Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No2
Newsletter Themes: Sex and Gender, Drag Queens and Storytelling, Schools are being Reracialised, News round-up.
Standing for Women rally, Glasgow, 2023 by Alan Dunlop
Welcome back. We had a good response to our first newsletter and quite a bit of press interest. If you would like to contribute, please email editorial@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
In this newsletter, retired paediatrician Jenny Cunningham provides a useful fact sheet for parents on transgenderism and younger children. This issue has been at the centre of public debate this week. Some trans activists see the public conversation as an attack on their very existence. At SUE we think it is an important discussion that can be had without posing any threat to people who identify as trans. Indeed, as chair of SUE Stuart Waiton explains, the trans lobby is itself often extremely intolerant and threatening, as seen in the recent case of the Drag Queen Story Hour protests in Dundee. Finally, educator and academic Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Director of Don’t Divide Us, explains what is wrong with teachers using schools to put critical race theory in practice.
Sex and Gender - Part 1
Jenny Cunningham is a retired community paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for over 30 years. She has specific experience in neurodevelopmental and autism diagnostic assessment.
Parents are being told by their school-age children and teenagers that there are transgender pupils in their school who want to change their sex. They are allowed to change their name and pronouns (he/him or she/her) and wear the clothes of their chosen sex in school. Teachers encourage children to accept their new transgender classmates and to call them by their chosen names and use their ‘correct’ pronouns. Making sense of this new approach to gender is difficult if you are unfamiliar with the terms used. This essay has been written to help parents get to grips with some of the ideas associated with the debate.
What does it mean to transition to the opposite gender?
First, we need to be clear: we cannot change our sex. Our sex is determined by our chromosomes (XX in females and XY in males) and sex hormones
(e.g. oestrogen or testosterone). Acting together, they determine development of the reproductive organs in babies (ovaries and womb in girls and testicles in boys) and genitals (vagina and clitoris, or penis). The sex hormones become active again during puberty, when secondary sexual characteristics develop. (See the table of pubertal changes below.)
What is meant by transitioning from one gender to the other is that a child or young person expresses an urgent desire to become like the opposite sex (known as gender dysphoria or gender incongruence). This can only be done by changing their secondary sex characteristics and altering their genitals to approximate those of the opposite sex.
The first step in gender transition (or realignment) can start just before or in early puberty with the use of drugs known as puberty blockers. These can interrupt puberty and prevent or slow down the changes – the thought of which the trans child or teenager may fear or hate. Puberty blockers are discontinued at around age 15–16, before the next stage in treatment, which is to administer feminising or masculinising hormones.
It has been argued that puberty blockers may be used to give the child or teenager time to consider whether they want to proceed to this next stage. However, studies have shown that virtually all those who are given puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormone treatment. The final stage of realignment may involve surgical treatment such as mastectomy (breast removal) and phalloplasty (creation of an artificial penis) in females or castration and vaginoplasty (creation of an artificial vagina) in males. None of these steps are without dangers.
Puberty blockers are not licensed for use in gender realignment, and little is known about their long-term effects. They do, however, reduce bone density and may interfere with bone development. Use of cross-sex hormones after puberty blockers results in infertility. Surgery is associated with sexual dysfunction and may result in incontinence and pain.
How has the Scottish government promoted gender identity and social transitioning in schools?
The government’s sex education curriculum in primary schools exposes children as young as 6–7 years to the language of gender identity: transgender, cisgender (i.e. not identifying as trans), gay and lesbian, bisexual, etc. Most children will only have developed a stable self-identity as a boy or girl at age 4–6. Introducing this kind of gender terminology can be extremely confusing for children.
In 2021, the government issued guidance to schools and teachers about supporting ‘transgender children and teenagers’ in school. Teachers are advised not to question children or teenagers who express their unhappiness about being a boy or girl, and instead to allow them to change their name, pronouns, and clothes in school (sometimes without their parents being informed). In other words, teachers are affirming the child’s new gender identity and allowing them to socially transition, so that society, or at least the school, now treats the child as if he or she were the opposite sex.
