Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No93
Themes: how to stop transgender ideology in schools, and the ‘fake’ research used to promote sexuality education
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What you can do to stop transgender ideology in schools
We have produced a leaflet for you to hand out to parents and members of the community that explains that transgender ideology is being promoted in schools across Scotland.
Many of us feel a little embarrassed or nervous about handing out leaflets, but the stakes are high and it is time that we did something to inform parents about what is going on in their children’s schools.
Please feel free to print out as many of these leaflets as you like and to hand them out to parents (not children) wherever you can find them. Perhaps you could target schools that are clearly promoting transgender ideology? Just Google your area and you will quickly find schools that have signed up to the LGBT Charter for Education award scheme, which is a clear sign that the school is promoting transgender ideology.
Ask shops if they will put a leaflet on their noticeboards, or find community venues where you can do this yourself. If you have the time and energy, you could even go door to door to help inform entire communities about this problem.
Send or give a leaflet to your local MP, MSP or local councillor. You could email or give one to your local school’s headteacher or the members of the council’s education committee.
Contact your local press and let them know that these leaflets are being handed out in your area, and indeed across Scotland. Contact other groups – churches, women’s rights groups, parents’ groups – who may be interested and get them to send a copy of the leaflet to their members.
And if you have any other ideas about what we can do to promote the leaflet, let us know.
There is a lot of confusion about transgender ideology and the massive increase in children wanting to identify as the opposite sex. The idea of being ‘transgender’ is presented as progressive, as simply an extension of the gay rights agenda, but it is not. In fact, it is increasingly clear that one of the effects of transgender ideology being promoted in schools and in society is that children who would grow up to be gay are one of the main groups of children being encouraged to think that they are in fact ‘transgender’.
The LGB Alliance, a charity that advocates for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, opposes gender identity theory, which it considers retrogressive and homophobic. It campaigns against the promotion of this ideology to children – a practice it recognises as a form of conversion therapy that takes gay kids and encourages them to ‘transition’, to change their name, and their appearance, to potentially bind their breasts, and look to take puberty blockers and eventually even to cut off body parts, at the risk of a life of sexual dysfunction and infertility. They have produced a video clearly explaining the dangers of medicalising the adolescent confusion that can be experienced by children who would otherwise, with support and reassurance, grow up to be healthy, same-sex attracted adults.
As we note in the leaflet, despite what activists – including activist teachers and schools – argue, nobody has ever been ‘born in the wrong body’. Likewise, the idea that there are a 100 plus genders, rather than two sexes, is a fiction that has been promoted by transgender activists, often online, and tragically, in our schools.
Last week, it was reported that Bannerman High School in Glasgow encouraged staff to fundraise to provide breast binders for girls who want to hide their breasts – a practice that is not only part of the promotion of transgender ideology but also has potentially serious health implications, as Dr Jenny Cunningham explains below.
We only know this because a brave teacher was prepared to break the silence and inform the press. But what else is going on in our schools that we don’t know about?
We don’t need whistleblowers to know that the state and our schools are promoting transgender ideology. It’s written into the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood curriculum and is part of the Scottish government’s Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools guidance. You can read about it in our pamphlet on the subject, which we have sent to every school in Scotland.
We also know that some nurseries are removing ‘old-fashioned’ books and replacing them with stories that promote transgender ideology to three- and four-year-olds!
Some parents are already well aware of what is happening, but many will not know. This is helped by the government’s encouragement to schools to help socially transition children without informing their parents.
But why bother? After all, it’s only a small, if growing, minority of children who want to transition.
This is true, but even here we need to recognise that it is often the most vulnerable children – not only gay kids but also those with mental health or social and emotional difficulties – who are most likely to be ‘captured’ by the activist ideology. More than this, though, all children risk being confused by what they are hearing in schools.
As transgender ideology becomes part of the ethos of schools, children are being trained, from an ever-younger age, to be confused about one of the most fundamental aspects of their selves: their sex and the sex of those around them. The very idea of male and female is now confused, while children and teenagers can now face punishment for daring to question transgender ideology; see, for example, the case of expelled school student Murray Allan.
