Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No84
Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No84
Newsletter Themes: Parents challenge Jenni Minto, and reflections on the Cass Review
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The institutions of Scotland, especially within education, need a clear-out.
Having noted last week that Police Scotland will continue to call male rapists ‘she’ and record the crime according to the claimed ‘gender’ of the rapist, we now watch as the man who ‘destroyed a rape crisis centre’ has resigned, having punished women who ‘refused to toe the line on gender ideology’.
Articles are now, at last, being written that ask, ‘Why is Police Scotland in thrall to the madness of trans dogma?’ Meanwhile, John Swinney is on the naughty step but refuses to take any responsibility for this trans dogma in the police, claiming that these are ‘operational’ police matters. This despite the fact that the police have repeatedly been calling out for guidance on this issue.
The perversity of this situation is beyond comprehension for the vast majority of Scottish people, but then I guess, as our enlightened politicians would say, Scottish people have to ‘change their culture’.
The story of the Rape Crisis man, Mridul Wadhwa, who identifies as a woman, is both bizarre and shocking. Transgender rights activist Wadhwa was appointed chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2021; he also stood for the SNP on an all-women shortlist. A report has concluded that under his leadership, the centre did ‘not put survivors first’, that he led a ‘heresy hunt’ against a former employee who questioned the centre’s policy on gender self-identification, and most shocking of all, rape survivors were turned away from the centre if they were suspected of being gender-critical (meaning that they know that humans cannot change sex).
This, I repeat, is perverse.
This week, we received a letter, written by a parent, that was sent to the SNP’s Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health, Jenni Minto. A number of these letters have been sent by distraught parents whose children have been transitioning since they entered high school. You can read the full letter below.
I’ve met two of these parents, and they’re both quite straightforward modern, loving parents, whose lives have been turned upside down by transgender ideology that is dripping out of social media and, tragically, being endorsed and promoted in schools.
What you will see in the letter below (from a mother whom we will call Susan) is an often-heard story of a child picking up on transgender ideas in high school, often from peers who are also ‘identifying’ as a ‘different gender’, and from social media. Parents, often unclear about what is going on, assume that this is simply a phase but then find their child’s identity is changing and then changing again, from being non-binary one week to suddenly becoming ‘transgender’ the next.
In Susan’s case, which again is quite typical, there are other issues that emerge, other mental health difficulties and problems with body image and even body hatred. Tragically, the Scottish government approach that is adopted in most schools is to simply validate these new identities. Susan, for example, was advised by the school to simply ‘go along with it’, and she was shocked to find, when she discussed the matter further with the school, that they had changed her child’s details in their system. Now her daughter, as far as the school was concerned, was suddenly her son!
After this, Susan explains to me that ‘none of the teachers would engage fully on the matter’, and those who saw a problem ‘wouldn’t fully step up’. Even in this Catholic high school, Susan explains, the school was ‘following the Scottish government’s guidance for transgender pupils’. This meant that at the age of 13, ‘my daughter’s name had been erased’ by the school. ‘When I raised my concern with pastoral care to say I felt this had been a mistake,’ Susan explained, ‘they ignored me’.
Of course, the school does not have to deal with the repercussions of what they are doing in helping to transition a child. When, at 15 years of age, Susan’s daughter started talking about needing testosterone and wanting to have her breasts removed, the school could carry on regardless. In loco parentis, the idea that schools act in the place of a parent, ends once the child steps out of the school. Schools can turn their backs on the repercussions and can carry on with the next ‘identifying’ child.
More good work is being carried out by ScotPAG (Scottish Professionals Advising on Gender). Via their latest post, you can find a response to another parent’s letter from Stuart Downes (Health and Wellbeing Curriculum Policy Manager) on behalf of Jenni Minto.
It’s worth dwelling on what Downes says to these parents. Here are a few snippets:
Young people […] experience learning which is factual [and] objective [through] teaching which is factual and presented in an objective, balanced and sensitive manner within a framework of sound values. [Using] age-and-stage appropriate education in a way that enables children and young people to make informed decisions about their lives.
