Trans guidance out "in next fortnight" - Keegan in The Times - RSE consultation also mentioned

[ResisterRex]

Here:

Gillian Keegan: ‘Children have been through so much — you couldn’t pick a worse time to strike’

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/984e449a-11d9-11ee-a92d-cf7c831c99b5?shareToken=13b87826a5f64a40bc85211dcd51490d

"Another contentious issue on Keegan’s desk is trans guidance for schools. This week a debate has raged over how to deal with children who identify as cats, dinosaurs or even the moon.

The guidance, which is due to be published in the next fortnight, will be detailed enough to be helpful to teachers in such situations, Keegan promises. “That’s the whole reason it’s there. I know it’s a very polarised issue, teachers should be guided through this.”

The guidance will recommend that children are able to “socially transition” — to use a pronoun of their choice — as long as they have parental consent.

This has already led to a backlash from Tory MPs on the right of the party, who have described it as a “great social experiment”.

“It’s a tricky subject but I think parental consent is the key driver for this,” Keegan says. “Schools aren’t there as doctors or parents. They are there as educators. Parental consent is the most important thing. Parents are responsible for their child.”

Keegan is keen to draw some lines, however. She says that the current guidance is already clear that children must not be allowed to use toilets or changing facilities of the opposite sex.

“We certainly make sure that safe spaces are protected and it’s biological,” she says. “A lot of schools have unisex toilets, a lot of places have single cubicle toilets. If you look at some of the newer toilet builds, they’re units with the toilet and hand basin inside.”

Would it be logical to assume that the government will follow “best practice” from elsewhere? UK Athletics has banned transgender women from competing in the female category across all of its events on grounds of fairness.

Keegan suggests that biological boys will be barred from competing against girls. “You can assume I’ve been logical and you can assume that I’ve used common sense and logic for drafting.”

Equally contentious has been the long-awaited sex and relationships education guidance — due at the end of this year. The curriculum had not been updated for 20 years, so it has been revamped to include issues such as pornography, sexting and consent.

This has led to a proliferation of companies providing lessons in schools, but many are unwilling to share the resources they are teaching for commercial reasons, to the alarm of some parents.

Keegan wrote to schools in March telling them not to enter into contracts with companies that would not allow their materials to be seen and said these should be freely available to parents.

However, a court case this week backed a company wanting to protect its materials. Parents can go to the school and see the resources but cannot make a copy or take it away to seek advice. Is that good enough? “Well we’ve obviously asked a panel to figure it out,” Keegan says. “But I think what is age appropriate has become a big question.”

Ultimately she wants a central bank of resources that schools can draw on and will ask Oak National Academy, a body that creates lesson plans, to do this. Schools would remain free to choose, she said, adding: “The most important thing is what is taught in schools is age appropriate.”"

Ironically if gender identity wasn’t being forced on people by such authoritarian means and didn’t include people using opposite sex spaces and services then I think more people probably would play the pronoun game to be polite.

Yes, and this is how it worked in the early days of this movement.

The problem is the philosophical and cultural creep from "call this man "she" and treat him as a woman out of courtesy" to "trans women should be treated as women" to "trans women are women", which is inevitable when others are feeding into someone's delusion that they actually are a woman.

Playing along with someone else's delusion doesn't feel as kind once it becomes clear there has to be a limit, as the other person has already been lulled into a false sense of reality by people treating them like they're too fragile to handle the truth. So the actual hard barriers they face to being treated as the opposite sex (toilets or sports, for example) hit even harder as everyone has played along with them up until that point.

It's like when a boy is treated as a girl by the school for several years and then wants to play sport, and the parents say "she just wants to play sport". The adults can see the inevitability of this issue, and the only option the parents feel they have at that point is to make good on the promise they made to their child by pressuring everyone else to continue to play along.

I thought I was being kind using people's requested pronouns but now I see it was probably quite cruel to do so in many cases.

Absolutely. So, where GI says that a male can be a woman, a parallel could be Islam saying that women must place their prayer mats behind men's prayer mats. Fine, you do you, but nobody else has to go along with it. Where GI says that children can be sterilised, a parallel could be FGM. In which case the democratic, pluralistic society steps in and confirms that children and vulnerable people cannot be allowed to come to harm.

As affirmation and social transition are precursors to GI-driven sterilisation, they cannot be acceptable. Not even in a democratic, pluralistic society. Because they require non-believers to participate in the faith behaviour, and because such a society prioritises safeguarding.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/nullo-cult-arrests-castration-finsbury-park-b2009141.html

I don't understand why Gnostic public servants are a sacred caste, who should not be prosecuted? Shame on their colleagues safeguarding their own, over the vulnerable, I say.

@Apollo441 it is cruel and unfair to tell people that they can change sex or that the are the opposite sex. As your sport example shows, it might seem kind and fair but, ultimately, you’re setting them up for disappointment and frustration when it turns out that they are biologically male and that matters.

It is much better to help them accept their biology and to separate out ‘presentation’ from any of that.