There is a major pushback taking place in the USA following the election of Donald Trump, and despite all his many flaws, he is now pushing back against what he calls ‘child sexual mutilation’ and the mass ‘child abuse’ of ‘very vulnerable’ kids. However, I suspect even he will face members of an establishment that have built their own ‘identity’ around the idea of transgender liberation, and key to what now develops in America will be the capacity of grassroots organisation to challenge the transgender ideology within their institutions.
Transgenderism is not liberating for children; it is a cruel trap, an ideology that feeds off the anxieties of vulnerable adolescents and provides a fantastical idea of ‘gender’ transformation. If only life’s difficulties could be resolved by changing our identity, the world would be a very easy place. The reality is very different, and the best chance that all children have is when they are encouraged to look beyond themselves, their bodies and identities. This is the real job of our schools – education, not indoctrination – and it’s up to us to do something about it.
Stuart Waiton, Chair of SUE
Social transitioning, breast binding and self-harm
Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.
In a section on sport and PE, in the government’s guidance to Scottish schools, Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools [1], breast binders are casually referred to as part of female pupils’ social transitioning to a male identity, to be accepted by teaching staff (pp. 30–31):
A transgender boy or non-binary young person who has developed unwanted breasts may bind their chest to flatten it, so they might need to wear a loose-fitting shirt or sweatshirt. Binders can lead to shortness of breath, can be painful during physical exertion and there are health risks associated with wearing binders that are too tight.
Binders can, however, have a positive impact on a young person’s mental health so staff should allow a young person to decide for themselves about whether or not to wear a binder, to help them join in.
In terms of social transitioning, such as changing one’s name, pronouns, hairstyle or clothes, breast binding has become virtually synonymous with girls making themselves appear more masculine. In fact, it is positively encouraged by transgender activists as being part of affirming one’s gender identity and a step towards female-to-male transition.
Binders are tight bands or compression garments used to flatten breasts in order for girls to appear more masculine. They can be bought online, and some transgender organisations have made them available. Even if ‘properly fitted’, binders carry significant health risks, especially if worn for 8 or more hours a day and over prolonged periods. A study that enrolled 1800 women who had used breast binders reported 27 significant symptoms; 97 per cent had experienced negative physical symptoms. Pain – in the back, shoulders, chest and abdomen – presents rapidly and continues to increase in intensity over time, peaking at over 5 years of binding. Binders restrict breathing and can lead to reduced lung function and chest infections. They can cause skin irritation, skin infections, acne, overheating, fatigue, headaches and heartburn. The more serious sequelae are musculoskeletal (rib and spine changes, rib bruising, rib fracture and muscle wasting) and breast changes (swelling, deformity and scarring) [2].
But the psychological implications are as important, if not more serious. By fixating on her breasts to the point of despising them, the enduring pain and complication of binding becomes a form of self-harming. What may start as a girl’s adolescent fear or discomfort about changes in her body during puberty becomes disgust, shame and body dissociation. The psychological and physical complications of breast binding make mastectomy a more attractive avenue to pursue. Detransitioner Chloe Cole reports that she began binding after being groped at the age of 13. It led to her ribs being malformed and breasts distorted. ‘I hated the look of it. I thought that I would never recover. This was one of several factors that led to me getting a mastectomy. Social transitioning is a gateway drug.’ [3].
Note that the same picture applies to boys who engage in genital tucking – compressing male genitals into the groin or between the legs, with compression tape or garments, to produce a feminine appearance. In some cases, the testicles are pushed up the inguinal canals into the body. There is little research about tucking, but harms include pain (testicular and penile), skin irritation and infection, potential infertility, and torsion (twisting) of the testicle (a surgical emergency).
References
Scottish government. Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools.
Peitzmeier SM, Silberholz J, Gardner IH, Weinand J, Acevedo K. 2021. Time to first onset of chest binding-related symptoms in transgender youth. Pediatrics. 147(3):e20200728. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0728.
Garfield-Jaeger P. 2024. A practical response to gender distress. Newton Abbot: Sandpiper Books; p. 71. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Response-Gender-Distress-Families-ebook/dp/B0CW1KZVTJ.