Learning in RSHP education […] includes learning about gender identity.
Downes continues:
The Minister was clear in her response to Parliament that schools do not teach young people about their own gender identity, that is a personal matter for any individual, and, in the case of young people, their family.
Downes then explains that transgender pupils have poorer experiences at school and are
likely to have poorer mental health and wellbeing, and do not achieve similar educational outcomes as their peers.
He talks about the need to ensure that the rights ‘of transgender pupils’ are respected, adding,
Children’s rights, including their right to privacy, are fundamental foundations of a child’s education.
So children experience learning that is ‘factual and objective’, do they? Are the ideas that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’ and that there are multiple ‘genders’ objective? These are certainly not established facts.
Children receive age- and stage-appropriate education, do they? What about the nursery children being encouraged to listen to and read story books promoting transgender doctrine? Or the teachers of prepubescent 11-year-olds being instructed through the RSHP curriculum to, ‘Ask if the children have heard the word transgender and introduce the term/definition on the slides, and talk through to ensure understanding’. Is this age-appropriate, is it simply objective and fact-based, or is it ideology, potentially confusing and damaging to very young children?
It is worth noting that this same RSHP lesson plan notes that if a child is questioning his or her identity, ‘In these circumstances the duty remains to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment for this child, respectful of their and their parents’ wishes in terms of any changes they wish to make to things like name or dress or chosen pronouns’ (my emphasis in italics). And yet, as we have seen, and see time and time again, when parents question the dogma of transgender ideology, they are not treated with respect, and their wishes are often ignored. Indeed, the Supporting Transgender Pupils guidance document even encourages schools to see this attitude by parents as a possible wellbeing issue, even one that might require implementation of the school’s child protection policy (p. 39). One of the parents I’ve met was even referred to social services when she questioned what was happening with her child.
Downes talks about schools not teaching individual children about their own gender identity, but what does that mean? When a school adopts a new name and new pronouns for a child, and when guidance teachers are encouraged to adopt a ‘gender-affirming’ approach, how is this not related to actual people, actual children – individual children and their gender identity? And what are those running the LGBT Youth Scotland clubs that are set up in schools talking to children about?
Dripping from every word coming from Downes is this idea that children must be ‘enabled’ to make ‘informed decisions’, and that we must respect ‘children’s rights, including their right to privacy’, which he cites as ‘fundamental foundations of a child’s education’.
We have noted before that the idea of children’s rights is highly confused. Here we see it in all its glory, where age-inappropriate, ideologically driven ideas are fed to even very young children and then categorised as a form of empowerment. As ScotPAG rightly note, ‘By definition, children are not adults’. Once they are treated as such, we are in serious trouble of abusing them, manipulating them, indoctrinating them.
The reply published by ScotPAG was sent by Downes on Minto’s behalf and was a reply to a letter sent to Minto by Margaret (name changed), another parent who has watched in horror as two of her children were transitioned with the assistance of the school and other children’s services.
In response to the Downes/Minto reply, Margaret told me, ‘She’s a lying **** who doesn’t have a clue what is actually going on in schools. She hasn’t spoken to ANY parent whose child is caught up in this… We and thousands of other parents are living proof, but she hasn’t bothered to even look into it.’
In her letter to Minto, Margaret explained that, ‘Our children are not born in the wrong body, they have been sold a lie and believe that changing sex is possible. We’ve been living a nightmare for ages, and I fully place the blame on the RSHP which absolutely teaches gender identity ideology and tells children they can be any girl or boy they want to be.’
Margaret, who originally wrote her letter to Jenni Minto after Minto dismissed concerns about school guidance on the transgender issue, concludes by saying this: ‘It’s abhorrent what’s happening in our schools and for you to outright lie that it isn’t happening is either disingenuous or something you really haven’t got a clue about.’
To support parents like Susan and Margaret, we need your help, so get in touch and let us know what is happening in your school. What evidence and examples do you have about transgender ideology being promoted?