But that would require society to accept that boys in sparkly dresses is totally fine. They can still use the male facilities and compete against other boys. Regardless whether the other boys are wearing dinosaur T-shirts or anything else - so long as it’s suitable for whatever activity they’re doing.

Unfortunately large swathes of society would much prefer this GI stuff than to move past crap gender stereotypes.

I don’t think children should be allowed to socially transition at all. Saying they can if they have parental consent, is wrong because it pressurises parents and makes them out to be the baddies if they refuse. This plays into the online TRA manipulation techniques of ‘everyone hates you’, ‘we’re you’re new queer family’, and is very unwise IMO.

Also, parental consent shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all anyway. We don’t let girls undergo FGM if they have parental consent. It’s about protecting the child.

It would be far better to ban social transitioning of children and all school students (because some 18yr olds will still be at school). Most importantly, along with this, schools should teach facts and fill in the gaps that they’ve clearly allowed to develop. Why TF are girls thinking that if they don’t have long hair/wear make up, etc, they must be a boy? Where are these ridiculous regressive ideas coming from and why aren’t they being countered?

When I was at school, we were taught sex equality. We watched videos about women doing jobs that some people might associate with men, eg engineering, tech, etc. We learnt about GNC women. We understood that there weren’t ‘boy things’ and ‘girl things’, and the idea that only men could be astronauts, mathematicians, scientists and so on was laughable crap. we say plenty of female role models who had short hair, dressed in a ‘masculine way’, etc. We learnt about the history of women’s rights and the fight for equality.

The same for boys too. They should know that some boys are feminine. They should understand that mocking feminine boys, or calling them ‘Girls’, ‘Sissies’, ‘Gay’ is homophobic and sexist.

Every child should understand regressive gender stereotypes and how damaging (and silly) they are. There’d then hopefully be a lot less of this GI rubbish and it would be considered far less appealing.

There should also be more teaching about the perfectly normal feelings of fear, upset, anger, awkwardness, etc, at puberty. These feelings shouldn’t be pathologised.

I don't honestly think anyone has enough of a handle on any of it to be doing any experimental kite flying.

I mean, I think it's all a total mess, as noted upthread. Really, we need to repeal the GRA and get rid of the nonsensical idea that a person can change sex by obtaining a piece of paper or having a certain 'feeling'.

Someone would have to define it first.

I suspect GI is a protected belief. If a person (not a trans person) was sacked for no other reason than they believe people can change sex I imagine that would be considered discrimination based on belief.

Yes considering trans activists are in denial that gender ideology even exists it might prove difficult for them to argue that it’s a concept worth protecting.

For a belief to count as a Protected Characteristic under the EA2010, it has to be WORIADS ('worthy of respect in a democratic society' for those new to the acronyms). Maya's case resulted in belief in the immutability of sex being designated WORIADS. No such designation has been done for GI.

A court has not (yet) pronounced gender identity ideology to be WORIADS but that does mean it isn’t. The court (Forstater decision) did make comments on the types of belief that would fail the WORIADS test and gender ideology doesn’t come close to those examples.

But even if it is a protected belief (and it possibly could or should be), that protection does not compel anyone else to behave as if it’s the truth. Nor does it mean the person who believes in GI is allowed to do whatever they like.

You can’t discriminate against someone for holding the belief. ‘misgendering’ is not discrimination. It’s just not participating in the belief structure.

I don’t think this is what the TRAs want.

TRAs want complete capitulation

The amazing thing is the extent to which we see organisations captured, right down to the teacher in the recording.

There is so much to undo it’s not going to be easy. I’d start with removing compelled speech. And then we have a chance

Those girls did a lot, may be a game changer. At 13 too

The Cass report concluded that social transitioning is NOT a neutral act.

The fact is though people aren’t getting sacked for saying they believe that people can change sex or that gender is on a spectrum. So the chances of this being tested in court are very slim (at the moment at least). This could change as the pendulum swings back you might start getting employers who over step and start discriminating against gender ideologues. I suspect at some point we will see that situation in court.

A court has not (yet) pronounced gender identity ideology to be WORIADS but that does mean it isn’t. The court (Forstater decision) did make comments on the types of belief that would fail the WORIADS test and gender ideology doesn’t come close to those examples.

Yes, exactly. I can't imagine a scenario in which the belief in GI could be deemed not WORIADS (obviously behaviour arising from that belief is handled differently, but holding the belief itself would be no different from believing every human has a soul in terms of its right to respect, etc).

Plus, in Forstater the judge did allude to the fact that other protected characteristics might apply in protecting trans people, which, looking at the other protected characteristics, I took to suggest that gender ideology could fall under either philosophical belief or potentially disability in the future (or both, depending on the context of whatever legal case ends up testing it), depending on which way things end up going with the science/medical side of things:

"Although the protected characteristic of gender reassignment under s.7, EqA would be likely to apply only to a proportion of trans persons, there are other protected characteristics that could potentially be relied upon in the face of such conduct." (p4, Forstater)

Keegan doesn't understand safeguarding. Teachers should not be alienating children from their parents - this is extremely undermining of the child's best interests. Telling kids who've fallen down a rabbit hole of GI online that they can be transitioned in school if only their parents agree is creating parental alienation, it's also saying that children with parents with particular beliefs are less deserving of safeguarding than other children. You can't have two different standards on this.