Social transitioning has consequences. Transgender children and teenagers will invariably be referred to the NHS gender identity service at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow (the national service for children and young people). This service also follows a gender affirmative model – unquestioningly accepting the child’s or teenager’s gender identification and desire to undergo gender realignment. In a large proportion of cases, children and teenagers will proceed to puberty blockers (even children as young as age 9) and then to cross-sex hormones or even surgery.
What parents may not know (or have not been told) is that if children with gender incongruence are not socially transitioned, and instead a ‘wait and see’ approach is taken, with support for the child and family from health professionals, the majority will desist, that is, decide not to transition. By their mid-teens they will be accepting of their sex, their bodies, and their sexuality (be it heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual). So why are teachers, who have no expertise in this field (nor be expected to have) being advised by the government to socially transition children – an intervention that is highly likely to put them on the pathway to gender realignment?
The problems associated with the Sandyford Clinic gender identity service and the particularly worrying tidal wave of referrals to the service of teenagers with gender incongruence, especially girls, will be discussed in another article on gender identity and transitioning next week.
Changes during Puberty
Age (years) Changes
Girls From 9–11 Breast buds; pubic hair starts to appear
After 12 Armpit hair; acne; height increases at fastest rate
Around 13 First period
Around 15 Reproductive organs and genitals fully developed
Boys Around 11 Pubic hair starts to appear
Around 13 Voice changes (‘breaks’); muscles enlarge
Around 14 Acne; armpit hair appears
Around 15 Facial hair appears
Drag Queens and Storytelling
Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
In early December last year, a Drag Queen Story Hour event in Dundee, targeted at 2- to 10-year-olds, was cancelled after ‘abusive threats’ were sent to the venue. Or so we were told. Sometimes the language used by both sides in this divisive issue is explosive, but what are drag queen shows and should we be concerned?
Having noticed opposition to the event on Facebook, I went to the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre (DCA) to find a rather polite group of about ten middle-aged protesters. In front of the venue, two bouncers stood cross-armed, but I suspect they felt little threat from the women in woolly bobble hats who were happy to chat about their concerns.
The following day the local press ran an ‘abusive threats’ story. According to the DCA the performer, Miss Peaches, did not feel safe due to ‘hateful and intimidating online behaviour’. Apparently the ‘appalling’ behaviour was directed at the performer and the DCA team – behaviour that was reported to the police. Having not seen any of this hateful behaviour either on Facebook or at the protest, I thought I would look into it further. It is not clear what was said to Miss Peaches online, but he claims that he was misgendered (I might be guilty of this too). He also claims that he was being accused of paedophilia, which may well have happened.
I contacted the DCA to ask if I could see the abusive, hate-filled messages, or to see if they could give me an idea about what had been said. They declined to do so, and interestingly, many of those articles with headlines about hate and abuse finished with a parting line explaining that the police had investigated and found no hate crimes being committed.
It is possible that some people called Miss Peaches a paedophile; however, the posts I saw online did not, nor were they homophobic. Rather, the concerns being raised were about drag queens being sexualised entertainers and that it is wrong for them to be used to ‘educate’ children. One could argue that it is up to parents to decide what shows to take their children to see, which is a fair argument. However, the DCA is publicly funded; they are using our money, which makes this a public issue.
The ‘paedo’ question is worth a little more thought. It is quite common to see articles and digital posts from authors who believe that what we are witnessing is grooming by paedophiles, and in America at least, one Drag Queen Story Hour performer has been found guilty of this charge. Elsewhere, in the UK, we find journalists complaining about acts like that of Aida H. Dee, who appears in front of children in tight outfits with bulging genitalia and who has declared online that they believe ‘love has no age’.
I believe that the term paedophile should be reserved for those found guilty of that crime itself and that we do not need to find paedophilia to recognise that there is something seriously wrong with an act that both sexualises childhood and also promotes gender fluidity to small children.
Drag acts are sexualised performances historically associated with late nights and gay clubs. Nobody questions or condemns these acts. The concerns are only raised when these sexualised personae are imported into libraries and council-funded venues and presented to small children.
