Transgenderism in Schools

Reconstructing Professional Responses to Transgenderism in Educational Settings

Rather than making use of longstanding legal frameworks to facilitate the inclusion of transgender children, schools and children’s services are instead adopting the woke policies promoted by lobbying groups. This is to the detriment of all children, argues David Buck.

Much media attention has focused on the threat to academic freedom in universities that have promoted policies influenced by critical race theory or gender ideology. Less commented on is the impact of similar practices within the public sector, especially children’s support services. This branch of public service has a legal duty to be politically impartial. Nonetheless, ‘woke’ views are often presented by Local Authority managers as being the only route to the further development of equality, diversity and inclusion in educational settings. Front-line staff are often expected to accept these politically contested positions without challenge and an illusion of impartiality is maintained simply because no other approaches are considered.

Tensions within children’s services between the duty of political impartiality and partisan, contested policies promoted by managers are now having a significant impact on front-line practice, particularly in relation to the needs of transgender children in educational settings. Local Authorities and schools themselves have sought advice from transgender charities, such as Stonewall and Mermaids, that are often uncompromising in their project to dissociate gender from biological sex. They then develop ‘transgender toolkits’ that go far beyond the needs of any individual transgender students to promote a broader ideological stance on gender. For example, such toolkits often recommend whole-school adaptations to single-sex spaces and sports; teaching that gender is on a ‘spectrum’ and even school policies on ‘chest binding’.

Many public sector front-line service staff have noted managers and human resource departments gradually adopting woke values into their policies. This appears to have happened because charities and campaigning organisations provide easy to follow, ready-made rules along with off-the-shelf moral authority. The delusion of moral authority seems likely to have contributed to the errors Local Authorities made in recent child protection scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Oxford, Derby, Halifax, Keighley, Peterborough, Huddersfield and Manchester.

Woke values are put into operation without consulting the front-line service staff who are tasked with their implementation. In schools and children’s support services, received wisdom assumes ‘doing nothing’ is the same as ‘do no harm’ despite historical warnings relating to ‘omission bias’. As Hannah Arendt notes: Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. In schools, this can result in what amounts to the inculcation of a moral imperative untested by democratic accountability.

This is especially concerning when services dedicated to child protection take on board, without challenge, a particular view in relation to gender identity. Vulnerable children risk having new gender identities affirmed, leading to irreversible medical decisions with life-long fallout. These dangers bring to mind scandals in places such as Rotherham where Local Authorities were specifically accused of an inability, at the time, to challenge the repeatedly raised child protection issues relating to grooming gangs, for fear of appearing racially motivated.

Many front-line staff are increasingly concerned about their Local Authority’s apparent indifference towards any wider stakeholder consultation on transgender issues, including with parents. Of particular concern is the way that protagonists of gender ideology react to criticism, often adopting a dogmatic, semi-religious dismissal of any dissenting voice, forming a barrier even to alternative conceptualisations, let alone whistle-blowing.

Unfortunately, the complacent approval of woke values seems to help the career progression of senior managers while maintaining culturally privileged group membership for their compliant staff. In Local Authorities, holding particular values has long been a way to establish tribal differentiation between managers and front-line workers and between public services as a whole and their respective client groups. Put more crudely, woke provides a management tool to maintain division between oppressors and oppressed.

Cancel Consultation

Remaining silent, the assumption that ‘doing nothing’ is the same as ‘doing no harm’, when it comes to transgender children could come to be seen as reckless, as it was in the examples of the child protection scandals cited above. Psychological and other ‘well-being’ services might wish to reflect on the risks involved in tacitly supporting under 16s who embark on a ‘Gillick pathway’ to irreversible decisions that they may well regret in later life (a responsibility for which that they singularly maintain if parental views are not included).

Psychological services that uncritically choose their manager’s woke narrative not only expose children to these risks, but leave parents responsible for a lifetime supporting their child as a seriously ‘self’-harmed adult. Rather than ‘doing nothing’ at least some moderation might be offered. This could entail discouraging the individual schools, support services, and staff members who act as ‘Trans-Activists’ and may be missing the real child protection needs for which they are formally responsible. Psychological services could also give voice to the increasing evidence of the correlation of transgenderism with autism (see, for example, Dattaro 2020). This would enhance strategies already well established for the wider brief of inclusion that have been developed in educational settings, especially since the introduction of the Children & Families Act (2014).