Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No3
Newsletter Themes: Girls in school, Sex and gender, and the Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education
Jenny Cunningham, Scottish Union for Education Board Member
As we go to press Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation is generating jubilation, reflection, and debate. Mounting opposition to her policies on gender recognition and sex education in schools must have contributed in some way to her demise. Back in 2015 Sturgeon said education was her priority and we should judge her on her record. At the top of her list of self-proclaimed achievements is ‘better chances’ for young people from deprived backgrounds. At SUE we see little evidence of ‘better chances’ for children or young people from any background. Our judgment on her record is that she has failed. On her watch education quality and standards have been eroded and she has overseen a raft of new policies which undermine pupils’ capacity to think and teachers’ and parents’ authority. Sturgeon’s resignation suggests an absence of integrity and direction in government, and it provides a very strong argument for you to join and get involved in our new education union.
This week Stuart Waiton argues that adults should be held to account for the growing confusion over gender among teenagers in schools, Dr Jenny Cunningham provides the second in a series of advice notes on gender ideology in schools, and secondary school teacher Stuart Baird explains his concerns about the Scottish government’s National Discussion on Education.
Negotiating the Transition to Adulthood
Dr Stuart Waiton, Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
It is difficult not to get angry when you are listening to parents who are scared for their children; some have found out that their school’s headteacher is unable to define a woman, while others have been put in the position of needing to remind their child what sex he or she is. Schools are being encouraged to adopt a gender-fluid approach to the trans question, so what should we do?
There have been several protests, in Glasgow and outside Holyrood, rightly raising concerns about the rapists and other sexual offenders who, had recent cases not been publicised, may have, and may still in the future, end up in women’s prisons.
Magically, it seems, Nicola Sturgeon has come to realise that perhaps when someone says they are a woman, it may not actually be true. This is really the only logical conclusion one can draw about double rapist Isla Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham. The prison placement of Bryson, along with other ‘trans’ prisoners, will at least initially now be based on their sex, as recorded at birth.
For Sturgeon to maintain the idea that trans women are women would mean that she has just sent the woman Isla Bryson/Adam Graham to a male prison – it’s like a Monty Python sketch gone wrong.
When we think of the trans issue, it is often men who have transitioned who come to mind. And it is often those individuals we see on TV debate shows, or who we hear about denouncing people such as J. K. Rowling. And it is individuals such as Rowling and other feminists who we see protesting around the trans question. However, when we look at what is happening in schools, the greatest change, by far, is not in the number of boys now saying that they are girls, it is the other way round.
The emergence of teenaged girls saying that they are trans is an entirely modern phenomenon. In a Google Books search, the first use of the term ‘female gender dysphoria’ was in 1979. The number of citations only starts to rise, and rise at an alarming rate, from 2005. Concerns have been raised about young children and teenagers who would previously have grown up to be homosexual adults, now ‘discovering’ that they are trans; there is even talk about lesbians becoming extinct. Those who have studied the phenomenon, such as Dr Lisa Littman, have explained that it is often also adolescent girls with autism and those with a history of mental illness who have become ‘trans’.
Littman and others, including Helen Joyce, author of the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, explain that what is happening is best described as a form of social contagion.
To put it crudely, teenaged girls saying that they are boys has become trendy and schools are endorsing this trend.
Helped by social media, particularly platforms such as TikTok, where children are often creating their own online universe, encouraged by trans rights activists and a wider culture of ‘identity’, teenaged girls are increasingly turning inwards, into their bodies, and concluding that they have been born in the ‘wrong’ one.
Dr Littman believes that ‘online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition’.
As Dr Jenny Cunningham explains, a key component of what leads young girls to transition, with all the medical and personal implications of this, is how society behaves. We have seen that Nicola Sturgeon et al. have just adopted the gender-fluid approach. There is one group of people in society who have the capacity to make a huge difference, and that is teachers – and especially headteachers.
If the massive and sudden increase in the number of children identifying as trans is to do with wider mental health problems, with adolescent trends, and with political and cultural activism, at the very least our schools need to look at the research work being done in this area and to consider the implications of what they are doing.
It may be a challenge to say that teen transgenderism has more in common with other teenage ‘trends’, such as anorexia, than it does with gay liberation. It may be confrontational to challenge the trans rights activist educators in schools. It will also be difficult to face the moralistic arguments about the potential suicide risk in these girls, but these ideas and arguments need to be questioned (as they have been here: Suicide Facts and Myths - Transgender Trend). To help teachers and parents do this, we hope to build on work already undertaken and to start a campaign around the idea that biology is real.
As adults, individuals have the absolute right to decide how they want to live, but children are not adults, and they need to know that biology is real. No individual has been ‘born in the wrong body’. A tiny number of people may grow up feeling this way, but today, the ever-expanding number has little or nothing to do with the mental disorder gender dysphoria. It is us, the adults in the room, who have helped to create a situation where sex and gender has become confused, and it is we who can stop it.