It is entirely legitimate for members of the public to be concerned about the breaking down of the boundary between adulthood and childhood. Drag queens may not be reading explicitly sexual material, nor are they there to physically abuse children, but nevertheless, they are themselves sexual – as seen quite clearly with certain named acts like that of FlowJob. There also appears to be a tacit acceptance that these acts are there to promote transgenderism. Aida H. Dee, for example, reads from his own work on ‘diversity’ and has raised funds for trans groups that advocate the use of hormone treatment for 12-year-olds. Other acts promote the idea of exploring ‘gender fluidity’, providing ‘queer role models’ and ‘breaking down the notion of sex binary’. In Dundee, the DCA promoted Miss Peaches as part of their ‘Transcendent season’ that is ‘pushing past gender norms’.
So it may be wrong to think that libraries and staff at art centres are grooming children for sex, but it is unquestionably the case that they are ‘grooming’ them for a gender-fluid outlook that they believe is ‘progressive’. They are of course entitled to their opinions, but that should not mean that they can use public funds to promote something that many, arguably the vast majority of people, think is wrong and confusing for children.
Finally, it is worth unpicking the image of the hate-filled intolerant protesters who oppose Drag Queen Story Hour. Some of the comments directed at Miss Peaches may well have been abusive, but it is worth asking what exactly the DCA were complaining about, especially when the police saw no criminality. In fact, the more you look at the Dundee example, the more it appears that the intolerance, and even the hate, appears to have been directed at the protesters, helped by a one-sided media that did everything it could to promote the idea of a threatening and abusive mob.
Nobody, not the press nor the DCA, bothered to talk to the protestors, reply to their emails or engage with their arguments. Being ‘inclusive’ appears to be a one-way street that shuts out those members of the public who oppose drag queens entertaining children. In England it was discovered that more than a hundred librarians met online to discuss ways of dealing, rather than engaging, with protests against Aida H. Dee. One suggested solution was to call drag queens ‘pantomime dames’ to hide the reality from the public.
In all these cases, never is there a recognition that public venues and managers should relate to the actual public. Rather, venues make complaints to the police and the press and even to employers. One individual protesting online against the DCA event, for example, found herself being dragged to the human resources department by her council under charges of ‘harassment’ before being found not ‘guilty’.
It is those people who have raised legitimate concerns about drag acts who are being treated in a profoundly intolerant way, demonised, ‘dead-named’, reported to the police and even having their livelihoods threatened.
Hiding behind the language of safety, shielded by the victim persona, it was the ‘progressives’ who demonstrated their intolerance towards the protesters. These ‘tolerant’ elites exercise an official bigotry that means no debate was allowed. Drag queens telling stories to children may not be paedophiles, but they clearly are helping to sexualise childhood, something that for many people will be seen as worth protesting about.
To end on a more positive note, perhaps rather than simply protest, we should create an alternative and truly progressive story time by setting up an Elderly Hour, where people who have lived, loved, worked and struggled to make our communities, read to our children and pass on their wisdom and wit to the next generation.
Schools are being reracialised
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is Director of Don’t Divide Us, a grassroots movement that advocates a colourblind approach to countering prejudice and campaigns against racially divisive messaging.
Most people in Britain are open-minded in their attitudes towards race, so much so that 89% of respondents in research from 2020 said they would be happy for their child to marry someone from another ethnic group. This is a significant improvement from earlier figures and marks the huge progress Britain has made since Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic, and wrong, ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.
So why are schools being encouraged to accept the views that Britain is systematically racist, that white pupils are bearers of privilege, and that pupils from ethnic minorities are inevitably oppressed? That this is happening can be in no doubt.
