National Education Union conference to debate if Supreme Court trans ruling is ‘attempted genocide’

[IwantToRetire]

The National Education Union (NEU) is set to discuss whether the 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman constitutes “attempted genocide” against transgender people.

Delegates are expected to debate the issue today (31 March) at the union’s annual conference in Brighton.

According to the Daily Mail, Britain’s largest teaching union may hear arguments that the judgment amounts to an “attempted erasure of a group from public life”, with criticism potentially directed at both the judiciary and the government.
“Attempted erasure of a group from public life” – the National Education Union is set to debate the 2025 Supreme Court ruling

The Supreme Court previously ruled that, under the Equality Act, the definition of a woman is based on biological sex, a decision that has prompted ongoing debate about the operation of single-sex spaces and the inclusion of trans people.

Full article https://uk.news.yahoo.com/national-education-union-conference-debate-115441811.html

Does anyone know if NASUWT is any better than NEU on this? Anyone else I can join, union-wise? They have all seemingly lost their minds.

I have met very few of my fellow professionals who see this movement as anything other than harmful to children. Teachers know that children need us to be the grown-ups, even if they hate us for it at the time.

One of the troubles with assertions about the number of trans children who commit suicide is that child suicides are recorded by sex not by gender (or hair colour or mathematical ability or anything less fundamental than sex is). So it cannot be proved that 46 of the children of one or other sex who killed themselves during some unspecified period of time in some area left equally unspecific were definitely trans rather than suffering from some (other) mental problem.

I've seen teachers mention Edapt as an alternative. They say their focus is on professional issues rather than political agitating?
Don't know how good they are:
https://www.edapt.org.uk/

This doesn't stop GLP claiming them all in their ideological quest

New data shows surge in trans kids’ suicides following healthcare rollbacks | Good Law Project

From the above page

This new data was released via a freedom of information request made to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD). The NCMD revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide from 2019-2025: 5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23. The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed”. Of course, we can never know, and often there will never be, a single reason why someone takes their own life.

46 trans children died by suicide - the hyperlinked evidence to support the claim is not the research work itself but what appears to be an appendix describing limitations to the research methodology. Why have GLP chosen not to link the original documents that support their conclusions?

5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23 - the GLP choose to only state the part of the data that seems to show a sharply rising trend. The source data also includes further data, 3 in 2023-2024, 2 in 2024-25. The data shows a sharp rise in 2021 followed by an equally sharp fall after 2023. The data may in fact be showing something else e.g. a failure of mental health provisions during and post lockdown.

The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed” - The GLP choose to make this statement immediately after quoting the data for 2021-22 and 2022-23. A casual reader might see the downwards trend in 2022-23 and assume that the 2023 data will be revised upwards. The warning is in fact about the two years worth of data the GLP chose to leave out of their analysis.

Of course, we can never know, and often there will never be, a single reason why someone takes their own life. - the GLP know that they are on shaky ground with the claims that they have made in this document. Here is their disclaimer, tacked on the end.

The GLP are deliberately spinning statistics for children taking their own lives in order to further their ideology.

(Also, f-you GLP for making it necessary to point these things out)

It is disgusting to co-opt the word genocide in the name of political posturing. How utterly insulting to the memories of those killed in the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Bosnian genocide, and the Holocaust. These are a few internationally-recognised examples of the crimes against humanity that are agreed to warrant the term. No doubt some of those voting in this charade are history teachers, to make it even more sickening 😞 Shame on the NEU.

SlackJawedDisbeliefXY
This doesn't stop GLP claiming them all in their ideological quest

(Not going to quote the entire post only because it is long.)

I very much agree that the trans bit may not have the most, certainly not the only bearing on a suicide: bullying or parental abuse (sometimes sexual) seems extremely likely to have at least some part in some of these deaths just as it does for children who are not being identified as trans, and as we know, a predisposition towards thinking oneself trans at an early age has been linked to some unfortunate mental conditions that might tend towards a predisposition also towards self-harm and suicide.