Contact info@sue.scot
We know it’s happening; it’s part and parcel of the educational ethos and RSHP curriculum, and it is a danger to our children, all helped by the confused idea of children’s rights, which ends up meaning that young children are being indoctrinated and manipulated by adults who think that their ‘framework of sound values’ is the one that children need to adopt.
The transgender issue can be confusing, but teachers and educators need to be more critical and questioning than they often are. They need to ask, Why now? Why has a whole new group of teenagers, especially teenaged girls, suddenly decided that they are transgender?
To finish, I’ll leave you with a quote from the Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance:
A question transactivism cannot answer. Where were all the ‘transchildren’ from 1920–2000 when Piaget, Kohlberg, Bandura, Vygotsky, Erikson, Bowlby, Steiner etc along with their students (and their vociferous critics) were spending tens of thousands of hours doing empirical research on children? Research that involved studying children at home, in nursery and at school. Studies that involved writing down every action, statement, or question that the child asked. And then analysing these recordings for patterns and insights. Not one of them observed a ‘trans child’ in all this time. So where were all the ‘transchildren’?
EVENT
Educating Scotland: Leaving Excellence Behind
Thursday 26 September 2024 - 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Edinburgh
https://commonknowledgeevents.telltix.com/events/commonknowledgeevents/1376167
The Final Report of the Cass Review: achievements, strengths and shortfalls
Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.
Why has Dr Hilary Cass’s independent review of gender identity services for children and young people had such an impact in the UK and internationally?
It is the most comprehensive scientific evaluation to date of evidence regarding the psychological and medical treatment of children and adolescents with gender incongruence/dysphoria.[1] It took four years and was based on seven peer-reviewed systematic literature reviews by researchers at the University of York, together with qualitative research to capture the experiences of children and young people referred to gender identity services, as well as the experiences of their families. The systematic reviews – which represent the highest level of evidence – covered every aspect of gender identity services: care pathways, particularly those following the ‘gender affirmative model’; the characteristics of children and young people referred to gender identity services; use of puberty-suppressing hormones; use of masculinising and feminising hormones; psychotherapeutic interventions; the impact of social transition; and the quality of international and regional guidelines for gender care.
The Review found ‘remarkably weak evidence’ (Final Report, p. 13) for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and was highly critical of the clinical assessment and management of cases and of the gender affirmative model of care in gender identity services in the UK and internationally.
What has the Review achieved?
It has discredited affirmative gender care – the unquestioning affirmation of a child/young person’s desire to change gender, the facilitation of their medical transitioning, and the concomitant failure to fully assess other conditions complicating their gender-questioning or distress.
It has discredited the influential international guidelines that have justified the provision of affirmative gender care, especially the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and Endocrine Society guidelines – demonstrating their lack of developmental rigour, the poor quality of evidence, and the use of each other’s recommendations to create apparent consensus.
As a result of the Review’s recommendations, the gender identity development service for children and young people in England (the Tavistock GIDS in London) was closed and NHS England is establishing regional paediatric gender services; it banned the prescription of puberty blockers for under-18-year-olds. NHS Scotland has ‘paused’ the prescription of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for those under 18 by the Scottish gender identity service for young people (at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow). The UK government has extended the ban on puberty blockers to cover private gender services in the UK and abroad.
What are the strengths and shortfalls of the Review?
These fall into two areas: first, the characteristics of those referred to gender identity services; and second, the deficits in the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of gender-questioning young people.
The Review’s first strength is its comprehensive consolidation of our knowledge about the very new cohort, of predominantly adolescents, being referred to gender identity services. It examines in detail the exponential increase in referrals to the Tavistock GIDS from 2014–2015 (a trend mirrored in Scotland and internationally) and what has changed when compared with the previously small numbers (of mainly young boys) presenting in the 1990s and early 2000s. There has been a change in the gender ratio, with over 70 per cent being teenaged girls. The majority of these teenagers did not experience gender unease or confusion in childhood but instead showed what has been referred to as ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’ in adolescence. This cohort of teenagers is remarkable for what Cass describes as its ‘complexity’ – with a high incidence of associated or comorbid problems, including mental health conditions (such as body dysmorphic disorder or anorexia nervosa), autistic spectrum disorders, and adverse social experiences (many are in the care system or have a history of sexual or physical abuse and family breakdown). A large proportion are lesbians, gays or bisexual.
