Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No39
Newsletter Themes: conversion therapy, mobile phones in school, and the idea of social construction
Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak encouraged us to think that the Conservative Party might finally take a stand against the trans rights activists in their ranks. It looked as if the campaign to ban conversion therapy in the UK might be dropped. However, according to the Guardian the law will go ahead, and the controversial idea of gender identity will be included in the ban. This highly contentious bill, which would make it illegal for parents and therapists to talk to children about gender dysphoria and identity without affirming their new ‘trans’ status, remains in a similar kind of political limbo in Scotland. Perhaps we can all breathe a sigh of relief in the face of the Conservatives’ and the SNP’s crisis. However, we shouldn’t confuse political crisis for principle; this proposed law represents a very serious attack on the rights of parents to talk to their children and their right to seek balance and non-partisan therapeutic support for them. According to Spiked Online, ‘There is a danger that by banning trans conversion therapy, we will make it difficult for professional therapists to talk through and work out what is causing someone’s gender dysphoria. It will pile yet more pressure on clinicians to simply affirm a person’s sense that he or she is born in the “wrong” body, rather than question it.’ This week, Carolyn Brown, an educational psychologist, looks at the Conversion Therapy Bill in more detail, we carry a letter from a parent about phones in schools, and Dr Simon Knight returns to look at ideas about childhood, this time exploring what academics mean when they talk about the social construction of childhood and gender identity.
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The Conversion Therapy Bill has been delayed in Scotland – is this the end of the matter?
Carolyn Brown is a retired depute principal educational psychologist
When children or teenagers announce to parents, teachers, or any other adult that they want to be something other than what they are – for example the opposite sex – the best response is to listen carefully, treat the discussion seriously, avoid rejecting the child’s or teenager’s statement, but under no circumstance affirm the individual’s claim. The chances are that the child’s or teenager’s statement is a red flag signalling that other concerns and issues need to be addressed: anxiety issues, perhaps, or trauma(s), autism, care issues ... or maybe some or all of these. This is where psychological assessment and intervention, including the possibility of therapeutic support, should be considered.
When kids say they are ‘trans’, why on earth would a responsible adult necessarily agree with them? Agreeing with a child who says that he or she is something other than what he or she is – for example a pirate, Superman, etc. – is participating in a fantasy. That can be OK as long as everyone, including the child, understands that any agreement in a fantasy is only for that moment in time. In essence, it’s imaginative play, which is a healthy part of child development. However, when a fantasy is claimed as reality, that is a very different matter indeed. When an adult affirms a child’s or teenager’s fantasy, this facilitates a deluded belief. It is deeply misleading and misinformed for an adult to do this. This type of affirmative behaviour on the part of an adult is a recipe for facilitating the development of severe future psychological problems.
Our job as parents and professionals is to help any child become more accepting of who they already are. This is especially important with regard to the reality of our biological bodies. Children need to know from a young age what their sex is, and that it cannot be changed. Children need clear and supportive messaging from the adults around them that they are accepted as belonging to the sex they were identified as having at birth, whether they conform to gender stereotypes or not. Therapy and psychological support are likely to be helpful and even necessary for gender-questioning children, teenagers and adults, especially when they have experienced difficulties in their psychological and emotional development, such as trauma and care issues, or other challenges, such as autism and ADHD.
The Conversion Therapy Bill in Scotland
The proposed bill in Scotland included a ban on attempts to dissuade children from declaring themselves as ‘trans’ and stating that they wish to change sex. In 2022, the so-called ‘expert’ Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee (made up largely of activists) advised Scottish government ministers that any alternative approach seeking to explore possible causes of children and teenagers identifying as ‘trans’ is conversion therapy and should be banned. There were recommendations too for removing children from the care of their parents who did not support their children being called ‘trans’. It is hard to credit that this was written in a so-called democratic society by a so-called ‘Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee’ and accepted as credible by a so-called ‘progressive’ and well-informed government. Such recommendations are conflating conversion therapy, as previously used to persecute same sex–attracted individuals, with appropriate and helpful support of gender-questioning children and teenagers who, in most cases, will have mental health issues. Teenagers have always wanted to experiment with their identity: to be goths, punks, hippies, ‘gender benders’, and so on. This was always fine and part of growing up. However, in the current context, far too many institutions and public services – including schools – have embraced the new ‘flat earth’ belief which says that any individual can choose to be the opposite sex if they wish and that it is important to affirm this wish. This is not only daft but dangerous.
