?

'Social transition' is the sum of actions performed by the person who IDs as trans (child or adult) and the actions of all those around them, which seek to affirm the individual's 'gender identity'.

So the individual may choose to alter their appearance to play into the gender stereotypes associated with the opposite sex, or they may declare new pronouns or a new name, or attempt to demand access to opposite single sex spaces, as a way of affirming their 'gender identity' to themself and those around them.

People around them may participate in affirming this identity by using their chosen pronouns and name, signalling approval for their adoption of opposite sex sereotypes, accepting them in opposite sex spaces or just blatantly agreeing with them that they are the opposite sex. Maybe also by being a good 'ally' and aggressively shutting down any non-affirming messages.

'Social transition' is all the things that people do socially, including the 'trans' person, to uphold the lie that this man is a women, this woman is a man, this boy is a girl, this girl is a boy. It has nothing to do with medical treatment beyond the recommendation to not do it before assessment.

There is no such thing as 'social transition' inside of medical treatment. It's a thing that happens outside, in ordinary social situations such as families and friendship groups, and in non-medical settings such as workplaces and schools.

I have a daughter who has socially transitioned and I explained it just above. It’s really really not difficult to understand. 🤷‍♀️

I honestly don't know what gender stereotypes you are referring to - or anyone else - when they say social transition so they just need to be more clear about what they actually mean cos the words social transitioning don't mean anything.

I didn't refer to gender stereotypes at all.

I just think it's odd to object to a term being used and to want people to stop using it while simultaneously claiming not to know what it means. Either you know what it means and you find it harmful to use it, or you don't know what it means and should probably try to find out before suggesting that people stop saying it. I don't see how your position can be both of these things and I'm really at a loss as to what you're trying to achieve here.

Obviously the term would be defined in any guidance that seeks to curtail the practice so that it would be clear to schools as to what the practice entails.

How i see the definition personally would be something along the lines of compelling others to collude in someone else's gender incongruence or gender distress by attempting to help them maintain the fiction they have created that they are a different sex from the one they really are. But obviously the definition in the guidance would be more along the lines of changing a child's sex marker on official documentation, allowing them to use the facilities reserved for the opposite sex, referring to them as "he" despite their being female, and so on.

It just feels so odd to be debating whether schools are actually facilitating these practices when teachers are losing their jobs and children are being disciplined for not colluding in it - i don't understand how pretending that's not happening is helping anyone.

Ah so you mean it's just about forcing less powerful people to pretend something which they know not to be true at great personal and societal expense especially to women? Now I get it!

These arguments are so unconvincing. It's nothing like the baptism analogy. You can get baptised without necessarily pissing on the rights of others. You can't talk about 'social transitioning' without entrenching dangerous gender stereotypes.

If you think we need common words - ways to actually discuss this damaging movement - then clearly 'social transitioning' is not the right term. Because it means nothing. There are people, myself included, who think that men's clothes are any clothes worn by a man and men's behaviours are anything a man does. So there is no meaning to the concept of social transition. My best guess is that it's when a man does something that would have been assumed to be something only women did pre the second world war. Is that what we mean? We mean women wearing trousers or men having long hair? Or are we talking about men joining the WI and women driving a tractor? I honestly don't know what gender stereotypes you are referring to - or anyone else - when they say social transition so they just need to be more clear about what they actually mean cos the words social transitioning don't mean anything.

In terms of teachers, of course they are working with children who find themselves at odds with their individualised concept of the 'right' stereotypes for themselves. We need teachers, as other adults, to use language which helps kids see the stereotypes for the meaningless nonsense that they are.

Yes we need guidance. Of course. Teacher need to know they have the backing of a civilised society when they stop males going into female toilets. They need to know that men's toilets always were mixed gender and you can wear a school skirt in one if a teen boy wants that. Using the language of social transition does nothing to advance those conversations and everything to hide the reality of the men's right movement which currently has the ear of many of the political elite.

It's not feigning ignorance btw to say I don't know what social transitioning is. I literally do not know. I think perhaps you need to think about just how engaged with gender stereotypes you need to be to understand that concept. For those people who aren't so engaged, the term is meaningless and offensive.

Yes, exactly, PencilsInSpace.

It's simply not good enough to say "oh fiddlesticks - gender identity ideology is actually a lot more complicated than we initially thought, so sorry girls and gender critical pupils and teachers, but we'll have to postpone protecting your rights in schools until we fully understand gender identity ideology".

There's plenty that could be covered now if they had any appetite to actually formalise their position. I don't buy Keegan's whole "we need to get this perfect" spiel one bit.

everyone should stop jumping up and down and pretending that the concept of social transitioning is anything other than regressive offensive drivel.

But the teachers who do stop pretending get disciplined and/or lose their jobs, and pupils get sanctioned and/or excluded.

The interim Cass report refers to it as a concept, it is something that schools are referring to as a concept and yes, obviously I don't believe that social transitioning has anything to do with someone's biological sex, but I also think it's no use pretending that it isn't happening.