In the coming months, helped by the work of Dr Cunningham, we hope to initiate this campaign.
Perhaps we need public meetings to discuss the issues, or we may need to produce leaflets and pamphlets and give them to schools and to headteachers. Whatever we do, we are going to need your help, so get in touch and let us know what you think.
To finish, it is perhaps useful to note the argument made by the novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver, who observes that we used to understand and talk about the need to develop ‘character’ rather than an identity. Character develops through a life of struggle and changes throughout a life until our older selves have developed wisdom. The latter, the idea of your identity, is more like a trap, a limiting label that children are being encouraged to ‘discover’, often inside themselves, and to then reveal to the adult world.
Today, rather than understand that education, and the struggle to learn, is part of the necessary process to develop character, schools are turning to children and affirming their self-discovered identity, saying, ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies’. By doing this, Shriver notes, we are abandoning minors, who understandably know little or nothing of the world, or indeed of themselves, ‘Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers ... (but) with no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff’. This, she argues, is a form of abandonment. She’s right.
Sex and Gender - Part 2
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.
One of the dangers of children and young people being socially transitioned from one gender identity to the other in school, to become ‘transgender’ pupils (as advised by the Scottish government), is that most of them will be referred to the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow. This is Scotland’s only specialist service for children and young people expressing distress related to their ‘gender identity’. The service follows the same model of assessment and treatment as the gender identity service at the Tavistock Clinic in London. In July 2022, NHS England announced the decision to close the Tavistock by spring this year, after a damning report by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who found the service to be clinically unsafe. Cass censured the Tavistock for a number of reasons:
The starting point for assessment was the unquestioning acceptance (‘affirmation’) of the child or young person’s desire to change their gender, especially if they were already being treated as the opposite gender in school or at home.
The service was so focused on the treatment of gender incongruence that any other problems that the child or teenager might have had were ‘overshadowed’ and inadequately assessed, if at all. These problems included poor mental health, developmental conditions (such as autism), and social or emotional difficulties.
Children and teenagers approaching or in early puberty were being started on puberty blockers, even though little is known about the long-term effects of these drugs.
Teenagers were being referred for cross-sex hormones to endocrinology specialists who were not part of the assessment team and did not know their background.
There was a lack of follow-up of children and young people after treatment in order to monitor outcomes.
The Sandyford service has all these deficiencies, but the Scottish government has ignored the warnings in the interim findings of the Cass report and refused to close the clinic. It has indicated that it will only review the service. There are two groups of children and young people most endangered by the present situation in Scotland. The first are children and teenagers between the ages of 9 and 13 or 14 who are coming up to puberty or are in early puberty. The Sandyford Clinic says that it prioritises this group. This is the age group most likely to be started on puberty blockers to minimise the development of secondary sexual characteristics. This makes the subsequent use of cross-sex hormones more effective (as they will not need to ‘undo’ the changes brought about by puberty). Most children and teenagers treated with puberty blockers move on to treatment with cross-sex hormones, despite the risk of subsequent infertility.
The second group endangered by the government’s policy of encouraging social transitioning in schools and the government-sanctioned gender identity service is teenaged girls. The Cass report highlighted a disturbing trend in the pattern of referrals to the Tavistock (which is the same for Sandyford and most other gender identity services in America and Europe). Before 2009, there were quite small numbers of referrals, mostly for boys. After 2009, referral rates increased rapidly, and by 2016 by far the largest group comprised teenaged girls. These girls had not experienced any gender identity concerns in childhood. Neither the Tavistock nor the Sandyford service appear to have asked the question, ‘Why should so many adolescent girls suddenly develop gender incongruence?’
Two writers, one in the USA and one in the UK, have answered the question through careful analysis and extensive interviews with teenagers and parents. In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, calls the phenomenon a ‘craze’. In Trans, Helen Joyce, a former editor of The Economist, refers to it as a ‘social contagion’. In Scotland and England, the number of teenaged girls in the same school and even in the same class who are transitioning is evidence of a similar trend. This has strong parallels with the nearly simultaneous increase in teenaged girls with eating disorders and self-harming. Adolescent girls as a group can be extremely anxious about pubertal changes and body image, including their appearance and inability to match unrealistic stereotypes of female beauty. The teenagers most susceptible to the allure of gender transitioning are often those with mental health problems (anxiety or depression), developmental disorders (such as autism) and social problems (e.g., in the cases of looked-after young people and those suffering neglect or abuse).
However, as Hilary Cass highlighted, these problems are not being identified or adequately assessed and treated by gender identity services such as the Sandyford Clinic. Nor is the possibility being considered that teenage friendship groups may be affected by a social contagion or craze.
