Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No71
Newsletter Themes: transgender ideology and vulnerable children, and LGBT Youth Scotland’s influence in Scottish schools
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This Substack contains two reports on a single meeting that took place in Holyrood this week. The meeting provided crucial and distressing evidence of the impact of transgender ideology on vulnerable children in care and in schools. On a more positive note, Gillian Keegan, Westminster’s education secretary, finally took a stand against the teaching of gender ideology in schools. She announced that new guidance would direct schools to avoid sex education for children below the age of nine, and it would insist that contested ideas about gender ideology should not be taught as facts. In addition, the new guidance will restrict the use of third-party campaign groups to deliver sex education.
Even in Scotland, most political parties have committed to following the recommendations made by Hilary Cass. This shift in the political landscape is welcome; however, it was very clear on this week’s Question Time from Aberdeen that we need a much more detailed public discussion on this issue. On Question Time, it was only the audience member who raised the issue, and perhaps Alex Salmond, who were able to explain what we mean by gender ideology. We need to rehearse the arguments that children cannot be ‘born in the wrong body’, and that although sexuality and preferences may come in many forms, biological sex is not fluid; it is, in fact, binary. We need to discuss and develop these ideas if we are going to guide our children or our pupils through their early experiences.
Adults, whether parents or teachers, need to practise making the arguments for the restrictions of the activity of transgender rights activists in schools. It is very inspiring that individuals like Katherine speak out, as detailed below, but it is also a great shame to hear how professional adults have failed to take their responsibility to children in their care seriously.
One of our reports from the Holyrood meeting is by an expert in child protection, and the other is from an expert in child health. They underline the importance of continuing the campaign to stop transgender rights activists operating out of schools. Both Maggie Mellon and Dr Jenny Cunningham have taken time to tell SUE readers about the devastating effect of some of Scotland’s flawed sex education and gender policies.
Penny Lewis, Editor
Watch Stuart Waiton in conversation with Frank Furedi. Why education isn’t educating. From Monday 20 May 2024
Transgender ideology and children in care
Maggie Mellon is an experienced social worker with years of experience in Scotland and England. Maggie is Trustee of Parents Advocacy and Rights (PAR) and is the former Director of Services for Children 1st and Head of Public Policy for National Children’s Home (Action for Children) in Scotland. She currently works independently as a consultant on social work practice and public policy.
On Tuesday, I went to the Scottish Parliament for a meeting with MSPs which had been prompted by the Sunday Post exposure of what is happening in schools and in care behind parents’ backs. I went with a teenaged girl and her mother. Until very recently, they had been denied any contact for nearly 10 years. Their story featured in the Sunday Post on 29 April 2024 and 19 May 2024.
From the age of 6 years old, after being taken from her mother, Katherine was moved between three or more foster placements and then to a residential ‘unit’, separated from her siblings very early on in this process. In secondary school, alone and feeling ‘different’ from other seemingly normal and happy children, she was encouraged to join the LGBT club. There, she was led to believe that she was ‘transgender’ and that ‘transitioning’, including through drugs and surgery, would be the key to future happiness.
Her foster carer at the time was not enthusiastic about transitioning; they said it was OK to be a lesbian, but the school, social workers, and the children’s hearing system all fell into line in agreeing to and even promoting Katherine’s ‘transition’. Her pronouns and name were changed officially in her records. Katherine disappeared and ‘Kane’ was born. But, far from finding happiness, her life just got worse, at both school and in the foster home. Her fostering arrangement broke down and she was moved again, this time to a residential placement.
At the Holyrood meeting, Katherine told MSPs that the children gathered into the LGBT club were all vulnerable children struggling with autism, disability, family troubles, care, abuse. Because they were all ‘misfits’, it was easy for the teacher and older children leading the group to convince any of them that transitioning was going to be a cure. Being ‘trans’ was going to be so cool.
While many children have parents who can try to protect them, Katherine had been denied any contact or support from her mother for years and was led to believe that she was not loved or wanted at home. She had not been loved since being taken from her home, but rather, cared for by people paid to do so. At the same time, she began to question not just her sex but who she was and why she was in care; this was something that had never been explained. She thought it was because her mother did not want or love her.
Katherine asked to have contact with her mother, which was reluctantly agreed to, by letter only. In her second letter, she told her mother that she was now a boy. No one had told her mother.
Katherine began to run away from the children’s home, where she felt bullied and isolated; she was not accepted by the girls or the boys. The staff called her ‘he’ and ‘him’ and bought breast binders for her. No one talked to her about why she wanted to be a boy. She was self-harming and miserable and often running away. When she ran away, she was, of course, reported as a missing boy. When the police found her, and searched her for blades or drugs, male officers searched her as a boy and treated her roughly, even after realising she was in fact a girl, thus causing a repeat of the sexual trauma she had already suffered. This was explained to me by her social worker as necessary in ‘respecting Kane’s wishes’.