Conversion therapy: a brief history
Conversion therapy is now very ill-defined and has taken on several different meanings. The term was used to describe a range of medical and psychotherapeutic interventions which were offered to lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) men and women in the 1950s. These were focused more on aversion than conversion. Therapists aimed to disrupt associations between same-sex sexual stimuli and sexual responses. For example, electric shocks and medically induced vomiting were part of the treatment. Over approximately the next twenty years, therapists attempted to reorientate people’s sexuality towards heterosexual stimuli via a range of ‘therapies’ including religious counselling, talking therapies, and hormonal treatments. These attempts to either avert homosexuality or convert LGB people to heterosexuality did not work.
In the 1980s, previous unethical treatments attempting to convert LGB people gave rise to affirmative practice. ‘Gay-affirming therapy’ was developed as a form of reparative therapy, where the clinician demonstrated acceptance of the client’s non-heterosexual identity as a means of reducing negative societal reactions. By 2015, societal norms had shifted significantly, resulting in the first Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Conversion Therapy, which was signed by sixteen organisations. In this MOU, the signatories agreed that it was unethical for a therapist to try to change someone’s sexual orientation. But just two years later, a second memorandum expanded the definition of conversion therapy to include any therapeutic approach ‘that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other’ (my emphasis in italics) [1]. The inclusion of ‘gender identity’ in this second MOU signified a major shift, resulting in the term ‘affirmative care’. Gender ideology had piggybacked onto a historic gay rights issue and changed what society meant and understood by the term ‘conversion therapy’, while ‘affirmative care’ morphed into ‘medical affirmation’, including chemical and surgical treatment.
This has resulted in a situation of total confusion where therapists could run the risk of being accused of conversion therapy when all they are attempting to do is to identify the causes of an individual’s distress and support that individual to manage them. Trans activists and sympathisers would have us believe that the only support that is appropriate is affirmative support and the likely follow-on to medicalisation including hormone treatment and surgery. But where does that leave support and challenge when an individual has faulty or delusional ideas? And where does that leave children and troubled and confused adults?
Is the bill banning conversion therapy no longer an issue?
The bill has not been included in the Scottish government’s programme for government for this year. Instead, a consultation process will occur next year, in 2024, with a report to follow. Regarding these new developments, Helen Joyce stated: [2]
Whenever the Scottish Government talks about ‘conversion therapy’, it conflates two quite different things. The first is the historic abuse of gay people in an attempt to turn them straight – which is already illegal and has not happened in any healthcare setting for decades. The second is careful, ethical treatment for gender distress, which can have many causes and which often resolves. Trans activists want this best practice outlawed, with gender-distressed children blindly ‘affirmed’ in an identity that would otherwise likely be a passing phase... Delaying this harmful and unnecessary bill can only be a good thing.
Such a sensible summary from Joyce begs the question, How can those individuals at the highest levels of society, with the most power, be so easily confused and misled? When the issue is assessed historically, it is clear that by misusing what was once a gay rights issue, the trans lobby has made a spurious claim about a treatment method that no longer applies. It is simply ridiculous that our politicians got as far as drafting a bill for parliament. Activist organisations have had far too much influence on politicians, civil servants and government policy-makers. Repeatedly, they have acted to mislead and to be impecunious with the truth while other, truly expert, voices have not been heeded.
