Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No19
Newsletter Themes: Mass meeting in Glasgow, what socialisation means, message from a parent of ‘trans’ child.
SUE is organising a mass meeting in Glasgow to discuss how to challenge the indoctrination taking place in schools.
Speakers include:
Malcolm Clark Emmy-nominated TV producer and co-founder of LGB Alliance
Stuart Baird a secondary school teacher who promotes the idea of the need for teachers to become subject specialists
Peigi Piper a GP and parent of two primary school children whose eyes have been opened to the activism and sexualising nature of primary school education
Dr Stuart Waiton academic and Chairperson of the Scottish Union for Education
Tron Church, Bath Street, Thursday 15 June, 6.30 p.m.
Tickets are free to SUE substack paid subscribers.
Now is the time for parents in Glasgow to have their say about indoctrination in our schools.
Stuart Waiton is Chairperson of SUE.
The Scottish Union for Education (SUE) was set up in response to concerns being raised by parents in Scotland about worrying trends in education that appear to be turning education into a form of indoctrination.
Serious concerns have been shared with us about the inappropriate nature of sex education in schools. Many parents have also questioned what they see as the promotion of a transgender ideology that has been adopted by the educational establishment. Attempts to question and discuss these matters have been aggressively shut down.
Tearful parents have contacted us over the past few months, confused and angry about headteachers who refuse to accept that ‘women have vaginas’, or upset to learn that their primary-aged daughters or sons are being educated about being ‘born in the wrong body’. The most recent letter we received was from a mother whose family’s life has been turned upside down now that her daughter, who has mental health problems, is having her demand to ‘transition’ into a boy simply validated both by her school and by mental health professionals. The list goes on.
Little more than a decade ago it was extremely rare to hear of teenaged girls wanting to transition. But within the space of a few years the number of children, especially girls, identifying as ‘trans’ has grown at an exponential rate. Previously, what was called gender dysphoria was understood to be a psychiatric disorder that needed talking therapies. Today, schools are encouraged to simply affirm gender-questioning children.
Even primary schools are now introducing children to sexualised material and to the confused and potentially dangerous idea of being ‘born in the wrong body’.
While some parents might welcome this ‘education’ in its current form, many feel uncomfortable or angry and believe their children are being encouraged to assume attitudes that are out of kilter with their own. More generally, schools appear to be developing a form of indoctrination rather than promoting education. The government’s curriculum increasingly tells kids what to think, not how to think.
So how should we think about what is happening? What can and should teachers and headteachers be doing? And perhaps most importantly, what should and what can parents who are concerned about this trend do?
SUE is organising a series of roadshows across the country to discuss these issues, the next of which we hope will be a big event in Glasgow where we will also be launching our pamphlet, Transgender Ideology in Scottish Schools: What’s Wrong with Government Guidance.
In this pamphlet, retired paediatrician Dr Jenny Cunningham explains what is wrong with the government’s approach, which denies the idea of biological sex and teaches children to adopt the language and outlook of transgenderism.
It does this in part, Dr Cunningham notes, by using unscientific and indeed academically flawed research that suggests that those who do not validate ‘identities’ are pushing children towards suicidal thoughts. This at a time when genuine scientific studies are suggesting the exact opposite is the case.
The guidance now being used by schools has been developed by trans activist organisations; it uses gender terminology, and promotes, in essence, a form of ideology that is being taught as fact. Worse still, perhaps, is the fact that schools are also encouraged to keep parents in the dark about the children who want to transition, and those parents who question this development are portrayed as a risk to their own children.
The fact that many children who want to transition have mental health difficulties is ignored by the authorities. Also ignored is the reality that the trans craze is a cultural rather than a natural phenomenon, as evidenced, for example, by the fact that it is one particular group, teenaged girls, who make up more than 70 percent of children who end up at gender clinics.
All these issues need to be discussed and explored, and parents have a right to have their voices heard within this discussion. Which is why we are holding the public discussion in Glasgow.