It is where the Review posits possible reasons for the exponential rise and the complexity of this new cohort that it appears most limited. This is summarised in one paragraph (p. 27):
Research suggests gender expression is likely determined by a variable mix of factors such as biological predisposition, early childhood experiences, sexuality and expectations of puberty. For some mental health difficulties are hard to disentangle. The impact of a variety of contemporary societal influences and stresses (including online experience) remains unclear. Peer influence is also very powerful during adolescence as are different generational perspectives.
By ‘generational perspectives’, Cass means that Generation Z (today’s 13- to 27-year-olds) are more accepting of the ‘mutability of gender’ than older age groups (p. 120). Biological predisposition is the most speculative: despite the lack of evidence for a biological cause of gender incongruence, ‘it may be that some people have a biological predisposition’ (p. 122).
Although the Review is written within a medical framework, nevertheless, what is most striking is that it leaves out of account the preceding growth of transgender ideology, together with the spread of transgender activism in academia, education, institutions such as the NHS, and virtually all the psychotherapeutic organisations. The start of the exponential rise in referrals to gender services in the UK coincided with the 2014 BBC documentary I Am Leo – 12-year-old Leo’s story about ‘growing up in the wrong body’: how Lily socially transitioned into Leo at the age of five and subsequently began medically transitioning, with puberty blockers supplied by Tavistock GIDS, together with counselling about what it means to be transgender.[2] In 2015, Stonewall, the organisation that had campaigned for equal rights for gays, lesbians and bisexuals, added the ‘T’ to LGB. One plausible explanation is that once marriage became legal for same-sex couples in the UK, in July 2013, Stonewall needed a new (lucrative) focus and transformed itself into a transgender lobby group, utilising its extensive existing connections in political, state and institutional structures.
Subsequently, large numbers of transgender organisations were spawned and transgender activists quickly gained influence in schools, universities and the NHS. At the same time, health professionals at Tavistock GIDS and the Sandyford Clinic adopted a gender-affirming model of care, under the WPATH 7 guidelines. The prescription of puberty blockers was liberalised, with children/young people almost invariably moving on to cross-sex hormones. Teaching staff were permitted or encouraged to allow the social transitioning of ‘trans kids’ in schools.
It is only in the context of transgender activism that sense can be made of Cass’s observation that ‘peer influence is […] very powerful during adolescence’
The Review noted that it ‘heard accounts of female students forming intense friendships with other gender-questioning or transgender students at school, and then identifying as trans themselves’ (p. 122). It also observed that ‘the term social contagion’ is a contested explanation, ‘causing particular distress to some in the trans community’ (p. 117). Of course it upsets transgender activists, who argue that ‘trans people’ have an innate gender identity that is in conflict with the gender they are ‘assigned’ at birth (as if the registration of a baby’s sex is some arbitrary allocation). However, social contagion does have explanatory power in terms of the sudden surge of adolescent girls claiming to be ‘trans’.
The second strength of the Cass Review is its focus on the inadequacies of the assessment, diagnosis and clinical management of young people by gender identity services. In the Interim Cass Report, published in February 2022, Cass stressed that once gender-related distress was identified, it tended to ‘overshadow’ other explanations and limit the assessment of coexisting conditions. In the Final Report, it is argued that in terms of the international guidelines for gender care, ‘the most striking problem is the lack of any consensus on the purpose of the assessment process’ (p. 28) – the inability to establish whether or not treatment is necessary. Although a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been regarded as necessary for starting medical treatment, ‘it is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them’ (p. 29). In other words, a formal diagnosis is not predictive of the persistence of gender incongruence or of desistence – the reversion to one’s heterosexual or same-sex attracted status. Studies suggest that up to 80 per cent of young people will desist if not medically transitioned, having come to terms with their bodies and sexuality. Cass has said that the difficulty is knowing into which group an individual will fit; hence the need for extreme caution in instigating medical transitioning. This is particularly so given the as-yet-unknown but increasing numbers of young adults detransitioning. The time to detransition is estimated at between 5 and 10 years (p. 188).