The Conversion Therapy and Gender Recognition Reform Bills were not mistakes. They were wilful attempts to take Scotland down a gender ideological path driven by activists who have little knowledge of or expertise in child development, education, psychology or women’s issues. The only reason the Conversion Therapy Bill has been delayed is a politically expedient one involving the self-preservation of those in power. It is likely that gender ideology activists have other moves planned. There are real risks that our political masters will behave similarly to what we have experienced already. We must remain vigilant and continue to scrutinise and challenge our politicians, policy-makers and institutions and hold them to account.
References
1. Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care. Authority supports Memorandum of Understanding on conversion therapy and welcomes the inclusion of gender identity. 27/09/22
2. Daniel Martin and Danial Sanderson. SNP delays ban on conversion therapy amid warnings it could criminalise parents. Telegraph. 13/09/23
Mobiles in school
We asked parents what their thoughts are on mobiles in schools. Julie Sandilands replies.
After nearly two decades of disruption, Gillian Keegan has finally pledged to ban mobile phones in schools across England, and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear a deep sigh rippling through headteachers’ offices throughout the land.
Mobile phone use in schools has, in my opinion, been one of the biggest barriers to education, and not particularly because of a lack of government legislation. A positive, whole-school ethos demanding high expectations of all stakeholders, including staff, is in the main all that is needed. Yes, I’m talking about strong leadership and clear communication. I’m sure there are many schools that already have established behaviour management policies encompassing the use of mobiles on school grounds, and that these expectations extend to family members and friends.
The first vivid memory I have relating to this issue was when I was supporting a deputy head teaching a rather challenging Year 11 foundation maths class, just before the lunchbreak, in the north of England. A female student, reacting to the buzzing phone in her pocket, took the call. The deputy head roared ‘Put that phone away!’ The indignant reply, reverberating at the same sound level, came swiftly: ‘It’s my mum, alright!’ In what can only be described as a ninja movement, the deputy head took the phone and a fraught conversation could just be heard in the corridor outside the classroom door. By then you could’ve heard a pin drop as we all strained to listen!
The second was teaching a National 5 English class in Scotland. Students were well aware of my strict policy on mobile phones, i.e. turned off and out of sight. They very often complained: ‘but Mr. So and So lets us,’ or ‘but Miss So and So uses hers in lesson.’ A calm, cool stare accompanied by raised eyebrows usually cut short that particular avenue. However, despite this, it was a constant battle, with students balancing phones on their lap, scrolling through social media while pretending to read a text that they would shortly be assessed on in an external examination. After the three obligatory warnings, I eventually sought senior management intervention. This eventually came in the form of a depute standing outside my door at the beginning of every lesson with a box, collecting phones from a list of perpetrators. Did this solve the problem? Sadly not. The list just kept getting longer, and at one point included nearly half of twenty-three names on the register.
This twenty-first century cultural phenomenon has created a tech-dependent society across all age groups, widening the gap between reality and the online fantasy world. Yes, herald TikTok, Instagram, etc. and their wonderful algorithms satisfying the ever-growing thirst for instant gratification whether for good or bad. And it is not just school settings that need to think about the private use of phones – it could reap economic benefits too. Whatever ... but you have to admit that the genius business model creating a never-ending multibillion-dollar industry is worthy of applause. Quick test. Turn off your mobile phone, put it in a drawer, and ignore it for 24 hours. Go on, you know you want to!
Understanding social construction
Simon Knight has a PhD in Education from the University of Strathclyde. He has been working with children and young people in a variety of social care, youth work and school contexts for 35 years. He has two school-aged children.
Police Scotland’s new LGBT Allies toolkit encourages employees to treat some beliefs more equally than others. The toolkit tells staff that ‘gender identity isn’t a decision or a choice’ and defines this as ‘a person’s innate sense of their own gender ... which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.’