LET KIDS BE KIDS!
Contact info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
The erosion of expertise and the abrogation of adults’ responsibility for bringing up children
Mark Smith worked for almost 20 years in what were called ‘List D’ schools and secure units for children who had offended or were deemed to be in need of care. In 2000, he was appointed to a Scottish Executive–funded post to set up a Masters in residential childcare and has worked in university settings since. He is currently Professor in Social Work at the University of Dundee. He is married with three children. He and his family have also offered respite care to disabled children and latterly fostered an asylum-seeking youngster while offering support to other young refugees. He has published extensively on aspects of childcare.
Here, Mark starts an important discussion about what socialisation means and how, at present, it is being lost.
One of the things that strikes me about debates around children, brought into sharp relief by the recent Care Inspectorate Guidance for children and young people’s services on the inclusion of transgender including non-binary young people, is that they proceed without any theoretical grounding in how to bring up children. Rather, they are based almost entirely on assertions of wants and preferences, reflecting particular ideological positions – and not necessarily those of children! This concerns me, as I have spent most of my adult life trying to put some theory around how to care for children. As any parent would know, this isn’t straightforward; it involves considerable intellectual, emotional, practical and ethical commitment. Not anymore, it seems.
All adults need to do nowadays is to affirm the desires or confusions of their offspring or those they care for. This state of affairs might be traced back through long years of superficially understood children’s rights agendas. At a wider level, it is the apogee of the culture of individualism and narcissism that Christopher Lasch foretold back in the 1970s. Whatever the roots of the current malaise, it constitutes an abrogation of adult and wider institutional and political responsibility for children.
Reclaiming adult responsibility for children would benefit from bringing some theoretical understanding back to the task. I want to use the rest of this piece to introduce, briefly, the work of the German educator Klaus Mollenhauer’s (1928–1998 – cue references to dead white men) cultural exploration of the idea of upbringing.
Mollenhauer makes the case that bringing up children is, fundamentally, a moral and cultural endeavour enacted through caring, intergenerational relationships. It is, first and foremost, a debt owed by adults to pass on a valued cultural heritage to prepare children to face the future. Children cannot do this on their own. Mollenhauer describes how we form ourselves and are formed by others, eventually to become mature individuals within a never-ending process of maturation.
In this sense, we don’t just come to the realisation of who our ‘authentic self’ might be in our teenage, or according to some politicians and activists with skin in this game, our earlier childhood years. Identity formation is fundamentally a social and cultural process that lasts a lifetime. Children should be brought up to support that process, in a dialogical relationship, a kind of mutual interchange or call and response between them and caring adults. Adults have a dual role in such upbringing relationships; they need to offer opportunities that promote the development of a child’s mind and spirit while also shielding them from more harmful or age-inappropriate aspects of adult life in order that they may reach a ‘position facing the world’. There is a delicate balance to be struck here. If adults foreclose a child’s development at too early a point, they narrow and restrict what a child might become. This is why we should not just accept and seek to confirm what a child tells us at any given point in time. To do so too early is unethical – and dangerous.
Mollenhauer suggests that adults are drawn to become involved in children’s upbringing because they believe that the way of life they seek to pass on has some merit. Anyone unsure of their own cultural heritage, he argues, will probably take little pleasure in raising or educating children – upbringing in such circumstances becomes a ritualised duty, through which adults lose the desire to raise children in all its joy but also its alterity and complexity and, instead, seek to co-opt and mould them to offer some substance to what is often the confusion and unhappiness of their own adult selves.
There is little place in upbringing for the moral relativism that infects current-day care and education, undercutting the necessary structuring and ‘parenting’ of families and of those who work with children. Seemingly progressive or rights-based philosophies that posit that children somehow come to find their own paths in life act to absolve adults of their responsibilities towards children. They offer adults a cop out that ignores the hard work and the handwringing over whether you have done the right thing, all of which is part and parcel of bringing children up.