You may not have yet experienced it first hand, and are therefore perhaps wondering whether this article’s title is itself somewhat apocalyptic. Maybe your particular child is lucky enough to attend a school where the head has not felt under intense moral pressure to ‘do something about racism’, even if pupils in the school have been playing and making friends across ethnicities with few or no problems. Maybe your child goes to a school where experienced teachers and heads, with common sense and humanity, do not think it is an educationally or ethically good idea to make children see the race of their friends and regard this as more important than their (developing) personalities. Maybe your child goes to a school that is not reaching out to one of the proliferating organisations offering equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) ‘anti-racism’ training in order to fulfil official requirements to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘respect diversity’.
You may think none of this applies to you. But no one in authority is scrutinising the content of such courses. Nor are they checking the qualifications of the staff of these organisations or whether they have the suitable experience and ethical principles to be working in schools. There is no form of quality control, yet they are endorsed by sources of cultural and political authorities who should know better. This means that their influence will percolate across schools unless stopped.
Liz Pemberton, aka The Black Nursery Manager, offers her services as ‘an anti-racist trainer and consultant’ to help schools make sure their dressing up boxes for under 5’s are culturally sensitive. Teachers will be taught how to ‘audit’ their dressing up boxes and be told about the history of ‘yellowface’, ‘blackface’ and pantomime. Teachers are being told that it is okay, or even cutting-edge best practice, to treat individual pupils as members of a group according to ethnicity, and to tell children a historically illiterate narrative of victims and oppressors – all in the name of inclusivity and anti-racism!
The irony is that such strategies are likely to make young children hypersensitive to skin colour and interrupt the normal developmental processes of making friends. One mother told us how her 5-year old (mixed-race) daughter suddenly stopped holding the hand of her best (white) friend as they walked to school. When she tried to find out the reason, she discovered that the school had recently started a new ‘anti-racist’ strategy. This was news to her and other parents.
Another example from the secondary sector is that of Penny Rabiger, who is cofounder of BAMEed Network and influential in certain professional circles. In this clip from a recent webinar hosted by the EDI company Flair, she warns her audience of the need to ‘circumvent resistance’ and that ‘the impartiality police will come for you’, and that teachers need to break down ‘every single area of school life’ (the school development plan, professional development plans, recruitment, induction, relationships with families) in the anti-racist effort.
This is the language of someone who thinks they are at war, not that of an educator whose primary role is to contribute to the intellectual and aesthetic development of the younger generation in an educational context that respects the dignity of the individual, our common humanity and justice within a universal moral framework. The framework of critical social justice, articulated clearly by Rabiger and adopted by many EDI organisations, is a highly politically partisan, intolerant ideology that brooks no dissent or alternative approaches and therefore runs counter to important democratic principles.
There are two other points to note in this example. The first is Rabiger’s allusion to the need ‘to circumvent resistance’. This is reminiscent of Brighton and Hove’s strategy meeting in November 2020 to discuss their Racial Literacy 101 Strategy, which is based on core ideas from critical race theory. In a Don’t Divide Us detailed case study, we expose the council’s minimal consultation with its citizens, indicative that they regard anyone who disagrees as ‘resistance’ or as ‘obstacles’ to be overcome – including parents from minority ethnic groups. The reluctance of many schools to show parents the materials being used for ‘anti-racism’ lessons or lessons on sex, sexuality and gender and related training is becoming more obvious by the day. In producing our report on councils’ use of third-party organisations offering ‘anti-racist’ training for schools, we issued over 172 freedom of information requests. Over 54% of councils contacted either did not respond or provided insufficient information, often citing commercial interests as a reason to withhold materials.
The second point to note is Rabiger’s hostility to impartiality (‘the impartiality police will come for you’!). This particular criticism is often closely allied to a hostility to colourblind approaches. Both impartiality and the colourblind anti-racist approach are assumed to be at best naive but more often a sign of privilege or assertions that themselves perpetuate oppression. At a political level, educator-activists who say this are often venting their knee-jerk anti-Conservative inclinations. In 2020 the Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, issued a stern reminder to schools of their duty to teach impartially. It caused a furore among some academics, who saw it as an attack on educators’ professional autonomy. But in making such protests, they forget that schools are different from institutions providing higher education. One main difference is that the relationships in schools – primarily between adult staff and younger pupils – are not those of adult individuals with equal rights. Most of us tacitly understand that children do not have equal rights to those of adults, because they need time to develop into adulthood. This understanding is formalised in law (hence the minimum ages of sexual consent, learning to drive and so forth).