It doesn't mean I believe in gender ideology to say that someone wants to socially transition any more than my talking about someone wanting to get baptised makes me a Christian. It's possible to discuss the concepts that are meaningful to others without having to subscribe to the same belief system as them.

Yes, obviously as this whole issue gets unpicked, thread-by-thread, it will likely become clearer what social transitioning really means and how it impacts the person at its centre and the many children and adults drawn into that child's orbit, and perhaps then the term might become obsolete. But we need words to be able to discuss it and manage it in the meantime, including to be able to perform clinical research on the impact of it.

You can't ban murder without some sort of common agreement as to what "murder" means - it's no good saying 'well, I don't agree that anyone should be murdering anyone so there doesn't need to be a word for it' if you're trying to stop people doing it. Yes, in the future of course it might look like a strange concept, but for the schools who have already been sucked into it by the Tavistock or random therapists or families who've done their own research online, etc, there needs to be a common agreement of what is not allowed to happen so that schools can have clarity on what they should and shouldn't be allowing.

I don't think it would be helpful at this point for headteachers to advise their staff to feign complete ignorance of the existence of gender identity ideology and to pretend that they simply don't understand the concept of social transition when faced with a child requesting social transition.

Teachers need to be prepared for the types of situations they will be faced with in classrooms (in terms of their own interaction with pupils and in terms of managing disputes between pupils in accordance with a clear behaviour policy as to what's acceptable and what's not, what to do when girls object to a male using the girls' loos but the school has said it's fine for this particular male, etc) and the last thing they need is to stick their fingers in their ears and pretend everything is just as it was ten years ago.

Absolutely, all of this!

The immediate priority is to produce the best guidance for schools so they can understand the current law and apply it effectively and confidently.

The current law is not perfect so the guidance will not contain everything we need and hope for but it can still achieve a lot, right now, to safeguard all children. And they can't wait for perfect law because childhood is short and they only get one shot at it.

Changing the law takes longer but we* *know that it's achievable if we keep pushing. Women have pushed for legal change for centuries and we always eventually get there. By producing accurate, comprehensive guidance on the current law we can work out exactly where it needs to be changed.

I think @PlanetJanette underestimates the persistence of women.

This is getting surreal.

Wearing what are stereotypically opposite sex clothes is not part of social transitioning if you are doing so because that’s the style you like. Social transitioning is where the child feels themselves to be the opposite sex and want everyone around them to affirm them as the opposite sex - typically by wanting them to use preferred pronouns and often a new opposite sex name and so on. They will also typically wear clothes/hairstyle etc associated with the opposite sex both to make them feel they are “performing” as the opposite sex but also to try to “pass” so other people think they are the opposite sex and validate them as such.

It isn't social transitioning for e.g. a girl to wear trousers to school; it is social transitioning to call that girl 'he'and no longer referto her as a girl. Its not complicated.

Personally I don't think any reasonable person should accept that wearing different clothing or choosing a different name has got anything to do with sex. It's just people breaking down gender stereotypes like they've always done and good! it should be done. It's not social transitioning though. It's actually really normal. I do lots of things which break gender stereotypes so do my kids. It's not a big deal and everyone should stop jumping up and down and pretending that the concept of social transitioning is anything other than regressive offensive drivel.

Why dont you read what are said and respond to that. Instead of just chanting the matra of TRAs.

So for the 3rd of 4th time there is no such thing as social transitioning outside of medical treatment, so why is the AG even referencing it.

Because the AG was reviewing the proposed guidance and it was obviously referenced.

Of course some children are being allowed to go to school dressed in the uniform designated for the opposite sex and are being referred to by different names and pronouns of the opposite sex - if this weren't happening, then how would teachers be getting disciplined for misgendering pupils and why would pupils be getting sanctioned (I think one in Scotland was excluded?) for misgendering their peers?

Are you saying that you don't believe that children are changing their names and pronouns and uniforms and that schools aren't going along with it?

Yes, of course it shouldn't be happening, but pretending that it's not happening isn't going to help now that it is happening.

And protecting the rights of children (and parents and teachers) who hold gender critical views.

Obviously, they shouldn't be going round telling anyone they're not really trans any more than they should be telling a Christian that their god isn't real, but they also shouldn't be shamed or punished for the views they hold, and shouldn't be forced to participate in someone else's social transition or forced to lie.

There is a growing sense from many orgs that they know something is not right here. It might take a while to get there but I think this is approaching enough to start a public inquiry, we don't need to wait for an avalanche of lawsuits. One or two more scandals should do it.

This thread has taken a very strange turn.

Of course social transitioning is a thing. Posters might not like that fact, but accusing us of using TRA weasel words is just bonkers.

The NHS still supports social transition under certain conditions. This is in the new service specs- saying that the NHS say it should now not happen is simply not correct.