Schools Guidance Consultation closes 12 of March - can we collate ideas for responding?

[ValancyRedfern]

Hi All,

I'm concerned people (including myself!) may lost track of time and forget to respond to the schools guidance. I thought it would be useful to create a thread collating and discussing ideas for responding. I know there are still some response guides to come from SSA and Sex Matters. I'm posting in a rush right now but I will be back with any links I can find. This is so important as all the Usual Suspects will be responding, and many Unions, charities, MATs and individual schools are currently saying this is only draft guidance so can and should be ignored. We need to ensure our voices are heard.

Link to consultation:

https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/

Link to draft guidance:

https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/supporting_documents/Gender%20Questioning%20Children%20%20nonstatutory%20guidance.pdf

This is the key point for me. I joined both the debate and the fight to firstly learn about and then stand up against the bias that is pulling my autistic daughter towards believing that she needs hormones and surgery to "be herself". We're not out of the woods yet and it's taking a lot of heavy lifting (and a lot of self-control when speaking to her...I distract myself on X and "vent it out" there instead) to support her.

I thought about the existing laws after I'd sent my response in. Here's a screenshot from the email that I sent to my MP on that side of things. I wish I'd asked the question via my consultation response but it's also helpful that I have separate correspondence specifically about it.

Thanks for positng the Stonewall info @DadJoke I should have read that first as it is easy to forget their perspective. We do need to deal with young people who have already been allowed to socially transition in school - children whose social transition might seem harmless to themselves and others when they were 5 are going to be difficult to manage when they are 12 or 14.

We also need to counter some of their most foolish arguments. I do wish Stonewall would understand what "case by case" means. It doesn't mean "person by person" it means "situation by situation". School toilets and sports are cases and it does not break the Equality Act to insist that provision for all toilets and many sports is always separated by sex. The variation in "cases" for sports are the different sporting activities and their general safety and benefit to female pupils if boys are included, not individual pupils and how "trans" they are.

(edited for crummy grammar and lack of clarity in para 1)

@AmaryllisNightAndDay ”case by case” means the same issue might have a different solution in different circumstances, with different resources, at different ages. You might have a legitimate aim, but in a particular circumstance, a solution which works in a large school might not be proportionate in another.

The EqA does allow single sex provision, other acts and guidance insist on it. That does not mean transgender people are excluded - they can be under certain circumstances defined in the Act (see AEA vs EHRC and statutory guidance).

I appears you are arguing for forced social detransition here - I hope that’s not the case.

That does not mean transgender people are excluded

Indeed it does not. For example female schoolchildren who who identify as trans, or as boys, or as non-binary, can still use the girls' toilets and participate in girls' sports. Because of their sex.

I think Bonfire and the rest of responsible society is arguing for children to be protected from being gaslit by adult transactivists / queer theorists and worrying about the terrible harm that's been enacted on so many mentally vulnerable children by all this.

Some of these children are on a one way path to sterility & life long poor mental and physical health. Supporting them is complex but if we can at least remove trans extremism from schools and return them to being places of learning where children can learn and develop in safety surrounded by responsible adults focussed only on their wellbeing, then that's a positive start.

Exactly.

As a self-acknowledged authority on the EA and the EHRC Code of Practice (CoP), you are doubtless aware that Education is excluded from the CoP which makes your post completely irrelevant.

Done at last! I used T Trend, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance to help and prompt. None of those three went far enough about sport, I felt, and each had their own agendas.

It all feels a bit pointless - this is draft and non-statutory, and even if the guidance comes in there will be a change of government. There would then have to be another consultation if Labour want to change it all again, and the teaching unions I suspect will just say to ignore it all, as it's all non-statutory.

Think lots of us share those fears but I'm trying to remain optimistic.
This us the start of society saying no to an overwhelmingly powerful male centred ideology that's managed to upend much of the social contract and gaslight a generation of children.
As the evidence of harm stacks up worldwide, this tanker is very slowly turning.

Great stuff @SchoolGuidanceQ

I'm with @MrsOvertonsWindow: don't lose heart. This is all moving in the right direction. Slowly at times, yes. But the magnitude and sheer scale of the harms that have been done to children is becoming increasingly clear.
Tonight's 2 hour discussion of the WPATH files on GB News will be another step forward in this. First it was prisons (thank you Isla Bryson 😁), then sports that broke this through far enough in to the public consciousness. What's about to unfold now will be huge and there will be an increasing awareness amongst the public about the true scale of the harm. Obviously this sits alongside other high profile news recently e.g the "cat killer" (human killer) and JKR's recent X activity.

Bumping this as a reminder - the consultation closes on the 12th.

Doing mine today, ill c and p anything that I think of

The 2 biggest issues for me is that the documentation doesn't match up - eg RSE guidelines and KCSIE.

And that it still doesn't recognise that a child identifying as trans should be considered a safeguarding concern in itself due to the vast range of co morbidities. And unfortunately, which needs to be sensitively handled, also parental issues / instability / inappropriate approaches to parenting. (Which social media exacerbates.)