Lies, damned lies and evidence: sexuality education and ‘expert’ advocacy
Dr Carlton Brick is a lecturer at the School of Education and Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland.
In May 2024, the then Conservative government suspended its controversial school-based Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme to children under the age of nine. Introduced in 2021, the RSE curriculum quickly became a point of conflict between parents and schools. Shaped by transgender advocacy groups such as Stonewall, and drawing on comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) advocacy promoted globally by the European Union (EU), World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNESCO, RSE became a focal point for concerns over the role of gender ideology in British schools and the overt sexualisation of children through the use of age-inappropriate language and imagery used in the CSE informed curriculum.
Writing for academic blog The Conversation, Sophie King-Hill, an associate professor at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, and a regular media commentator on CSE, feared that the government’s decision threatened to expose school children to greater abuse and harm. Furthermore, she insisted that the government’s row-back on its RSE programme flew in the face of the global evidence and expert consensus that supports CSE programmes in schools.
Such decisions, King-Hall argued, ‘When considering the wealth of evidence in the field […] are nothing short of dangerous’ and pose ‘a serious risk to the psychological and physical health and well-being of children and young people’.
Citing an article by Finkelhor et al., published in 1990 in the peer-reviewed journal Child Abuse and Neglect [1], King-Hill draws attention to research evidence that she claims proves that ‘women who received inadequate sex education as children were more likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse’, the clear implication being that preventing children accessing CSE in schools exposes them to a higher risk of sexual abuse.
It is worth taking a closer look at this claim, and in particular, the research article it is purported to come from.
The article in question does indeed draw attention to a claim that higher rates of abuse were found among women who received inadequate sex education as children. However, the article in question doesn’t actually make this claim. In fact, on scanning the article abstract, one quickly realises that Finkelhor et al. (1990) do not support this claim at all. The clear focus of the journal article is a substantive critical discrediting of a Los Angeles Times survey carried out in 1985. It is the Los Angeles Times survey that makes this claim, and not the cited journal article, as King-Hill leads us to believe. In fact, Finkelhor et al. go out of their way to argue that the Los Angeles Times survey is so shot through with methodological bias that any inferences drawn from the data have to be treated with extreme caution.
Based on a sample of males and females over the age of 18, the Los Angeles Times survey comprised a series of four screening question about respondents’ memories of childhood experiences that they might now, as adults, perceive as sexual abuse. Any respondent who answered ‘yes’ to any one of the questions was considered a ‘victim’ of abuse (27% of female and 16% of male respondents).
The first issue flagged by Finkelhor et al. is that the Los Angeles Times survey is measuring the memory of a perception of behaviours and not actual behaviour itself. This is a very important qualification, as a respondent’s perception of what might or might not constitute sexual abuse would probably have changed over the course of the respondent’s life, and the memory is itself likely to change alongside the respondent’s ability to recall experiences accurately.
The second issue of concern noted the journal authors is the methodological unsoundness of the survey questions themselves. For example, respondents were asked the following:
When you were a child can you remember having any experience you would now consider sexual abuse – like someone trying or succeeding in having any kind of sexual intercourse with you, or anything like that?
or
When you were a child, can you remember any kind of experience that you would now consider sexual abuse involving oral sex or sodomy – or anything like that?
Note the ‘or anything like that?’ which concludes each question. Any research undergraduate, let alone an associate professor, worth their salt would tell you that such an unspecific, ambiguous and methodologically unsound data collection tool is likely to produce unspecific, ambiguous and methodologically unsound results.
As the survey did not define or provide data on how respondents interpreted or considered what types of behaviour might fall within the very broad parameters of ‘anything like that’, the journal article authors could only discount a number of the survey’s so-called findings as lacking validity and reliability, because of the implicit unscientific bias contained in the ambiguous and methodologically problematic phrase (p. 23).
On the specific question of the relationship between sexuality education and perceptions of childhood abuse among adult women, the journal authors have this to say (p. 20):
Experiences some researchers might define as abuse could be left out because the respondent did not consider them abuse. Other experiences of a minor nature that many researchers would exclude could have been counted because of a respondent’s interpretation of the phrase ‘anything like that’. Unfortunately, no subsequent questions were asked about the sexual acts that could have been used to exclude experiences that did not meet researchers’ criteria.
