School governor clearly explains safeguarding issues grown up by Allsorts style guidance

[OrchidInTheSun]

I really like this. It's clear and logical and acts as a really useful starting point to challenge your own school policies if necessary.

Hopefully this thread won't be 'hidden' like the article I started a thread about yesterday

https://excelpope.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/the-unaskable-question/amp/?twitterr_impression=true

Thrown up, not grown up!

Great piece - thanks for sharing.

Well stated. I do wonder how long it is going to be until we find out who is behind all this. I have been DBS’d and had no problem with doing this to check I was safe to be alone with children. Why do we accept the possibility of risks apart from when the magical word ‘trans’ is raised.

I dislike the phone calls about whether a bank has sold me a policy I didn’t want. I bet there’s lot of legal training in the background for when the shit hits the fan and everyone is trying to work out who to sue.

Of course, this risk could be mitigated by not being blinkered. But that would be accepting reality...

I know what my FB timeline would say if I shared that. It'd say: but how do you know a GIRL wouldn't be the one planting the camera, huh?

There's a real refusal to admit what we know to be true - that statistically boys are so much more likely to offend in this way.

I saw that and it was very clearly written - something that every head teacher should read when considering how to integrate trans children into the school community.

Great article-many of us have noticed how normal safeguarding procedure go out the window when dealing with trans issues.....girl guides are a classic example.

Don’t grt me started with girl guides. I’ve written them two emails highlighting my concerns. The first was responded to with ‘but we’ve been doong this for ages and it’s fine. The second was ‘what’s your problem? Trans rights are sooo more important than girls’.

Doing

Why do they constantly twist the EA to make out that male children have the right to change in female changing rooms?

Why are schools so completely accepting of this shite when the EA protects SEX not gender identity.

Why do we have separate sex changing rooms in the first place? Is it (a) because girls' bodies are different from boys' bodies, or (b) because girls' brains are different from boys' brains?

Why do they constantly twist the EA to make out that male children have the right to change in female changing rooms?

The way the EA guidance is written is partly to blame for this. It's all about how someone 'presents' and vague scenarios about when someone should or should not be treated as the opposite sex.

The EA guidance says that under most circumstances a man who presents as a woman should be treated as a woman unless he's doing it for a laugh. Or words to that effect. But how is anyone supposed to know what someone else's motivations are?

Schools, and especially school heads, live in perpetual absolute petrified terror of bad publicity.

That was a very welcome voice of reason. I think this issue more than any makes me shake with rage and then have to fight to get back to reason myself. This issue is on the same page as the thread on the trans policy in the civil service. We have males being given free rein to enter women's' safe spaces under very spurious pretexts and, in this case, we are talking about children and young people who are a captive population and entirely dependent on the adults in their environment for their safety. If we don't fight this we are all letting them down. I am hoping that we can find ways to challenge these 'guidance' documents of dubious legitimacy, that seem to be breeding like flies and infecting all of our institutions, in a concerted way. There is another thread on here about trying to get a judicial review into some of these cases
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3375380-is-anyone-judicially-reviewing-this-stuff

and another where a member of Mumsnet @Trousering is going to raise these issues with a QC
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3520371-civil-service-trans-policy-what-can-i-do?pg=9

I daresay WomansPlace and Fairplay for Women are also planning further action - so all is not lost!

OldCrone A lot of the guidance was changed last year after Fair Play for Women highlighted to EHRC that they were misrepresenting the EqA. However, they did so on the quiet and in an obscure manner, so many people are unaware.

They simply deleted for instance the bit about a man should be treated as his preferred gender under all circumstances or that men identifying as trans could only be excluded on a case-by-case basis.

Now they've made it well, not clear, but they did publish a statement saying that unless a man is legally female, he is to be treated as all other men as regards any women-only things.

What that means in practice is that if you want to put on a women-only workshop, something that is widely accepted as legitimate, then you can turn away all the males without a GRC including the non-binary men, the agenders, two spirits, the l-identify-as-a-woman-today blokes without needing any more explanation than the one all other men are entitled to - which is, no sorry, this is a women-only workshop.

Excluding GRC-holders is trickier, even though according to the EqA we have every right to do so because of and through the sex-based exemptions. I mean, that is literally the point of these and why they are called sex-based. Because the law recognises that a man who is legally female continues to be biologically male.

The law doesn't say anything about only being able to exclude on a case-by-case basis, but the guidance does. Case-by-case makes no sense - either women are entitled to women-only things or we are not. Case-by-case basis implies that we are not and that there are GRC-holders who can never be excluded even if their sex of course never changes.

I say it's trickier because if you're trying to actually exclude GRC-holders, no one can figure out how to do that outside of public bodies, companies or organisations.
So you can always try to play it safe and instead include GRC-holders and those who for all intents and purposes pass (as per the EHRC guidance). That's what the recent Audacious Women Festival in Edinburgh did. But trans privilege activists supported by Glasgow Women's Library and Edinburgh Rape Crisis tried to boycott and sabotage them anyway. Because no man must ever be excluded, no matter his legal status or actual presentation.

