Suella Braverman expected to make a speech on Wednesday

[achillestoes]

In which she will say (in advance of DfE guidance to be issued in September - apparently) that schools are not legally obligated to facilitate childhood transition through the use of opposite sex or neo-pronouns (non-binary etc), allowing children to use the toilets of the opposite sex (arrangements should be made for children to use a third space if needed), or the uniform of the opposite sex.

For some reason this has provoked an outpouring of accusations of Suella being ‘as thick as mince’. One charming person wished her dead. Someone else said we ‘don’t get to’ disagree with Suella on other things and then agree with her on this. Erm...

Anyway, this seems like a return to much-needed ordinary safeguarding practices to me.

I don’t care if boys wear skirts particularly. I do care about my daughters being bullied to pretend they are female.

I can't help but wonder if Suella Braverman has spent some time reading in this forum.

I wondered that as I can think if a number of threads discussing various different points she made.

Suella Braverman says schools that teach children about changing gender could face Ofsted sanctions

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/731872c0-18d5-11ed-b4a0-f11f082a3a3c?shareToken=556ccbf1dda57b83726c35479f608938

I thought it was only last week that ofsted said the opposite. That they downgraded if trans ideology wasnt embraced.

@ChristinaXYZ

Yes this is an issue although what I notice is that when a school knows they're nearly due, even an outstanding one, they start to analyse the latest Ofsted criteria.

Schools do mini internal ofsteds and also have school improvement partners who visit alongside various other external people from trusts/ LAs . Ofsted actually rely on schools to inspect themselves. Slt observe teachers and are supposed to then support any areas of weakness etc.

Slt will read outstanding reports and look at the schools, even do visits.

What is key here though is that this and dfe guidance needs to go hand in hand with Ofsted's criteria.

Ofsted are key

Wow, cross post.

This is going to send shockwaves. And piles of shitty resources will be useless.

It had better bloody happen soon.

I think that that is what had been happening in some inspections.

A member of our slt was an inspector; they're usually ex / retired deputies or heads themselves. If they don't fully grasp the wider implications they wouldn't know.

This is why explicit guidelines are needed. Ideally I'd like this to be explicitly in KCSIE.

I do wonder if the latest about the Tavistock and 1000s suing them will mean it's possible to state that affirmation is a safeguarding issue for the child, alongside accessing single sex spaces if you're not that sex.

(My deputy didn't actually know there was a law about that. She thought it was just common sense.)

For some reason this has provoked an outpouring of accusations of Suella being ‘as thick as mince’.

It hasn't provoked anything of the sort, because she's been known to be as thick as mince more or less since she was appointed. Sadly she isn't a great advert for the cause.

Misogynistic much?

Since Owen has weighed in now might be a good time for the whole business of non-binary identities and all those other genders to be put to bed.

Sex is binary.
In so far as transgender is recognised this surely is based on the binary, transitioning from one to the other.

Non binary is just nonsense. The woman with the annoying voice who intoned to children on CBBC that there were SO many genders, at least 100 or more was talking rubbish.

Kind observers refer to these many genders as personality. Having seen cat gender and bird gender people on TikTok I am less than kind.

None of this has any relevance to law or biology. Law must be based on material reality which gets back to biology.

I want to see an end to all this teaching about these multiple genders.

It must be a complete nightmare for teachers, being forced to affirm these many genders or non binary identities, noting new names and pronouns. It's all attention seeking behaviour and teachers need to be put back in charge.

Nope. This is the Attorney General who said, for instance, that it is absolutely fine to break international treaties, and insisted on leading an appeal against sentence based on a submission that the judges should have ignored well-established guidelines. In that case her arguments were described as unusual, which is polite judgese for "monumentally poor". And those are just a couple of samples.

A male AG who did the same would certainly be viewed as thick as mince.

It must be a complete nightmare for teachers, being forced to affirm these many genders or non binary identities

Thank goodness teachers now have the pressure off them to teach this nonsense, I wouldn't be surprised if we see an improvement in children's exam grades over the next few years now they'll have more time for actual learning.

A male AG who did the same would certainly be viewed as thick as mince.

I don't think anyone who can pass a law degree and all the additional qualifications to rise up through the ranks of a law career is likely to be thick in anyway, mince or otherwise.