Instead, these girls are being propelled along a pathway to major medical and even surgical interventions. The scandal, as Joyce and Shrier argue, is that many of these teenagers may not have gender incongruence at all. This is brought home by a small but growing number of young women who have decided to detransition, who recognise that they have made a mistake but now must live with irreversible changes, such as breast removal, deep voice and facial hair.
Imagine how much more dangerous it would be for this group of teenaged girls if gender self-identification by 16-year-olds were to go ahead under the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition Act – fortunately halted by the UK government.
The Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education
Stuart Baird is a secondary school teacher who has worked in the state sector in Scotland for over 25 years.
The ‘listening phase’ of the Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education is over and we await a ‘Call to Action’ due to be published in the spring. Engagement in the discussion has been celebrated by government for the number of tweets, meetings, and responses from parents, pupils, and organisations. One of my main concerns about the discussion is that the outcome of all these diverse views is that the central role for schools could be lost. Our education system has been organised around subject areas for a long time; they play an important role in introducing children and young people to the world around them. This subject-based learning gives pupils the tools to develop and as adults to make the world their own. It is through the subjects that schools provide a framework and pupils can see the world as a historian, a physicist, or an artist. These subjects are built from the shared knowledge that humanity has accumulated, distilled, and made accessible for pupils.
So, teachers have a key responsibility for shaping the content of the curriculum that is taught. It is their knowledge of specific subjects and how it can be introduced to pupils that gives them their authority in the classroom. Introducing enquiring minds to the world through the subjects is one of the joys of teaching. In delivering the curriculum, teachers plan and craft lessons using the best methods, or pedagogy. Teachers’ training and experience, shared with others, puts them in the ideal position to know what works with the pupils that they teach. Through their engagement and participation with their lessons, with interactions with peers and extra-curricular activities, pupils refine and develop their social and personal skills and understand the rules and behaviour that support their progress.
While new ideas for both curriculum content and pedagogy should be considered, these must be weighed against what is current practice. Professional dialogue and engagement are essential for teachers who have always tried to avoid pedagogical panaceas and dubious scientific claims. Today we find that the curriculum is being used to promote political positions and contestable values and that there is an undermining of the authority of teachers and a challenge to the role of parents.
It is certainly the case that the Curriculum for Excellence, since its inception in 2010, has been a vehicle for political priorities. There was a strong economic and skills push when the curriculum was established, including ‘the need to increase the economic performance of the nation’ and ‘more skills-for-work options for pupils’. Today the economy has taken a back seat to a policy programme aimed at ‘closing the attainment gap’ and overcoming ‘child poverty’. Just as schools do not shape the economy, how can schools seriously be expected to overcome poverty?
Another example that brings politics into the curriculum is in learning for sustainability. Here curriculum content is used by the Scottish government in ‘facilitating the delivery of a wide range of related policy commitments’ including Scotland’s pledge to become a Net Zero Nation.
The successful integration of previous policies’ initiatives into education has paved the way in allowing education to be the target of a new wave of activist’s ideas such as critical race theory and gender ideology. Such theories are contested and problematic and should not be taught in school as society’s settled outlook on such issues.
While politicising education can win headlines and help MSPs and their allies to look busy, they undermine the special contribution of schools through the subjects and erode the authority of the teacher and ultimately the learning and experience of pupils.
To challenge indoctrination, teachers should draw on their subject expertise to defend both the curriculum space for and the content of their subjects; a thoughtful subject specialist is one who values education over political diktat. Parents should support those teachers putting subjects first and be ready to challenge those who overstep their authority and follow without question government or activists’ leads. When we read the ‘Call to Action’ in the spring, let’s assess it for its education benefits and be ready to challenge partisan policies and ideologically loaded policies.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks
American Psychiatric Association. Gender dysphoria diagnosis.
Regina Erich, ‘What the Scottish Government wants your kids to learn about sex and relationships’. 28/11/22
Matt Powell, ‘Devout born-again Christian mother sues her four-year-old son’s school in first case of its kind in UK for “making him take part in LGBT parade”’. 03/02/23
Nigel Biggar, ‘Deconstructing decolonisation. At its most radical, the push for decolonising the curriculum rests on a series of false assumptions that we need to repudiate’. 02/23
‘Gender critical author Helen Joyce accuses her son’s prestigious sixth form of risking safety by allows trans pupils to use girls’ toilets and play for female teams’. 03/02/23
Mark McLaughlin, ‘New union to fight race, diversity and gender dogma in schools’. 02/02/23
Owen Evans, ‘New union takes on “indoctrination” of Scottish education system’. 03/02/23
Stuart Waiton, ‘The fightback against the woke capture of Scottish schools begins’. 04/02/23
Joanna Williams, ‘Playgrounds are no place for Pride parades’. 04/02/23
Jenny Hjul, ‘How Scotland became the wokest country in the world. Nicola Sturgeon’s passion for fashionable causes is changing the Scottish social landscape – much to the frustration of many locals’. 28/01/23
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