Legally, and by custom, parents are considered the primary source of care, nurture and development of children. Schools in England have an important but distinct role, but one which depends on the trust of parents, and as specified in Section 9 of the Education Act 1996, with the consent of parents and in accordance with their wishes. Sections 406 and 407 of the same Act stipulate that schools have a duty to teach impartially; where contested views are part of the lesson, alternatives should also be presented, including opposing views. Instead, we have a situation where teachers are being encouraged to reject colourblind universal approaches (i.e. the belief that skin colour is not the most meaningful or important aspect of our sense of self) by edu-activists who see themselves as harbingers of some utopian fantasy based on a cocktail of statistics and social justice moralising.
In reality, we are seeing a highly racialised outlook being presented as normal, or even good, practice. Witness the accolades heaped on Channel 4’s documentary ‘The School That Tried to End Racism’, where ‘anti-racist’ experts observed a young child visibly distressed at being separated out into racial affinity groups and commented that at least the pupil was ‘doing the work’. One teacher at a school that is paying Flair to become an ‘anti-racist’ school told me that one of the pupils asked, ‘Why are we excluding our white friends?’ Truly it seems that just when skin colour was less important than ever in Britain, this new ideology of ‘anti-racism’ is reracialising our society – it is divisive, unethical and politically dangerous. That is why Don’t Divide Us is focusing on schools. We are launching a petition – Educate Not Indoctrinate – and look forward to working alongside like-minded friends including the Scottish Union for Education.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks
Jessie Singal on teachers letting kids ‘transition gender’ while keeping it a secret from their parents, and the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity. 23/01/23
Frank Furedi on ‘the alarming speed with which the school curriculum has become a vehicle for promoting political objectives and transforming children’s values, attitudes and sensibilities’. 24/01/23
https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/naomi-cunningham-the-chilling-effect-of-scotlands-proposed-gender-recognition-regime Naomi Cunningham explains that the first casualty of the gender recognition regime is freedom of speech. 12/01/23
https://unherd.com/2023/01/how-we-created-a-self-hating-generation/ Lionel Shriver, ‘Children can’t be experts on themselves. Character is created over a lifetime, not discovered whole.’ 09/01/23
https://www.teachwire.net/news/social-justice-racism-education-advocacy-citizenship-politics/ Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert makes the case for why schools shouldn’t put their thumbs on the scales of social justice. Retrieved 30/01/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11651493/Edinburgh-European-capital-meat-menu-schools-reduce-footprint.html Colin Fernandez reports that Edinburgh is now the first European capital to commit to axing meat from its menus in schools, hospitals and nursing homes. 19/01/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11620829/Harvard-Medical-School-offers-course-healthcare-LGBTQIA-infants.html Paul Farrell reports that medical students at Harvard are ‘being taught how to care for infant patients who identify as LGBTQIA+, according to a publicly available course description’. 12/01/23
https://www.teachwire.net/news/climate-change-natural-disasters-geography-teachers-teaching-media-reporting/?fbclid=IwAR2fL2dk4uVleu7ahbv6O6-Si4uRViYcrfkpY9BlV0u9LIpuSh1QkgvMeOo Alex Standish argues that ‘overheated media coverage is making it harder for geography classes to grapple with the complexities of climate change and natural disasters’. Retrieved 04/02/23
https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/minister-denies-foot-dragging-over-schools-transgender-guidance Education minister Baroness Barran is accused of leaving heads ‘out in the ether’ without official guidance on transgender issues. 25/01/23Â
https://conservativehome.com/2023/01/30/nick-fletcher-draft-guidance-on-gender-issues-in-schools-safeguarding-children-should-come-first/ Nick Fletcher, MP for Don Valley, explains why safeguarding children should prioritised in the long-awaited[KH3]Â draft guidance on gender issues in schools. 30/01/23
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