Belittling the experience of troubled children by sweeping it all into a single, possibly inaccurate cause is definitely objectionable to me, even if not to AGPs.

From what I’ve been told this motion hasn’t been passed.

Sorry to repost this but can we please just ignore anything that uses GLP as a resource. I responding you only encourage time wasters and derailers.

And in responding stops the flow of the discussion about the issue itself.

IMO!

If reddit is to believe there never was a motion with the wording as in the article.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1s9f0jq/neu_national_education_union_has_passed_a_motion/

Apparently shortly after the end of the conference the NEU library will publish all motions passed at the Conference.

And I think the yahoo story is based on one from "Attitude" which has a political agenda. ie it is likely they have exaggerated the wording of the motions as listed on reddit.

In which case I apologise for falling for the hyperbole.

Oh good, I hope those who proposed the motion are mad as hell about it, because it would do my soul good to know, they're the ones fuming for a change. 😁

Bosnia was ethnic cleansing not genocide same with rwanda.
It may seem like semantics but its actually an important difference

It's worth pointing out, since I'm not seeing it mentioned elsewhere in the comments, that it's highly unethical to argue from the perspective that X lead to Y # of suicides, therefore X caused Y deaths. The reasons for this are well known:

• In general the cause of suicide should be viewed as a complex mental health crisis, often with highly impaired judgement so the logic that 'X makes life unbearable' should be treated as defective reasoning not an indication that X should be (or indeed can be) changed;

• Even if there were a hypothetical way to derive the true cause of an individual suicide and even if we could agree that the suffering the X made the desire to end one's life understandable, it's clearly impossible that that information could be collected as a mass statistic especially given the fact that the topic itself is highly ideological with deeply corrupted public institutions that would be incapable to collecting the needed data objectively. And indeed it is not considered ethical to collect and maintain statistics to be used for this purpose.

• The one thing that we know does cause suicide is contagion - seeding the idea that X ought to cause one to commit suicide. It's irresponsible in the extreme to make those assertions publicly, and even more irresponsible to make the argument that X must be changed because it's causing people to kill themselves over the issue. That, in itself, is a dangerous possible cause suicide contagion, and a far more likely one than that X itself is somehow causing overwhelming suicidal suffering.

People engaging in this kind of argumentation are dangerous to the very people they claim to care about, and the lack of concern over this very basic aspect of the topic tells you more than you need to know about their motivations.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/2/it-is-not-ethnic-cleansing-it-is-genocide

It seems there was some kind of fuckery going on - the Daily Mail and Attitude both reported the ‘genocide’ wording but then the motion actually passed was a much milder ‘protect’ trans students and staff. God knows what’s actually gone on.

https://neu.org.uk/latest/press-releases/protect-trans-and-non-binary-tnb-students-and-educators

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15692769/Teaching-union-debate-Supreme-Court-trans-genocide.html

Are you doing a drive by scold on every thread tonight?

They’re debating whether a legal judgment is genocide.

As horrific as it is to state even by your suicidal threats - some suicides don’t a genocide make.

If they’d focus on you know - actually teaching - more people would have the ability to think critically.

I do hope these teachers are aware of which kids are most likely to be doing the bullying and which kids most need protecting from being bullied:

Transgender Identity Is Associated With Bullying Involvement Among Finnish Adolescents
Frontiers in Psychology, 8 Jan 2021

Methods:
Our study included 139,829 students in total, divided between a comprehensive school and an upper secondary education sample.