That the world we inhabit is one created by humans (or socially constructed), rather than by God or nature, seems straightforward today. In my previous article Children, not mini adults (Newsletter No34), I explored how the concept of ‘childhood’ was invented, by us. These days there is little serious questioning of the idea that we live in a socially constructed world. Looking at the long list of categories or identities on equalities monitoring forms, it is scarcely possible to remember or imagine a time when our identities seemed to be biologically ascribed.
As an approach, the idea that humans create or construct their world seems contradictory. For some, our entire being and the context in which we exist is manufactured. Everything emanates from our actions and is specific to the time and place of its culture. Concepts such as ‘childhood’ or ‘education’ have no universal relevance. Their meaning is determined so much by their context that there is no commensurability between cultures.
For others, human agency is accepted as more than just significant, but nature still stretches the canvas onto which humans cast their world. To a greater or lesser extent, nature is understood to exert an influence over, or even determine, the extent of the impact of human agency. Nature in this context can be understood to be in some manner ‘divine’ in either old-style establishment-based religions or in the more recent ‘new age’ Mother Earth or environmental causes.
These discussions about nature and culture have been well rehearsed over the past 300 years, in particular by John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Often placed in opposition to one another, they shared an approach that rejected ideas which we might today describe as relativism. Both treated children as a special class of people. They would have been baffled at the idea that we don’t need to draw boundaries around categories such as childhood and that reality can be altered by just insisting that it is so.
Today’s gender-affirming activists and their allies, including the police, take what is worst from each side of the culture and nature debates, undermining human agency in the process. First, there are those who want children to be able to construct their own identity in any way they wish. Children are a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate onto which anything can be written. This ‘frees’ children from ‘constraining and oppressive social structures’, allowing them to construct their own futures unshackled to conservative and limiting narratives. Earlier and earlier intervention is required to undo and prevent further poisoning by unenlightened adults (or parents) already involved children’s lives and to stop ‘nature’ from casting its hormonal dye. ‘Right-thinking’ people need to drive a wedge, often secretly, between children and their ‘wrong-thinking’ family. And children need professional support to make the ‘correct’ decisions.
On the other hand, the gender-affirming lobby has it that children need to be free to find and live out their true ‘authentic’ selves. This aspect of a child’s life seems to be already written somewhere, a prescribed natural or God-given ‘gendered soul’. Any action that refuses to ‘affirm’ this deep-down truth is understood to be oppressive and destructive. But this approach flies in the face of every scientifically established process for the development of selfhood. Your ‘self’ isn’t determined at conception, waiting latently to flourish as the individual discovers them-self. Selfhood comes from interactions with the world, nuancing itself in a reflexive manner. Vygotsky (1896–1934) identified how natural processes, nurture or an individual’s social experiences, and the broader reflexive cultural world all simultaneously work together to develop individuals. While nature was part of this triptych, different aspects of humanity also play a determining role.
No wonder children and young people today face increasingly confused and challenging mental health problems. They are told that they can develop their gender identities for themselves, choosing from the ever-expanding list, or synthesise their own one, with no recall by nature or biology. At the same time, they are also pressured to be who they truly are – encouraged to reach into their psyche for some fundamental or natural truth that was seeded at conception. Both approaches cast an interdict on the influence of the world around them, the key source of a sincere self.
‘In a time of doubt, of what can we be certain?’ asked, and answered, Descartes (1596–1650); concluding that if he was thinking, he at least must be. But ‘I think, therefore I am’ is very different to today’s ‘I say, therefore I am.’. Whereas the process of thinking confirms the individual’s existence to himself, asserting something to be true purely by virtue of saying it requires us to enter the transcendental realm.
I can say many things: ‘My favourite ice cream is mint choc chip’, ‘I am same sex–attracted’, ‘I am a cat’, ‘I am a baby’. Each of these assertions can be tested against a standard for the category, if required. It may not be necessary, for example where my assertion has no implications for other people. But in other situations, society should not be required to affirm the pretence, or collude with a delusion such as ‘I am a cat’.