Fulfilling adult responsibilities to children may involve conflict at times and can require adults to assert a level of authority or control. In fact, children need adults who will not avoid conflict but who will work creatively with it. The connection created through genuine engagement and negotiation over points of contention, rather than artificial sensitivity, makes it possible in the longer term for those who work with children to encourage and nurture their growth into autonomous individuals capable of making their own decisions.
It is easy to understand why adults in caring or educative roles might wish to avoid some of the difficult decisions they need to take when confronted with some of the identity issues they come across on an increasingly regular basis; they will be cast as censorious or oppressive, standing in the way of progress. However, in failing to present children with a confident, if albeit contingent, image of what we believe they can become, adults risk presenting them only with a free-floating nihilism in which they can be whatever they want to be until they grow up and realise they no longer want to be what they thought they did at 14 – by which time it may be too late. This is far from progressive.
From a parent of ‘trans’-identifying child
Here we share, with permission, an email SUE received last week from a parent who has suffered the consequences of a culture that encourages children down the spiral of gender transitioning.
Dear Scottish Union for Education,
I’m glad to have found you.
I first heard about your organisation at a Let Woman Speak rally.
I am a married Mum of two teenagers, and we have had an exceptionally challenging time with my daughter age 16.
It all started 4 years ago, age 12.
First, she said she was bisexual, then non-binary.
Then age 13 she came out as trans on Instagram, to friends at school and to family.
Her mental health was going downhill, and this was also March 2020, and so once the first lockdown happened her mental health deteriorated to severe.
Things have never recovered fully, and it has been very hard on the whole family.
Age 12 I had an independent daughter who walked and got the bus to school. Had no prior mental health issues, or attendance issues. Her only difficulty being with fitting in/friendships and these issues were mild.
Summer 2020 I decided to let the school know about the difficulties she was having as I knew she was going to find it hard to re-engage in school as she struggled to leave the house during lockdown due to depression and dysphoria.
I was shocked with the blasé way my concern was handled and I was assured there was a child who was trans in the year above, and details could be changed, and teachers wouldn’t bat an eyelid. This wasn’t the response I had expected, but I was left a bit speechless. With much regret on my part now, I reluctantly went along with the teacher’s suggestion that the new name and preferred pronouns could be noted on the register.
What I did do was insist that the birth name remained on their official records.
What followed has been what I can honestly describe as three school years of hell.
My daughter has been living as a boy at school and because her Dad and I have taken a common-sense approach to not affirm her as our son, I in particular have been subject to a torrent of verbal abuse daily.
You can imagine, but it is too offensive to write here. In addition, I have been called transphobic and a bigot.
However, I have worked really hard to put in appropriate boundaries and our daughter is currently not on social media, which has helped.
Teen years are hard, but I have genuinely seen a personality change in my daughter, and if friendships were hard for her before this, the trans identification seems to have only increased her social isolation.
All her school life before 2020 her attendance was not far off 100%. This past year her attendance has been 1–2 days per week. She has struggled to leave the house daily due to her dysphoria. Today she is on a school trip and is intending to stay on for 6th year. Perhaps there is some light at the end of this very long tunnel.
In terms of mental health. Our GP referred her for an autism assessment, and I have been advised that a lot of her struggles may well be connected to being on the autism spectrum.
CAMHS, the children’s mental health service, have been a huge let down as they affirm the trans ID without exploring the underlying issues.
I am now in contact with GENSPECT, which is a good organisation, and there is an organisation GETA which promotes explorative therapeutic work with young people with gender identity issues. I will be looking to both organisations for further information and support.
In addition to being a Mum I am also a therapist and have worked mainly in primary schools, but also in hospital settings with young people.
I have had to cut back my working hours to 1 day a week to prioritise my family. I am lucky I can do this as my husband works, but financially it’s not ideal. Once my daughter’s mental health has improved, I will feel happier to pick up more work.