When Katherine was finally allowed to have a phone call with her mother, she managed to copy the number, and next time she ran away, she called home. She was finally allowed to attend her own hearing and have a lawyer to represent her. She was allowed to go home, where she has slowly found belonging and happiness and real care, because being in care, Katherine told me, ‘is not what people think. It is pretty dark. It is not good.’
Children separated from their families are vulnerable to all sort of abuse and exploitation. That is one of the reasons we have organisations funded to register and regulate the workforce, and to set and inspect on safe standards of care.
Social Work England has investigated social workers, and in at least one case sanctioned a social worker, Rachel Meade, for questioning Mermaids and Stonewall’s activities and their impact on children and women. The Care Inspectorate in Scotland has issued guidance advising that children should share sleeping and other accommodation according to their ‘gender identity’ and not their sex. They also advise festooning children’s homes with leaflets promoting LGBTY Scotland and Mermaids and with rainbow flags. Just so that children get the message. The only source consulted or cited in the guidance was − LGBTY Scotland.
The Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance (EBSWA) is an alliance of social workers across the UK with the sole focus of challenging the lack of evidence for practice and policy based on gender identity. We should be able to say ‘job done’ with the publication of the final report of the Cass Review, but we have been met with obdurate refusal to accept that these organisations are still participating in one of the biggest scandals of the twenty-first century, not just in health, but in education and in care.
Scottish politicians should put an end to LGBT Youth Scotland’s involvement in schools
Dr Jenny Cunningham was a paediatrician in Glasgow for more than 30 years. Now, she is campaigning to ensure that the Scottish government implements the recommendations of the Cass Review.
I attended the meeting at Holyrood with Maggie Mellon, Katherine and her mother. It was convened by Meghan Gallacher MSP and Sunday Post investigative journalist Marion Scott, to discuss Katherine’s brave account, the experiences of parents with transgender-identifying children, and the views of concerned professionals. Fourteen MSPs listened to the parents’ testimonies.
What was so telling were the similarities in the parents’ testimonies. First, all the young people were vulnerable in various ways: as well as childhood trauma of abuse and being in care, they were autistic or had mental health conditions, and in one case was caught up in a friendship group of ‘trans-identifying’ girls.
Second, they had all become involved in LGBT Youth Scotland clubs in school, and none had expressed any gender unease or questioning prior to this club membership. In each case, LGBT Youth Scotland activists assured them that their unhappiness, social difficulties, or sense of being different were because they were ‘transgender’ – supposedly born in the wrong body. The solution to each child’s problems was social transition to the opposite sex in school followed by referral to the Sandyford gender identity service for hormone therapies and ultimately gender reassignment surgeries. They were encouraged to hide their new gender identity from their parents, who would, they were told, try to dissuade them.
Third, in each case trusted adults, teachers or social workers, endorsed this approach by unquestioningly affirming the young person’s wish to ‘transition’ and allowing them to change their name and pronouns. Subsequently, this was justified on the basis that they were acting on the guidance of the Scottish government or, in Katherine’s case, the Scottish Care Inspectorate’s guidance. Both sets of guidance are derived from a LGBT Youth Scotland document and advise that children over 12 have the right to withhold information from parents.[1]
Finally, and unsurprisingly, all the parents were ‘the last to find out’ that their child had socially transitioned in school, learning accidentally or when their child finally told them.
Parental doubts or opposition was met with accusations that they were harming their children by not affirming their gender identity − or that they were even exposing them to the risk of suicide. In several cases, parents were referred to social services on the grounds of child abuse, either by the school or, in one case, by a mental health clinician. What is so dreadful is that family relationships have been seriously, perhaps irrevocably, damaged.
Thanks to government’s endorsement, LGBT Youth Scotland, through its schools charter scheme, is present in more than half of Scotland’s secondary schools and in at least 40 primary schools. This is despite the fact that it is an organisation for young people aged 13-25. The charter rewards schools for setting up LGBT Youth Scotland clubs or groups, and for appointing children or young people as ‘LGBT champions’, who are encouraged to question pupils about their sexual orientation and gender identity.[2]
By the organisation’s own admission, it attracts vulnerable young people. In its 2022 Annual Youth Work Survey, it claimed that almost three-quarters of ‘our young people’ have a ‘disability or health condition’, 63 per cent have a mental health problem, 46 per cent have a learning disability or difficulty. Ninety-one per cent of young people in the survey ‘agreed that LGBT Youth Scotland had helped them feel part of a community’, and 86 per cent said they had made new friends.