The implications of this trend of society to affirm a child’s identity or belief regardless of its alignment with reality is very serious. We do not treat children differently to adults for arbitrary reasons. Children are not ‘childish’ just because adults say they are. An adult has experience, physical and psychological maturity, and moral independence, which give them competence from which their legal capacity emanates. Children are lacking this experience and qualities and are not generally allowed to take major decisions about themselves (e.g. starve themselves to death), other individuals (e.g. serve on a jury) or society (e.g. vote in elections). Blurring this distinction has serious consequences for everyone. Adults are patronised by ‘power’ and children have unrealistic demands made of them.
The debates around ‘trans’ identity exemplify this trend to ignore the differences between adults and children, but so too do critical race theory (CRT) interventions in schools, where white children are tarred with predetermined and unshakable guilt for crimes that occurred generations ago, and children of colour are born into victimhood.
The ‘social’ bit of social constructionism gives people agency. If you can play an active role in who you become, how your ‘selfhood’ develops and becomes ‘who you are’, it is good. This is your springboard into the public world. There are aspects of who we are though that you cannot alter, no matter how much you wish to. We can intervene to ameliorate the disadvantages of physical impairments, but no matter how much we legislate against disadvantage, parliament can’t undo biological fact. Truth is arrived at in a range of ways. Science has discovered and invented a whole host of hugely important knowledge. How this scientific truth is utilised by us is decided in the political realm, where discussion and debate, and democratic participation, govern ‘truth’.
Agency and universalism are not unkind. Truth can be harsh, but it up to us to find ways to overcome the challenges that individuals face socially without disregarding that which we have no control over. Or at least attempt to do so until we find a ‘mint choc chip’ gene.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman, Fighting the Good Fight in an Age of Unreason—A New Dissident Guide. 01/10/23
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/nearly-70-tory-mps-champion-legislation-mandating-parental-access-to-rse-lesson-materials-5511729?utm_source=uk_morningbriefnoe&src_src=uk_morningbriefnoe&utm_campaign=uk_mb-2023-10-18&src_cmp=uk_mb-2023-10-18&utm_medium=email&est=cNl%2BnH4HLWAQAeG367pmwwlbKRyDWFU4hY0pkjWyCeLnyJctqurJ%2BVIiRCdZitrxWA6MPQ%3D%3D&utm_term=news&utm_content=6 Joseph Robertson, Nearly 70 Tory MPs Champion Legislation Mandating Parental Access to RSE Lesson Materials. 17/10/23
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/schools-teaching-kids-social-justice/ James Lindsay, Why Schools Are Teaching Our Kids ‘Social Justice’. 17/10/23
https://substack.com/inbox/post/138064464 Peter Gray, Why did teenage suicides increase sharply from 2008 to 2019? Much evidence supports the theory that No Child Left Behind and Common Core have caused a surge in young people’s anxiety, depression, and suicides. 18/10/23
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/government-to-tell-uk-general-medical-council-that-women-are-women-5512320 Evgenia Filimianova, Government to Tell UK General Medical Council That ‘Women Are Women’. A House of Lords peer has questioned whether mothers would have confidence in a doctor ‘who thinks that men can have babies.’
https://unherd.com/2023/10/inside-britains-new-trans-clinics/ Kathleen Stock, Inside Britain’s new trans clinics. They said they were closing the Tavistock’s gender services – but what happened next? 19/10/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/edinburgh-uni-staff-accused-horrific-31150546 Jessica North, Edinburgh Uni staff accused of ‘horrific’ and ‘nonsensical attack’ on free speech over gender book. 10/10/23
https://substack.com/inbox/post/138107181 Frank Furedi, Decolonisation – another word for dehumanisation. Decolonisation – a warrant for dispossessing people of their humanity. 20/10/23
https://www.teachwire.net/news/commodification-education/ Alka Sehgal Cuthbert takes issue with the creeping commodification of not just schools’ curricula, but now also their fundamental ethos. (retrieved 23/10/23)
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