Results:
Both experiences of being bullied and perpetrating bullying were more commonly reported by transgender youth than by cisgender youth. Among transgender youth, all involvement in bullying was more commonly reported by non-binary youth than those identifying with the opposite sex. Logistic regression revealed that non-binary identity was most strongly associated with involvement in bullying, followed by opposite sex identity and cisgender identity. ➡️ Transgender identities were also more strongly associated with perpetration of bullying than subjection to bullying. ⬅️

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612424/full

That reddit post has a copy and paste of the motion, which includes:

Conference Believes . . . That the actions of the government constitute an attempted genocide.

and

Conference instructs the executive to . . . Call for a reversal of government attempts to erase and eradicate TNB people

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1s9f0jq/neu_national_education_union_has_passed_a_motion/

Motion 24 (Equalities and social justice 078)
Protect trans and non-binary (TNB) students and educators

Conference notes:

1. The failure of successive governments to introduce an inclusive ban on conversion practice.
2. The government’s veto of the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill
3. The ban on puberty blockers for TNB children
4. The new RSHE guidance, which states that schools “should not teach as fact that all people have a gender identity”
5. The changes to “Keeping Children Safe in Education”, which removed the statement that being TNB is not inherently a safeguarding issue, and now states that schools should inform parents
6. The EHRC’s guidance, which states that trans people must be excluded from spaces which match their gender
7. 43 per cent of TNB people have experienced abuse from family
8. The DfE’s claim it has no evidence that informing parents of their child’s TNB status would only put a child at risk in “exceptionally rare” circumstances and its refusal to clarify whether schools should act in the best interests of the child when working with TNB children
9. The Lemkin Institute’s warning the UK’s actions constitute an attempted genocide.

Conference believes:

1. The Cass Review contradicted international best practice
2. Trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are valid
3. That an attack on any of us is an attack on all of us
4. The government’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of TNB children, its weaponisation of schools to restrict access to knowledge and to put TNB children at risk of abuse, is an attempt to erase and eradicate TNB children
5. That the actions of the government constitute an attempted genocide.

Conference instructs the executive to:

1. Call for a reversal of government attempts to erase and eradicate TNB people and to urgently engage with, and rebuild the rights of, the trans community
2. Write to all schools to express support for TNB rights, and to encourage them to treat TNB people with dignity and respect
3. Fully support the union’s TNB network.

That appears to be the original motion although it might have been amended in debate before being passed.

And people wonder why no one has any respect for teachers any more. It's because this is how thick they are.

Bloody hell. It's looking very similar to that batshit Action for Trans Health group whose manifesto called for the release of all trans prisoners and the right to operate on each other.

And who, incidentally, in case people think no one listened to them either, were asked to give evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee under Maria Miller.

Fortunately, i think we've moved on...

...hopefully.

Fascinating.

Who would have thought that kids involved in an ideology which is enforced by coercive behaviour and guilt tripping are more likely to be bullies?

No one saw that one coming did they?

Union activists are motivated by political ideology; anyone who goes to conference has to be. They don't represent the voices or views of most of their members; and this relates not just to the NEU, it is all of them, including the BMA, UNISON and others.Blanket statements about teachers "being thick" simply demeans the conversation.

Brianna Ghey wasn't killed because she was trans, Brianna was killed because she was the one on the list that turned up.

The murder was bad enough with out extremists twisting it further.

The NEU really needs to be protecting its members and protesting the shit show that is the current education system before taking on half baked ideologies.

The Geneva Conventions describe genocide like this:

"Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"

A transgender identity is not a nationality, an ethnicity, a race, or a religion - indeed they have emphatically denied it is a religion. It is possible to identify as transgender on one's say-so alone, something that is not possible with ethnicity, race, or nationality. According to transgenderism, all it takes to make me a man is for me to declare I am a man. I cannot become Polish, or Japanese, or black, simply by declaring I am that thing.

Ergo, the term genocide does not apply.

Honestly I think it's despicable to take a word with the solemn and atrocious connotations of genocide, and apply it to a situation where men aren't allowed into ladies' loos. Have people lost all sense of proportion?

Nobody is saying, "Oh it was just ethnic cleansing, that's all right then." Ethnic cleansing is also an atrocity and a crime against humanity. The difference between the two is that in ethnic cleansing, they won't kill you if you leave, whereas in genocide, they won't let you leave because they want to kill you.