Finally, the UK is waking up to the fact that something’s going badly wrong in our schools. As the media volley the kid-who-identified-as-a-cat back and forth, some saying it’s a myth, others saying it’s happening all over the country, people are finally realising we have a problem, and beginning to understand what that problem is.
Identity politics
I believe the kinds of rows coming to light in schools now are the inevitable result of identity politics.
Click here to read about ‘identity politics’.
Tory super-heroes?
The ‘trans rights’ issue is just one of the controversies identity politics has brought us, and Rishi Sunak’s ministers are lining up to give themselves the credit for sorting it all out but – who has been in government for the last ten years or so? And just how long have they been encouraging schools to pay lobby groups to come in to teach their ‘specialist subjects’ around LGBT and PSHE topics? And just what have organisations like Stonewall and Mermaids been teaching the kids – and the teachers?
I’m told these organisations have been teaching queer-theory inspired identity-politics in schools since 2008. A common theme of that teaching is that ‘you are what you say you are’, a line that’s supposed to be necessary for the protection of trans people. It’s often taught along with dire warnings of what will happen to self-identifying people if their identities are denied or questioned, so that teacher from Rye who’s in the spotlight this week was probably in a genuine panic, thinking something terrible would happen if there was a kid who said they were a cat, and someone disbelieved them.
Blame the government
If you want someone to blame, please take a look at this government. Just like what’s happening now with dysfunctional water companies, with crises in the NHS, in transport, and elsewhere, many of us have been petitioning the government for years to clarify what our excellent Equality Act actually says, and sort out what’s happening in our schools, but the government did nothing.
The problem isn’t trans people, it’s ‘self-ID’
That’s what people like me – ‘gender critical’ people – have been trying to say for years. If you put self-ID, or the ‘gender identity’ theory that supports self-ID into law, that means if someone says they’re a woman – or a cat, or anything else, you are obliged to believe them. If you say you don’t believe them, you’re breaking the law. The point was made very eloquently in the Labour Party back in 2018. At that time, Labour’s NEC (National Executive Committee) had come out in favour of self-ID thinking (as many people did at that time) that it was a harmless and progressive thing to do.
A male Labour Party member, David Lewis, stood for the position of Women’s Officer in Basingstoke, saying he was ‘a woman on Wednesdays’ (the day the local branch’s women’s group met). The NEC promptly suspended him, and then those of us who had our heads screwed on pointed out to them that if they got their wish, and self-ID was enshrined in law, they would have been breaking the law by not believing him.
Click here to read David Lewis’s story
Unfortunately, government ministers weren’t paying attention and so over the next few years, there were a series of problems caused by organisations following the advice of self-ID promoters and, for example, transferring male sex-offenders into female prisons if they said they were women.
Clarity in law
Many managers and executives really believed that ‘you are what you say you are’ was enshrined in the law already. It got so bad that some councils withdrew funding from women’s refuges that insisted women-only services needed to provide exclusively female spaces, and some trade unions began hounding ‘gender critical’ members, believing they were ‘anti-trans’.
Click here to read about Kathleen Stock.
That’s why earlier this year, the EHRC finally did as we’d been asking, and made a statement clarifying that the Equality Act has an exception for ‘sex’ which means that, where necessary, you can set up all-female spaces and declare them to be exclusively for females, whatever people might say they are. Unfortunately many organisations that had received training from organisations like Stonewall thought the EHRC was changing the law. They were completely convinced by years of LGBTQ+ staff training that ‘transwomen are women’, and so they thought the EHRC clarification that ‘sex means sex’ was a rolling back of what they imagined were ‘trans rights’ under the law.
We are all protected
There is no need to worry. The Equality Act has an exception for ‘sex’, so where we need single sex spaces, we can create them. There is also an exception for ‘gender reassignment’, so where trans people need their own spaces, they can create them. We are ALL – every single one of us – protected under that Act from discrimination on the grounds of the protected characteristics that apply to us.
Nevertheless, Stonewall’s CEO Nancy Kelly appears to be one of those who thinks the EHRC clarification is ‘rolling back trans rights’ and so Stonewall continues to spread the myth that progressive people should be challenging the idea that ‘sex means sex’.
Let us hope that, as the ‘cat story’ buzzes around the country, enough people will find out what’s really happening. Things got so bad a year or two back that one woman, Maya Forstater, had to go to court to defend her right to believe that sex exists, and matters.
Click here to read about the Forstater case.
Beliefs and opinions
As that court ruling demonstrated, those protections provided by the Equality Act include your right to have, and express, your own opinions and beliefs. And that is what has put our teachers in such an impossible position, and it is why I say we should not blame teachers who’ve found themselves talking nonsense, and then panicking, on the topic of kids identifying as things. On the one hand, Stonewall type training tells them those kids must be believed, and must not be questioned but on the other hand, the law tells them everyone has the right to believe (or not believe) whatever seems right to them.
So the teachers can’t win, the kids can’t win, and situations like that one at Rye last week are inevitable. That’s how things have been for the last decade and more – whilst countless numbers of activists and concerned parents have been emailing government ministers asking them to please sort it out.
Last year, one in eleven teachers left the profession, and the nightmare that PSHE lessons have become is one of the reasons. There are many others – like not getting paid decently – but it’s one of them. Kids will ask questions. Kids will challenge nonsense ideas and, on the topic of self-ID, the government’s inaction – ten years of inaction – has left teachers no safe way of dealing with that.
The schools are a mess. Blame the government.
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 