In conclusion, the journal authors clearly point to the dangers of reading as meaningful the correlation between the interviewees’ responses regarding sex education and their perception of sexual abuse. As the journal authors note, there are a far too many inconsistencies and biases within the survey, which make drawing inferences from its data highly problematic.
As such, extrapolating specific causal conclusions from the survey, such as those inferred by associate professor King-Hill, are compromised by the inherent biases and ambiguities of the survey questions.
It is telling that in her rebuttal of government policy, King-Hill cites a research article that actually refutes the evidential claim she claims it makes. Within the world of CSE advocacy, the idea of research evidence has been emptied of any real scientific meaning and reduced to a game of expert subterfuge.
Global institutions such as the EU, WHO and UNESCO, together with advocates of CSE, make great claims that that there is now a considerable international consensus that CSE has a positive impact, and that this consensus is ‘evidence based’. However, they all appear to be on a less sure footing when trying to evidence the actual evidence for this claim – if you catch my drift.
In their International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education [2], published in 2018, UNESCO et al. suggest that evidence reviews overwhelmingly reinforce the conclusion that CSE, ‘has positive effects’, particularly reducing sexually related harms such as risk of pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (p. 28). However, a couple of sentences later, the guidance admits that ‘It is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the impact of CSE on biological outcomes such as STI or HIV rates, as there are still relatively few high-quality trials available’.
However, unperturbed, the guidance battles on. A few paragraphs later, it tells us that ‘While the focus of many studies is on health outcomes, the evolving understanding of CSE recognizes that this kind of education can also contribute to wider outcomes such as gender equitable attitudes, confidence or self-identity’. On the next page, however, you find the following qualification: that despite the ‘evolving understanding’ that CSE can positively contribute to wider cultural outcomes, ‘There have been limited rigorous studies assessing these types of non-health outcomes to-date’ (p. 29).
Such is the extent of the paucity of an actual evidence base for CSE, UNESCO admit that ‘evidence reviews commissioned by UNESCO have some limitations that make it difficult to make a general statement about the magnitude of the impact of CSE programmes’ (p. 30). In short, by their own admission, the evidence drawn on by UNESCO to inform its own CSE advocacy not only lacks methodological rigour but any substantive scientific bases that supports CSE in any form. This is a consistent theme in global CSE advocacy.
In 2022, a European Parliament report entitled Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Why is it Important? [3] openly conceded that evaluations of CSE programmes lack any real engagement with scientific literature. Moreover, they offer only, a ‘very limited description of the programme’ being evaluated’ (p. 22). As such, the report continues it is, ‘difficult to interpret results’ (p. 22), and recognises the ‘sub-optimal quality’ of studies carried out to evaluate their effectiveness, and ‘is not of the highest standards’ (p. 22) and that substantive ‘methodological weakness underly [sic] the studies and their findings’ (p. 22).
One would imagine, then, that given such a damning assessment of the quality of research in the area of CSE that organisations such as the European Parliament and UNESCO would conclude that, at the very least, the rolling out of CSE programmes in European schools should at least be suspended until a viable rationale supported by a methodologically sound and rigorous evidence base can be established. But, of course, this is not the intent of these organisations. They are first and foremost ideologically captured advocates of CSE and are not interested in evidence at all. How else could you account for the conclusion reached by the authors of the European Parliament report that despite the growing international consensus for sexuality education, ‘much less is known about how and why sexuality education works’ (p. 22).
The lack of any meaningful evidence base for justifying any of the aims, objectives or outcomes for CSE is perhaps the clearest indication that the real dynamic driving the sexuality education crusade is not a scientifically informed evidentially grounded assessment of the education needs of children, young people and their families, but an ideologically driven dogma that promulgates a skewed sexualised image of children, underpinned by a vociferous anti-family prejudice.
Via the CSE narrative, the notion of ‘evidence based’ policy (a highly contested concept in its own right) has been emptied of any substantive meaning. Instead, it is deployed as a rhetorical device that reaffirms the dominance of expert opinion. When expert narratives utilise the term ‘evidence’, what they are in fact doing is reinforcing their own privileged (and unaccountable) position.