A key weakness of the Cass Review is its acceptance that the psychiatric diagnosis of gender incongruence represents a genuine condition which has some underlying cause that can be treated by medical interventions – at least in some cases.
In medical diagnosis, people present with symptoms that are often very general and subjective. Doctors have to identify signs that can be observed and tested for (e.g. signs of infection or other abnormalities found through scans or tests of blood pressure, blood or tissue samples, etc.). Results are then fitted into disease patterns established by medical research. However, as Lucy Johnstone points out, with very few exceptions, psychiatric conditions present with symptoms but there are no proven biological causes or measurable, verifiable signs.[3, pp. 26–27]. Diagnoses are agreed by committees of experts on the basis of behavioural features and symptoms. There are two classification systems: the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5) (2013, revised 2022) and the World Health Organisation International Classification of Diseases, eleventh edition (2022). The DSM-5 diagnosis of gender dysphoria is a good example of these points.
DSM-5 defines gender dysphoria in adolescents (and adults) as ‘a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and one’s assigned gender, lasting at least 6 months, as manifested by at least two of the following’ – for example:
a strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics
a strong desire for the sex characteristics of the other gender
a strong desire to be of the other gender
a strong desire to be treated as the other gender
a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender
To meet the criteria for the diagnosis ‘the condition must be associated with clinically significant distress’.[4]
This begs more than a few questions: what does ‘a strong desire’ mean? – it is immeasurable and entirely subjective; what does it mean ‘to be of the other gender’?; how can one have ‘the feelings and reactions’ of the opposite sex?; and what is ‘significant distress’? Reading the DSM-5 on gender dysphoria can leave one in no doubt that the American Psychiatric Association is in the grip of transgender ideology – from the adoption of its terminology to its recommendations for treatment: ‘Support may also include affirmation in various domains’, such as social affirmation or legal affirmation. ‘Medical affirmation may include pubertal suppression for adolescents […] and gender-affirming hormones like estrogen and testosterone for older adolescents and adults […] Some adults (and less often adolescents) may undergo various aspects of surgical affirmation.’
Gender dysphoria is the only clinical symptom in DSM-5 whose treatment involves sex hormone manipulation and surgical intervention. It is the view of Paul McHugh, Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, that gender dysphoria, a term for ‘feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex’, belongs to the family of ‘similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction.’ The treatment needs to attempt to correct the false/delusional belief and ‘to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it.’[5]
There is no contradiction between McHugh’s characterisation of gender dysphoria as part of a group of delusory mind–body disorders and the conception of it as a social contagion among teenaged girls. The latter is well known in relation to anorexia nervosa, but what is specific to the contemporary phenomenon is that teenagers have been so thoroughly inducted into transgender ideology in schools and online and imbued with the fallacy of sex being on a spectrum and mutable. Gender dysphoria/incongruence is part of a cultural narrative that confers attention and endorsement.
However, it is wrong to argue that gender dysphoria does not exist – that it is simply synonymous with the comorbid conditions affecting many of the young people in the new cohort of referrals to gender identity services. It very definitely exists in the sense that it is given a material transgender form – a masculinised female or a feminised male – through medical and surgical gender treatment, with its serious, life-changing sequelae. It should not be underestimated how important it is for transgender ideologues to have their mendacious belief in innate gender identity embodied in transgender individuals, and young people recruited to their ranks and transitioned. They legitimatise and validate transgender identity, putting it on a par with sexuality. That is why transgender activists in transgender organisations and among health professionals are so opposed to the Cass Review and its discrediting of affirmative gender care. It is also why the Cass Review needed to have been more circumspect about suggesting that medical transition may be appropriate for some young people or that it would be ethical to conduct research to find evidence for or against the use of puberty blockers in children or adolescents.
Notwithstanding such reservations about its limitations, the Cass Review has been an invaluable challenge to the orthodoxy of affirmative gender care, and it has created the space for reasoned debate around these issues in the UK and internationally.