Very well put and highlights this clearly: Also, parental consent shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all anyway. We don’t let girls undergo FGM if they have parental consent. It’s about protecting the child

It sounds as if the guidance is going to say the equivalent of if your family's beliefs include breast ironing then fine, the school won't safeguard that child in the same way as the rest of the children.

Cass said social transition is not a neutral act and should only be taken with the advice / input of medical experts so if Keegan's guidance says schools can do this without medical input she's going against Cass's advice.

There's also the issue of compelled speech and essentially coercive control (i.e. abuse) in schools enforcing the other children using pronouns. It's not enough to say children 'don't have to' use preferred pronouns - if all the teachers are doing so it would be a brave child to go against the very clear message being sent by the behaviour of the adults in charge. There need to be better safeguards for our children's mental health than is being suggested - I guess we'll see.

I think Keegan's an idiot, I wish Sunak would replace her with Miriam Cates, who as well as really understanding safeguarding has the advantage of having been a science teacher.

"But it needs to be presented that way, as a choice not as a belief."

I don't see feminine gay boys who are growing up to become gay young men as having a choice. They are following what feels natural and right to them, presenting in a feminine way and experiencing horrendous levels of homophobia for doing so. The pressure to conform now as trans, instead of gay and femme is huge.

It's not a choice. It really isn't. It's not Trans either. This is the lived reality cor men gay men who have always felt and presented as feminine their whole childhood and adolescence lives. Going through puberty and understanding themselves to be gay should be a lightbulb moment that the trans movement has taken away and told them they are in the wrong body instead. They are young gay men, not trans. Young girls identify as trans is more complicated, a mix of butch lesbians and girls traumatised by sexual abuse, overt sexualisation of the female form and often autistic. This is not a choice.

Being gay is not a choice, but neither is it a prerequisite for being trans.

How you present yourself is a choice, heavily influenced by societal stereotypes and your peers. This is the aspect of 'gender' that should neither be enforced nor be allowed to become a source of bullying and discrimination.

Being male and insisting that you are a woman is entirely a choice. Either that or a psychological disorder.

Cass said social transition is not a neutral act and should only be taken with the advice / input of medical experts so if Keegan's guidance says schools can do this without medical input she's going against Cass's advice.

'Not a neutral act' is going to prove to be unhelpful. It could mean it's a positive or necessary intervention, it doesn't mean it's negative.

And the new NHS guidance says the decision on social transition should be taken with a clinician but that ultimately it's up to the parents.

So together they're saying social transition is an intervention at the parents discretion.

This isn't going to help schools.
The big unanswered question is how do pupils and staff have to respond to a child who has 'socially transitioned.'
If you know they're male can you insist on using male pronouns? This is then a disagreement about language conventions in line with your belief?

But if a socially transitioned child starts at a new school everyone may not know their sex. Then we have issues of consent.

I fear the adults are gonna continue to fumble this, maybe the pressure that's gonna tell is going to come from the kids.

Being male and insisting that you are a woman is entirely a choice. Either that or a psychological disorder.

This neatly sums up the whole problem. 'Being trans' is undefined. It's simultaneously not an illness but in need of medical treatment. We are told by TRAs that people can choose whether or not to medically transition, but the same people tell us that being trans itself isn't a lifestyle choice.

The government has now put itself in an impossible situation. They have accepted that 'being trans' is a real condition even though there is no definition of what it means to 'be trans'. So they are legislating about a condition which is undefined. Then each minister, MP, parent or teacher who pronounces on this is using their own definition. They are not all talking about the same thing.

If children self-define/self-diagnose as trans, what does Gillian Keegan think is going on? What is her definition of trans?

@OldCrone exactly.

It has been said before on these boards but we really are coming to the crux of it now. We need an objective definition of gender identity just as we have diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses and psychological conditions or we have clear enough definitions of mainstream religious beliefs, philosophical positions, political allegiances etc

If we are going to legislate protections and dedicate public resources for something we need a clear objective definition for what it is.

How on Earth the GRA got pushed through in 2004 I don’t know. There were excellent arguments against it, all the problems we have now were foreseen as possible by someone. The Hansard record shows this.

I’ll confess though that I never thought child transition would happen due to the ethical problems with it being so clear. That one just seemed beyond the pale. I still struggle to get my head around how we, supposedly civilised nations, have done and continue to do this to our children.

PoP a lot was foreseeable re:sports, toilets, prisons etc but no, we didn’t tend to think about child safety because-well I guess because it wouldn’t occur to right minded people that they’d’go after’ the kids and actually be backed up in doing so.

It’s still mind boggling for example that a woman who took her child to Thailand to be castrated could be given so much influence and sway over policies and practices regarding vulnerable children. Honestly it would be unimaginable if it wasn’t true.