Speaking very carefully as this is potentially outing, the problem is that even those responsible for Safeguarding on organisations for children and on LA's Children's Safeguarding boards - those whom we rely on to flag up the red flags - have been seemingly captured by gender ideology, whereby they believe a male teenager with a feminine gender identity is, in material reality, no different to a female teenager.
Moreover, they believe the feelings and comfort of the male person with the cross sex identity take primacy over natal female girls' boundaries and consent.
Gender does literally mean mixed sex accommodation when it comes to those on NCS, in case that is the organisation in question. The application form only asks for gender so NCS is structurally unable to provide single sex accommodation.
In y11, one of my daughter's male friends began to identify as a girl. Due to their gender identity, this 16 year old teenage male (attracted to girls) was the only legal boy allowed to share a tent/dormitory/facilities for a fortnight with girls on NCS, even though the girls had signed explicit consent to single sex (sic) spaces once on residential and my daughter had specifically requested female only sleeping/changing accommodation.
I took this up with the National Citizens Scheme (NCS) and the local authority's Children's Safeguarding Board; they both showed a worrying lack of understanding of Safeguarding and Equality law.
NCS felt that because this particular teen 'identified as a girl' that he was one and that the girls - some of whom had only just met him - had given their informed consent to sharing a room with "her". I did ask if they knew how pregnancy happened...
Yet nowhere on the NCS application form did they ask about Sex - just Gender - so they failed from the outset in their duty to set up a Safeguarding structure to keep girls safe. There were no 3rd spaces provided. So a clear case of discrimination/indirect discrimination etc.
I asked to see a copy of their Safeguarding Team's risk assessment for this scenario but they had not done one nor did they have any plans to do so. 😱
Unsurprisingly, they also have a policy for their leaders which restricts girls accommodation at night to women and self-id transwomen...
The LA's Children's Safeguarding Board response was to ask if "anything inappropriate had happened" and batted it back to 'mum to take up with NCS'.
Yes, something inappropriate happened - a Safeguarding board and a national organisation like NCS handwaved away the boundaries and consent of teenage girls.
It is disturbing when Safeguarding authorities don't really understand the purpose and nature of safeguarding frameworks which is partly to attempt to STOP BAD THINGS FROM HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE because we already understand what the risks are, rather than just trying to pick up the pieces once the bad thing has happened.
This is where I believe the law on Safeguarding is being misinterpreted.
The case by case basis is not supposed to be about 'how nice does this particular individual seem?' 'Did anything inappropriate happen?'
This is not Safeguarding.
Rather, that the principle of, say, a single sex space for the safety, privacy and dignity of girls means that, in overnight sleeping accommodation for teenage strangers, only people of the female sex should be in there.
And that all males, the lovely ones, the gay ones, the vulnerable and the confused ones, the trans ones together with the occasional downright awful ones should not.
No exceptions.