Download Jenny’s pamphlet, Transgender Ideology in Scottish Schools: what’s wrong with government guidance?
References
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ (page references to the Review are given in parenthesis in the text)
Johnstone L. 2022. A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis, 2nd edition. Monmouth: PCCS Books.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria
A parent’s letter to Jenni Minto
Dear Jenni Minto,
Hope you are well.
I contact you today to express my ongoing disdain at the Scottish government’s stance on gender identity.
I think it is important you read what I have to say, as I am concerned that you have not taken time to look at the bigger picture, and so I wish to offer you a wider perspective on the matter.
I’ve become an expert on the matter by default – it’s been 5 years now – as my daughter was 12 when she first told me she was bisexual in 2019, then it was non-binary, and in 2020 – ‘trans’.
As you are currently Scotland’s public health minister, I hope you will take the time to hear my lived experience, as I fear you are complicit in a huge medical and societal scandal.
I am 46 and have lived in Scotland all my life. I was blessed with the birth of a healthy daughter in 2007 and was lucky enough to also bring a son into the world in 2009. Neither my partner or I had much money but with the help of extended family we brought up our two children, and we decided to marry in the local Catholic church we attended in 2012, when the children were age 5 and 3. It felt important to me that we all had the same family name. We lived a simple life and both children were very happy in primary school. No major issues or problems. Of course, as with any family, we have had our challenges, a number of bereavements, and my husband was made redundant before retraining.
My daughter was in P7 and 11 years old when she got her first smartphone, also around that time she got an iPad. She assured us she had plenty of Internet safety talks at school, so I tried not to be too concerned about what she might access online.
We had no reason not to believe that she was on route to becoming a lovely independent young lady, albeit knowing that there would be teenage challenges ahead.
She had some trouble settling in and fitting in at secondary school but had made a few new friends, so I was not overly concerned.
Nothing could have prepared me as a mum for what was to come.
I work in the field of counselling and therapy with children and young people; however, back in 2019 I had not yet heard of non-binary until my daughter filled me in. She told me she was now ‘non-binary’ and would prefer to be known by a new name and pronouns.
I am trained to take a child-centred approach and so I listened. Despite my instincts telling me something was off, I took on board the advice of others and tried not to be too judgemental. I was beginning to come round to giving the preferred name and they/them pronouns a go.
After all, it seemed from what she was saying that a number of her friends were non-binary, and after all, this was surely a phase at age 12 where she was playing around with her identity; she was also trying out the goth look at this time.
However, things went rapidly downhill early 2020.
She informed me she was ‘trans’ and that her pronouns were now he/him.
She had already ‘come out’ on Instagram and to friends at school.
When she turned 13, she made her own cake and iced the new name on it.
Once again, I was empathic. Yet queried how at this stage in her life she could ‘know’ or make such a huge decision.
Her moods were becoming darker. She started to self-harm and was having panic attacks.
I was supportive in the sense that I was okay about her getting a buzzcut and wearing male/gender non-conforming clothes, but I gently tried to express that she was still female. It was uncharted territory, and I was shocked to be in this situation.
She was a quirky fun, outdoorsy, creative girl, who never before had expressed the desire to be a boy or to be seen as male.
The March 2020 lockdown only made things worse, as she was now struggling with body image and depression.
She hated her body, showers/baths and mirrors. Began to get OCD symptoms.
We always limited the phone time. But it was hard to keep her offline during lockdown, when she also had an iPad and a school iPad now too.
She was now suffering from suicidal ideation and as there had been some attempts I contacted the GP and she put in a CAMHS referral.
The GP really didn’t know what to advise. My daughter was now pressuring me to get her a binder which was not even needed as developmentally she was behind for her age. By the time she was able to attend school again she was struggling to leave the house, and so I spoke to pastoral care at the school to explain she was having difficulties.
Unfortunately, when I mentioned to the school that she was going by this new name and identifying as male, their response was to change her details on the system without question. I was shocked by this response.
The only advice I was getting was to ‘just go along with it’.