The phrases that proliferate documents like the UNESCO guidance, such as ‘international consensus’, ‘desired outcomes’ and ‘strongly believe’, have come to replace a traditional understanding of what is meant by evidence. This is perhaps not surprising, given that research in the area has indicated for some time that there is no evidence at all that CSE or any form of school-based sexuality education has any meaningful impact – good, bad or otherwise – on the behaviour of children or young people. An international consensus of experts has displaced rigorous methodologically grounded debate as the defining principle on which global educational policy should now be predicated. The uncritical acceptance of CSE by an increasingly unreflective and self-referential network of experts has rendered the notion of evidence irrelevant – it is simply no longer up for debate. It has become a self-evident truth, a self-reinforcing incontrovertible maxim that no longer requires justification. Such is the deeply entrenched nature of these ‘truths’ within expert narratives that there appears to be no attempt or pretence to hide the fact that, evidentially speaking, there is no ‘evidence base’ supporting CSE whatsoever. That advocates like King-Hill, armed with guidance from the likes of the EU and UNESCO, appear quite open in claiming non-existent findings and outcomes within published research in the field is problematic. It insults its audience. Either ‘sexuality experts’ such as King-Hill are not very good at their jobs or they are deliberately misdirecting public debate in this controversial area.
References
Finkelhor D, Hotaling G, Lewis IA, Smith C. 1990. Sexual abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: prevalence, characteristics, and risk factors. Child Abuse and Neglect. 1990;14(1):19–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/0145-2134(90)90077-7.
UNESCO, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, United Nations Population Fund, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and World Health Organization. 2018. International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. https://doi.org/10.54675/UQRM6395.
Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs Directorate-General for Internal Policies. 2022. Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Why is it Important? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/719998/IPOL_STU(2022)719998_EN.pdf.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
Andrew Doyle, No, the countryside isn’t racist. The Welsh government is just the latest institution to make this baffling claim.12/11/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151429048?source=queue Dr Kristopher Kaliebe, Where Youth Gender Medicine Should Go From Here. A child psychiatrist’s advice for President Trump 11/11/24
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/trans-row-erupts-scots-school-34011373 Mark McGivern, Trans row erupts at Scots school over "chest binder" fundraiser for girls who identify as boys. Bannerman High School sends email to 100 staff members, saying: “Teacher Coffee Morning! Pay £2.50 (or more!) to raise money for trans binders for trans pupils!” 12/11/24
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14081403/Teachers-bullies-children-torment-classmates.html Graham Grant, Teachers told not to use the word bullies to describe children who torment their classmates - in case it upsets them 14/11/24
https://archive.is/pN8ax Daniel Sanderson, GPs told to refer children to pro-trans charity, despite Cass review. New guidance from Scotland’s second-largest health board recommends ‘LGBT+ informed and affirmative counselling’ for teenagers 16/10/24
Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance.
9 days ago · 171 likes · 54 comments · Henry Oliver
Henry Oliver, Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance. Why do teachers insist on promoting anti-science policies? 11/11/24
https://archive.ph/2024.11.14-203411/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/nine-year-old-among-thousands-investigated-for-hate-incidents-3czwz8zsl James Beal, Nine-year-old among thousands investigated for hate ‘incidents’. Police record playground insults amid confusion about guidelines 14/11/24
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/16/why-are-the-cops-policing-playground-taunts/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1qIgIGGBD0CA5Yz2HipNRXqFWykl93a37ZfGORKNxKoxu3mDS-LO0dSqE_aem_yfl3zlYXbkJgDbkMkW1beQ Lauren Smith, Why are the cops policing playground taunts? Now even schoolkids are having ‘non-crime hate incidents’ recorded against their names. Enough. 16/11/24
https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-trump-won-the-war-over-normal/?ref=compact-newsletter Sohrab Ahmri, How Trump Won the War Over ‘Normal’ 15/11/24
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151816635 Titania McGrath, In Defence of Non-Crime Hate Incidents, 18/11/24
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