Transgender trend have a point by point guide if nobody else has linked to it yet

https://www.transgendertrend.com/gender-questioning-children-consultation-response/#:~:text=The%20pressure%20on%20ordinary%20teachers,other%20children%20in%20the%20school

Only a day to go

Yes I made that point in my response. That KCSIE, other policies and guidance, and RSE curriculum (which teaches gender identity as fact) will need to be changed to be made consistent.

Also there’s a question at the end about public sector equality duty and I pointed out that the DfE guidance doc on PSED has not changed since 2014. There was one change in 2018 that was because of a case re single sex schools (I think) but the wording re trans and gender reassignment has not changed since 2014. In the school I’m a governor at we reference that 2014 doc in our Equality policy 🤷‍♀️

Bumping again.

Transgender trend guide above is great and so is this:

Deadline is end of tomorrow.

The EqA still applies to schools, and the CoP references employment in schools, which has direct revelance to this issue, though there are some exceptions. So, anything in the guidance which suggests trans boys should be forced to use girl's toilets, or that transgender teachers should be outed are not permitted.

The current EHRC schools technical guidance says, for example:

A previously female pupil has started to live as a boy and has adopted a male name. Does the school have to use this name and refer to the pupil as a boy?
Not using the pupil’s chosen name merely because the pupil has changed gender would be direct gender reassignment discrimination. Not referring to this pupil as a boy would also result in direct gender reassignment discrimination.

A school fails to provide appropriate changing facilities for a transsexual pupil and insists that the pupil uses the boys’ changing room even though she is now living as a girl.
This could be indirect gender reassignment discrimination unless it can be objectively justified.

Schools Week (not a trans rights organisaton) mentions some of the legal problems.

Meanwhile, today’s guidance states, as one of five key “principles”, that there is “no general duty to allow a child to ‘social transition’”.
But the legal advice from government lawyers said there was a “high risk of successful challenge to the guidance on the basis that this statement is misleading / inaccurate”.

Lawyers also warned of a “high risk of successful challenge to guidance or schools” in relation to a passage stating that “as a default, all children should use the toilets, showers and changing facilities designated for their biological sex unless it will cause distress for them to do so”.

I'm sure that we all agree that the guidance needs to be lawful, whatever objections you might have to the law.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/trans-guidance-dfe-lawyers-said-schools-face-high-risk-of-being-sued/

Let’s see what happens legally

Laws can change, if enough people push for them to

Are you sure that your information us up to date @DadJoke ?

I believe some of what you has quoted has been removed by EHRC.

See commentary here : What is new in the EHRC guidance? - Sex Matters (sex-matters.org)

Trouble is when certain people mention the law they mean "Stonewall law" - ie the law as Stonewall and transactivists would like it to be rather than the l;aw as it is.
To date, there's been no unpicking of whether the demands from men to access women undressing relate to children as well or how gender reassignment applies to children unable to give informed consent. Personally I'd like to see some of the middle aged men claiming to be women standing up in court explaining to a horrified nation why they must be allowed access to teenage girls undressing for swimming - or why a 16 year old boy claiming to be a girl must be allowed to share a swimming pool changing rooms with girls undressing.

Worth remembering when one transwoman breached the privacy of naked girls in swimming pool changing rooms - the once trans captured "Swim England" immediately ensured that they were no longer able to access the female changing rooms.

We really do need these adults in the courts explaining why they think children are not entitled to be safeguarded as there appear to be a worrying number of adults with distinctly dodgy beliefs. Until then, responsible adults will want to ensure that children must not be forced to undress or sleep alongside the opposite sex as the guidance states.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12350741/Parents-raised-concerns-transgender-pool-official-using-womens-changing-room-time-young-girls.html

The EA doesn't apply to children.

The proposed guidelines simply reaffirm the current laws already in existence.

The most it will do is disagree with some people's opinions which appear to have evolved into imaginary 'laws' for children.

As explained to you several times, Michael Foran said that the schools week article wasn't describing anything different to what always happens internally with gov lawyers where they explore 'potential' challenges with any new guidance. This doesn't mean the potential challenge is lawful.

(As explained to @DadJoke) that should say

*The EA in the context of transgender characteristics doesn't apply to children.

There are 3 EHRC Codes of Practice: Employment, Equal Pay and Services, public functions and associations. The consultation draft makes no reference to employment or pay and the third Code excludes education so none of the Codes have any bearing on the legality of this guidance.

I am amused that you refer to the EHRC Schools Technical Guidance to support your argument since you tried to persuade us that non statutory guidance has absolutely no standing in law on the Hampstead Ponds thread but hay-ho. Your points might have carried more weight if you had used the current 2023 guidance rather than the 2014 original version. Your examples have now gone without trace. There are 2 new examples. The first looks at toilet use and suggests a third space for transgender pupils. The second one one covers a teacher verbally abusing a transgender pupil in such a way that I would expect the teacher to be summarily dismissed and prevented from ever teaching again.

Your Schools Week reference and link are another unevidenced opinion piece produced with a sole purpose of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.