I'm happy to judge someone who makes such an ill judged comment.

I've never really understood the whole non-binary thing. I mean, if there is non-binary, then you'd have thought there is non-non-binary (for those who don't identify is NB) which effectively equates to binary. So that puts you right back in being in a binary category.

Unless there are many different types of non-binary?

There’s one HT on Twitter saying “Sure, you could legally do this, but you’d have to be kind of nasty.”

Someone sensible and compassionate needs to sit the guy down. Nasty? To be aware of the emergence of a serious medical scandal and commensurately cautious in your approach? Nasty to protect the free speech rights of your students, and not punish them for refusing to say things that are not true? Nasty to protect the privacy and dignity of students who want to change in facilities with others of the same sex, rather than be gaslighted that some students have changed sex?

Braverman has more acumen in her little finger than some of the people we have running our schools.

‘It hasn't provoked anything of the sort, because she's been known to be as thick as mince more or less since she was appointed. Sadly she isn't a great advert for the cause.’

Braverman has a Cambridge law degree, was an Erasmus scholar and has a Masters from the Sorbonne.

I’ve never met mince with a Masters degree. You?

UK schools tend to have uniform rules though, which include that skirts should be of a minimum length.

Yes, that's true, I'm sure. The capture cannot be that extensive, surely.

Sad to report that the capture is extremely intensive. Currently working within local and regional teams to dig out the pernicious weeds that have infiltrated local and regional educational materials, every stone turned over reveals how deep this goes - it is horrendous as a local/regional schools get their resources from a central organisation that in itself is ideologically driven by the usual suspects. We are on it but it will take some time to highlight and undo the damage caused.

I can't remember the name of the person but there are video clips of a male student in the USA clearly enjoying the validation of wearing a short skirt which made his sex quite obvious. I think there were parent/pupil protests about his use of the girls changing room, it was a few years ago, and of course his rights won

Lila Perry

www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/hillsboro-high-students-walk-out-over-transgender-dispute/article_be488fab-d239-5944-9733-32f569dcdc32.html

Good to know people are on it!

Schools can choose to have uniform policies. Or not.

Those uniform policies can have sex based rules. Or not.

Parents can choose the school.

I'd choose a school which didn't allow boys to wear skirts, because boys wearing skirts policy would indicate to me an organisation which is radical and where the leaders want to change society top down with their own ideological belief in how society should be, and are prepared to use children and schools to impose their own type of 'progressivism'.

Fine for boys in their own time to experiment with fashion. Maybe over time the norms would shift and we'd realise how silly it was when there were girls only skirt policies.

But changes like that should happen over time, organically and with discussion.

Any organisation with the idea and confidence that they know how to radically change society for the better and impose this on everyone through children: I'd not send my child anywhere near it.

I wouldn’t send my child to a school like that either. Not because it would bother me that boys wore skirts but because I’d wonder what else the management thought they could change.

I am alarmed by the number of educators on #edutwitter tweeting about how they plan to defy the Attorney General's advice re gender ID ideology in schools or have suggested that her comments yesterday were unclear

https://twitter.com/shivandavis/status/1557610097588805633?s=21&t=1Lq-genJZEj5xtCGEceXVg

Thread by Shivan Davis, a lone GC star among edutwitter idiots. Many rt ing to draw attention of this to Suella et al.

I've argued elsewhere previously that this will be wilfully ignored until Ofsted have a hard line about it and possibly KCSIE explicitly explain the issues with affirmation. (Though an issue with that could be that overly affirmative parents withdraw a child from education - hopefully the need for medical
diagnosis will help this though of course they could seek private health care.)

The unions need to get their acts together.

I've argued elsewhere previously that this will be wilfully ignored until Ofsted have a hard line about it

Then they will surely be vulnerable to legal action and maybe, as always, it will be money that talks in the end.

I hope that Suella Braverman can follow this up with the reasoning behind it. That the biggest indicator of medical and surgical transition, is social transition. And that children are being led to believe that they have the wrong brain in the wrong body.

Yes. Teachers need to have it all explained. What the affirmation model is and why it restrictive. Some truths about longer term impact of drugs and surgeries.

Yes they will be. A head can be sued. This is the extent to which they both have no understanding of the issues and are so bloody narcissistic about them 'knowing best.'