I believe this to be the wrong advice.
My husband and I tried to call our daughter the preferred name out of respect for her wishes. But my husband, her dad, could not bring himself to call his daughter ‘he’. After much consideration, I feel the same way.
I have decided not to be bullied into calling my daughter, ‘son’.
As mentioned at the start of this email, I will always feel blessed to have brought both a daughter and a son into this world.
Of course, it did not go down well with our daughter that we were taking that stance, as the school and the rest of society were happy to call her ‘he’ as that is what she wanted.
I have had to endure a lot of verbal abuse, including being called transphobic and a bigot. All because I would not give in fully to the demands of the ideology.
Please keep in mind that my daughter was 12 when this started and at time of writing is 17.
Unlike a lot of Scottish secondary schools, LGBT Youth Scotland did not play a role; however, I know that my daughter’s Catholic secondary school have been following the Scottish government’s ‘guidance for transgender pupils’.
I know that they had at least two trans-identifying pupils in the year above and that they were using this Scottish government guidance to make decisions, for example to respect children’s chosen names and pronouns, and to not be fully transparent with parents.
As mentioned, we did give our daughter the freedom to express herself and she did continue to present socially as male.
By this time, I was more aware of how trans was a social contagion.
I was surprised to realise that my daughter’s plans for the future were now to ‘go on T’ – testosterone. And to have ‘top surgery’ – a double mastectomy.
She was still only 15. The Gender [Recognition] Reform Bill was coming up and at 16 she may have decided to change her name legally.
It was all happening too fast.
She was struggling even more socially now, and also struggling with school and exams.
She saw a GP in person in early 2022 for an autism assessment. We are still waiting.
I don’t want to go into any more detail here, but things came to a head late 2022, and in 2023 we ended up paying for a private counsellor.
My daughter made the decision to leave school. She was desperately unhappy and had been struggling to attend ever since the Covid lockdowns.
I am sad she did not get as good an education as she could have had. However, she is bright and talented, and I have hope that things are looking up for her.
I have had to give up most of my work to be present. It has been incredibly challenging, especially when she has been having panic attacks and autistic meltdowns.
She recently started a part-time job and is growing in confidence. She is using her birth name for work and seems relaxed and happy.
Yet for college the form asked gender identity questions, and she put down preferred name and he/him pronouns.
This means she is now living a double life.
When I queried how this would play out, she reminded me that on the form it said that in Scotland you can have two different identities.
This is true – as I saw it when she was filling out the gender identity questions.
As a liberal-minded, non-judgemental parent who has had to change my outlook on life over the past five years, this is where I find myself – concerned that I have enabled (with the help of the Scottish government) my daughter to have two different identities. A split personality.
Only time will tell what happens, but my message to you is that this new exploration of gender identity can be harmful, and as Hilary Cass says, ‘social transition’ is ‘not a neutral act’.
As a family we have been through hell. It has also all been upsetting and unsettling for her younger brother.
I want to register my complaint with you that gender identity ideology is being taught in schools.
There is plenty of evidence to prove that this is the case.
It’s undeniable that there is now a generation of very confused young people.
Schools should go back to teaching basic biology.
My daughter said a while ago if that she was ever pregnant she would be a dad.
I have to be very careful what I say to her, but she is just one example of a confused young mind.
You may call recent changes ‘progressive’. However, I believe the material on gender identity currently being taught to even very young children to be highly problematic.
The problem with your current guidance is that it suggests that if loving parents or wider family question a young person’s announcement of a new gender identity, that they should be cancelled. This is morally wrong and in fact can be dangerous to cut off children from their families.
As mentioned, my training is in person-centred care; however, I feel that the balance is shifting too much onto the rights of the child.
Children are too developmentally young to make changes so profound as changing their gender identity.
Families usually know their children better than anyone and are best placed to continue providing what their child needs.
I am concerned that many of the children, young people and families who you already have contact with have been sold a lie – that their child will be happier once they get gender affirmative care.
Stop and think about this – as what we are prescribing is sex changes for children.
Puberty is a challenging time, but it’s also a natural stage and takes time.
Puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones are harmful, often with devastating side effects.
Surgeries that some may go on to have at a young age may be deeply regretted later in life.
Nothing justifies harming vulnerable children, and so deals with big pharma or other financial deals on the matter need to be stopped now before children are harmed.
Sadly, I have heard many personal accounts from American parents whose children have been irreversibly harmed, and there are a growing number of detransitioners.
We cannot experiment on these children, who are often autistic, coming to terms with same-sex attraction, in care, suffered sexual abuse…
Counselling is often what these children need to look at underlying issues.
I ask you, as Scotland’s public health minister, what your current role and stance is regarding what I and many others believe to be a huge medical and societal scandal.
The gender industry promotes the cruel cult-like social contagion that is gender identity ideology.
It’s destroying young lives and tearing families apart.
Never did I think I would see something like this happening in Scotland.
I still can’t believe it happened to us, and I feel lucky that we have managed to stay together as a family.
As I said to my daughter’s headteacher when I went in to speak to her in person this spring, never could I have imagined when my 11-year-old daughter started secondary school that she would leave with her name changed and identifying as male. I’m still trying to process what has happened.
I won’t apologise for the length of this email, as it is important I get my message across.
If you truly are doing ‘Extensive public consultation and targeted consultation with people with lived experience’, then you need to take time to look at the bigger picture, to hear my story and that of the many other concerned and often heartbroken parents trying to cope with the ongoing challenges of having a gender-questioning child – an issue that you must appreciate is new in terms of the sheer number of, in particular, girls saying they are boys.
I would be happy to talk or meet with you in person.
I now know there are many other parents going through similar to me in Scotland.
Recently I have found much-needed support from other parents through the organisation Our Duty.
The organisation Bayswater are also very active in Scotland.
I know parents of both girls who have decided they are boys, and boys who have decided they are girls.
It would be valuable for you to hear their lived experiences.
Please read Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes and Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier.
Many Thanks for your time, and hope to hear from you soon.
Kind wishes,
Susan Smith (mum of a 17-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son)
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
Frank Furedi, The struggle to gain control over language. 07/09/24
https://gript.ie/outrage-over-vile-portrayal-of-irish-family-in-sphe-schoolbook/ Niamh Uí Bhriain, OUTRAGE OVER VILE PORTRAYAL OF IRISH FAMILY IN SPHE SCHOOLBOOK. 31/08/24
https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/compassionate-pedagogy/ Joanna Williams, Compassionate pedagogy is the latest fashion in higher education. But it is an emotionally manipulative and censorious practice that is antithetical to education. 30/11/23
SEEN, Recently Index on Censorship published an article about what at first sight appears to be a very worrying trend in school libraries: namely, that more than half of school librarians surveyed are reporting that they are being ordered to take books off shelves. 09/09/24
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39kry9j3rno Vanessa Clarke, How did the pandemic impact babies starting school as children now? 01/09/24
https://archive.is/fKmkc Andrew Learmonth, Police Scotland face backlash over gender ID policy. Campaigners have criticised Police Scotland after the force told MSPs that allowing individuals charged or convicted of rape or attempted rape to ‘self-declare’ their sex fosters ‘a strong sense of belonging’. 10/09/24
https://archive.ph/2024.09.09-065753/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/schools-must-not-be-allowed-to-indoctrinate-our-children-vl9f98jzd Caroline Brown, Schools must not be allowed to indoctrinate our children. The Scottish government’s insistence on supporting the social transitioning of children ignores wider evidence and is harming families. 08/09/24
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7ry7l305eo Andrew Picken, Review ordered into handling of complaints against teachers. 11/09/24
https://archive.is/80jvC Daniel Sanderson, SNP tells schools to ditch blazers. Ministers insist ‘flexible and inclusive’ uniform rules will help drive down costs for families. 12/09/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/13/the-dark-truth-about-lgbt-youth-scotland/ Malcolm Clark, The dark truth about LGBT Youth Scotland. Why did it take two child-sex scandals for questions to be raised about Scotland’s leading LGBT charity? 13/09/24
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