Publication of the final report of the Cass Review achieved several key things. It exposed the lack of a clinical, scientific, or ethical basis for the affirmative model of gender transition services practised in the UK. Furthermore, it exposed the potential or actual harm being done to children and young people. It also castigated clinicians (and implicitly politicians) for their failure to confront the reasons for the exponential rise in referrals to gender identity services of adolescents. The rise in referrals is predominantly among girls (about a 70 per cent increase) from around 2014-2015, but there has been a not inconsiderable increase for boys.
There appears to be a reluctance to consider the possibility of a social contagion among this most susceptible population. I would argue that there is a clear relationship between this rise in referrals and the spread of gender ideology in society and its institutions. In Scotland, the increase in referrals coincides with the spread of LGBT Youth Scotland’s influence in schools, together with the government’s Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenting curriculum and subsequent guidance, Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools.
To be blunt, LGBT Youth Scotland is actively recruiting young people to become ‘transgender’ (or ‘transgender-identifying’) and demanding that ‘gender-affirming treatment’ should be available for them, regardless of age and of any of the coexisting problems they may have. This is why LGBT Youth Scotland’s Trans Youth Commission has reacted so angrily to the announcement that Sandyford Young People’s gender identity service has paused the provision of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to those under 18. The recently wrote: ‘We are angry that we have been abandoned yet again by a service that is supposed to protect and help us [...] We would like to be clear about the wonderful impacts that accessing gender affirming care can have [...] Gender affirming care is about our right to do what we want with our own body. It is freedom. We deeply urge Sandyford to reconsider this decision.’[3]
It can only be hoped that the Scottish MSPs who were witness to Katherine’s story and the accounts by the parents of transgender-identifying young people will make it their business to begin a challenge to the government to get the recommendations of the Cass Report implemented in Scotland, to get LGBT Youth Scotland and transgender ideology out of Scottish schools, and the government’s guidance on supporting transgender pupils shredded.
References
1. Cunningham J. 2023. Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: what’s wrong with government guidance? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bei_RpeJHl_-CMjmtOGx-hyPLMS4dK2V/view.
2. Sanderson D. 19 April 2024. Radical LGBT charity encourages teachers not to tell parents their children are trans. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/19/lgbt-charity-scotland-teachers-parents-trans-children/.
3. LGBT Youth Scotland. News Statement. https://lgbtyouth.org.uk/news-statement-april-2024/.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://archive.ph/2024.05.02-224831/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/school-reported-parents-of-trans-child-to-social-services-ngm80gpc5 Helen Puttick and Marc Horne, School reported parents of ‘trans’ child to social services. George Watson’s College in Edinburgh alerted social workers in 2020 after the parents asked the school to adopt a ‘watchful waiting’ approach to their child. 02/05/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-144442147?source=queue Sarah Phillimore, Consent to Medical Transition at 16 – where are we now? Two cases have now been decided in the wake of the Cass Review concerning the decision of 16 year olds to take cross sex hormones. In both, the court declined to intervene. 08/05/24
https://archive.ph/2024.05.09-213559/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/09/autism-school-pushing-pseudoscientific-trans-ideology/ Daniel Sanderson, Autism school signed up to LGBT charter pushing ‘pseudoscientific’ trans ideology. Kaimes, which takes children from age five, accused of ‘breathtaking’ recklessness over what it teaches vulnerable pupils. 09/05/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/09/the-entitlement-and-intolerance-of-the-campus-gaza-camps/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3xTgOMs2SOHnHuNC9elGzXHlpI-uDG97ZRprV3vbyjWD62k2B4XSnkx-w_aem_Adz5XkFq3N8m3tho6NftvhHPGvvMOb10M1Y0LjO7WVWcI-Zl2KScLOnwUV32I8cTFaD4-mrFtMPeWrV-6ir0OYr0#google_vignette Joanna Williams, The entitlement and intolerance of the campus Gaza camps. Anti-Israel bigotry is spreading like wildfire across UK universities. 09/05/24
https://archive.is/XlqyY Helen Puttick, I’ve seen first-hand that we’re too quick to help young people change gender. A Scottish clinician warns that girls robbed of their own childhoods are directed unquestioningly towards cross-hormone treatment that may make them infertile. 11/05/24
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/john-swinney-first-minister-and-snp-leader-addresses-question-on-whether-trans-woman-is-a-woman-4625784 Alistair Grant, John Swinney: First Minister and SNP leader addresses question on whether trans woman is a woman. 13/05/24
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/dispelling-the-suicide-myth/ Sex Matters, Dispelling the suicide myth. 10/05/24
https://corvinak.hu/en/velemeny/2024/05/02/in-defence-of-standards Joanna Williams, In Defence of Standards. The determination of parents to secure a place for their child at a good school suggests that, among the general public at least, high educational standards are valued. However, among teachers, policy-makers and educational theorists, there is disagreement about the meaning of standards and little consensus that securing high standards is an important aim for schools. 02/05/24
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Joanna Williams, In Defence of Standards. Great article, also if you click on her name, it takes you to four more education related articles.