I am not transphobic, or a bigot. I have spent 3 years researching and so am now very knowledgeable in the field of young people and gender identity, but I admit it is hard to keep up as there is so much happening right now.
I support LGB rights and my vocation as a therapist requires me to be open minded and non-judgemental.
I have taken a back step from working in primary schools, in part because contracts tended to be short and there was a lot of moving around from school to school, but also because the company I was working for seemed to be quite supportive of gender ideology and that didn’t sit right with me.
In addition, I fear that as a whole therapists may not be understanding the full picture of gender ideology and how harmful it can be for young people and their families.
I feel my story is testament to how harmful it can be; however, I have not gone into detail here in terms of just how bad things have been.
In terms of my own daughter, all her documents are under her birth name despite her using a different name socially. We are using a common-sense approach and ‘stall and delay’ approach in terms of any interventions.
She has accepted that she is biologically female but says her gender identity is male.
She feels this way at 16, but will she still feel this way at 32? Time will tell.
To conclude, this whole journey has in a sense given me my own identity crisis in terms of my work and my future, but I know I am making the right decision to prioritise my daughter and my family.
As a Mum and someone who cares about children and young people I am committed to spreading the word about the potential harms of gender ideology.
I am also passionate about education, and particularly in primary school I strongly believe there is no place for gender identity exploration, and any sex education should be minimal. Let Children be Children.
In secondary school it’s normal for young people to be exploring their identity and sexuality, but school is for education, and teachers are not qualified in this complex area.
It’s a difficult area, but personally I don’t think teachers should have to use a young person’s chosen pronouns. See the organisation GENSPECT for advice on this, but it is possible to be respectful of a young person’s struggles/identity exploration without helping enable them down a path which could potentially be very harmful.
For example, my daughter’s aims this time last year were to get some qualifications, leave school, ‘go on T’ (testosterone), and save up for ‘top’ surgery. I really think we need to challenge young people with aims like that.
I really hope that focus has changed and that, with good teachers, her final year will help inspire her to reach her potential and see that there are many good paths she can follow towards a positive future.
I really value education, so it has been hard for me to be in the role of a parent of a young person not engaging fully in school. I have good things to say about her school and the staff, but I do believe the current Scottish schools’ ethos on gender identity and ‘supporting trans kids’ is morally and ethically wrong.
I’m on your side, Scottish Union for Education.
I’m determined to fight for a better future for our young people who have endured a particularly difficult few years with Covid disruption in addition to all the other challenges.
I value teachers too, and I hope I can be of help to raise awareness of the harms of gender ideology.
Please let me know if I can assist in any way in terms of raising awareness, and feel free to share my story.
I do need to remain anonymous in terms of safeguarding my daughter so please treat this information sensitively.
Thank you,
[Name withheld]
HCPC registered therapist
and Mum of two teenagers
Aberdeen
If you want to share your story and raise awareness of problems and concerns regarding how young people are educated today, get in touch: info@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk.
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-trans-surgery-damaged-my-body-for-ever-its-not-safe-jt2hhbrgk?shareToken=ae6c9c6eaf12a61e91ddc63d6c66ed0d Sian Griffiths, ‘NHS trans surgery damaged my body for ever — it’s not safe’. An autistic patient who reversed his transition is suing over treatment given to young people with gender dysphoria. 04/06/23
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/who-is-pride-really-for/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020230603%20%20House%20Ads%20%20SM+CID_8f23732b0a38b6dd75d90a932ea570e5 Andrew Doyle, Who is Pride really for? 02/06/23
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22553142/sex-education-schools-shock-parents/ Johanna Williams, From Play-doh vulvas to polyamory, what your kid is learning at school might shock you – its time the Govt got a grip. 01/06/23
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/what-does-a-grc-do/ Naomi Cunningham, What does a GRC do? 01/06/23
Frank Furedi, Cancelling Human Knowledge: The Cultural Taliban Is Coming for Mathematics. Science, Philosophy, Classics etc.... 05/06/23
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