Much as I love Twitter, it’s often difficult to use it to debate subtle points, which is possibly why my question has seen me being accused of being “transphobic” and “hysterical” and having “medieval ideologies”.

I wonder if the writer really thinks this? That it's the word limit that's the problem!!!

This question of risk assessment has been asked repeatedly. Of Girl Guides, the NSPCC, Swim England, the government, every MP in the country.

It's raised on here at least 15 times every day.

No-one can answer it. Because the answer is that trans people (i.e. anyone who says some magic words), are above the law.

Placemarking

A lot of the guidance was changed last year after Fair Play for Women highlighted to EHRC that they were misrepresenting the EqA. However, they did so on the quiet and in an obscure manner, so many people are unaware.

Now you mention it, I do remember that, Charlie. I was writing what I could remember from the guidance I had read, which must have been the old guidance.

Allsorts seem to have updated their guidance this year, but they still say that boys can use the girls' changing rooms if they want to, and claims the equality act gives them this right.

uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5888a640d61795123f8192db/5c0ff2e6f554ac6a3f017600_Trans_Inclusion_Schools_Toolkit_Version_3.3_Jan2019.pdf

Why do we have separate sex changing rooms in the first place? Is it (a) because girls' bodies are different from boys' bodies, or (b) because girls' brains are different from boys' brains?

Excellent point!

It's hard to believe sometimes that people can be so bloody thick about this.

Finally got a chance to read - extremely valuable; I shall be keeping link this should the need ever arise.

Why do we have separate sex changing rooms in the first place? Is it (a) because girls' bodies are different from boys' bodies, or (b) because girls' brains are different from boys' brains?

Excellent point.

Schools, and especially school heads, live in perpetual absolute petrified terror of bad publicity.

Also ofsted. Ofsted can fail a school instantly for a safeguarding issue. Which is why I simply don't understand how schools are agreeing to this or how allsorts got this stuff through.

Since the government have allowed anyone to come up with teaching materials for anything, surely they should be ofsteding these materials?

Esp for SRE.

All these organisations should be a wee bit more concerned about their liability exposure. People are informing them they’re putting girls at risk and they’re doing nothing to mitigate said risk. Risk management brokers and insurers don’t like that. I can well imagine a jury not liking it either, esp. with polling indicating that something like only 18% of the population agree with genderism.

IANAL but I’m not sure that “we were just doing what Allsorts told us to do” would be much of a defence.

I personally would be wary of taking on personal liability risk as a volunteer for such organisations. That one may be “innocent” doesn’t actually matter. Being named in a lawsuit is emotionally and financially debilitating regardless.

I have professional contact with lots of Governors and Trustees through my job and this is an issue Ive been trying to highlight

In Education safeguarding we are actively encouraged to think the unthinkable and ask the difficult questions. The vast, vast majority of adults do not pose a risk to children. But some pose such a risk that they seek to work to children to exploit situations where safeguarding isn't rigorous. That why we have policies and procedures including DBS checks.

Whilst I don't believe that TW are a threat to children and women, I do think that some males are such a threat that they'd use the lack of well thought out safeguarding procedures in this area to take advantage of women and girls.

I'm aware of an ongoing legal case involving just this issue. It's a live case, so I'm guarded in what I say; but basically a child had been allowed to access the toilets of their chosen gender not sex. Surprise, surprise several years later, there's been a safeguarding incident and the blame is coming back to the DSL for not putting appropriate procedures into place.
It'll probably never get into the public domain as the DSL will probably have to sign a non discloser as part of a termination agreement. But if it does, I'll shine a light on it

I’m not sure that “we were just doing what Allsorts told us to do” would be much of a defence.

It's not a defence at all. Either the school or the LEA should have done an equality impact assessment before putting guidance like this in place in schools.

A very clear blog post - well done that governor.

I've been saying this over and over again for years - the central problem with self ID is that it is a legal nonsense. According to trans ideology itself, there is no publicly verifiable fact of the matter against which one could possibly judge the truth or falsehood of the assertion "I believe myself to be a woman", therefore no way legally of distinguishing "true trans" from "taking the piss." The assertion is everything (at least Rachel McKinnon is honest about this in McKinnon's po-mo addled PhD thesis...)

Even if one were to buy the idea that "being a woman" is a social construct, there is no other social construct which has legal and real-world implications (money or nationality, for instance, to name but two) which are completely detached from any external referent and where the truth of assertions about them lie entirely within the beief system of the person making the assertion.

Much as I'd like to be able to say "I identify as American inside, now can I come and live and work in America for a few years", or "I identify as stinking rich, can I buy that lovely Regency house round the corner from you on the strength of my sincerely held belief", that ain't gonna fly.