Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No 116
Themes: transgender ideology and environmental indoctrination, and how the former has dire consequences for children and teenagers.
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The term indoctrination has a harsh feel to it. The dictionary definition is ‘the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically’. This is what is happening in Scottish schools, so it is difficult to find a less blunt word to talk about these developments.
As we’ve shown over the last few years, when it comes to promoting transgender ideology, teaching children about the mystical idea of ‘being transgender’ due to having been ‘born in the wrong body’ – and changing pronouns and names, often behind the backs of parents – the Scottish government have proven to be guilty of indoctrinating very young children.
As Susan Dalgety argues in the Scotsman:
[F]or a decade and more now, gender identity ideology has seeped relentlessly into our public services, infecting everything from the Scottish Prison Service and the NHS to the school system. Vulnerable young people have been encouraged by their teachers and charities to believe they can change their sex, often against the wishes of their parents, but always with the full support of the Scottish Government.
As we’ll see below, this is not the only form that indoctrination takes, and we have received an internal letter that has been sent out to some schools and all education authorities that represents another form of indoctrination, this time regarding environmentalism.
This week we have also seen one of the teachers’ unions in Scotland arguing that primary kids should get hate speech warnings as part of their education about the ‘far right’. Personally, I just wish teachers would get children to read something, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or get them to do their times tables, but perhaps that’s me being ‘far right’.
It doesn’t appear to occur to these ‘progressives’ that teaching young children about ‘correct’ ideas, uncritically, is the definition of indoctrination – something we used to associate with the genuine far right.
Also this week, we have seen a variety of reactions to the Supreme Court ruling that stipulated that there is a biological reality to the sexes. The junior doctors’ wing of the British Medical Association, for example, demonstrating that perhaps they need to go back to school, have argued that there is no scientific basis to the idea that sex is binary. By contrast, a review of gender medicine in the US has noted that the planned trial to investigate the use of puberty blockers on children in the UK not only has no medical justification but is likely to cause significant harm to the children who participate.
As Dalgety points out – helped by the great work of Carolyn Brown, a retired Depute Principal Educational Psychologist – as it stands, it is very often the most vulnerable children and ‘those who have additional support needs’ who are most at risk of being transitioned by their schools – something Brown argues is a ‘scandal’.
In relation to Carolyn’s work, it is worth noting her article about the dangers of the conversion therapy bill, not least of all because the Scottish government has just dropped any plans to introduce this authoritarian law. It seems that even the SNP are waking up to some aspects of the harms of transgender ideology.
Thankfully, a little bit of common sense has also been spotted in the NHS, as they will now ‘test all children who believe they are trans for autism’. This is significant; as SUE’s Dr Jenny Cunningham pointed out in one of our first newsletters, it is often autistic children who are most susceptible to transgender ideology. In part, ironically, this is because autistic people have a tendency for binary thinking, where there is a desire for black-and-white answers, and where any discomfort or concerns about identity and body changes can result in a belief that they are not actually the sex that they are.
Now rather than simply affirming any child who thinks that their body is not their real body, medical professionals may actually do their job and try to understand if there are other possible explanations for why autistic adolescents may think this.
Another positive development is that other organisations, like the Scottish Football Association, have taken the Supreme Court ruling to heart and banned ‘trans women’ (read men) from competing in women’s football – which is interesting. It’s interesting because when it comes to the clear differences between men and women that can result in physical harm – like in physical sports, or, for example, when you put men in women’s prisons – our authorities appear to back down on this issue. But where it is less directly physical, in school education, and especially when it is girls who want to transition rather than boys, little or nothing is being said or done about this. In other words, the understanding that transgender ideology is a form of social contagion, something that has been given to children by adult activists, social media influencers, our schools, and ‘progressive’ health professionals, is far from accepted by our authorities.
Here at SUE, our parent support worker Kate Deeming has been encouraging parents to contact their schools about all this. If you would like to do something, please do contact her at psg@sue.scot. As a parent in England found out, challenging your school over transgender ideology and sexualised materials in schools is often difficult. But for Kristie Higgs, who also worked at and was sacked from her child’s school, it has all been worth it.
Transgender ideology has spread and spread. Even Edinburgh Zoo is now pursuing the LGBT Youth Scotland Charter, despite all the controversy that is mounting around this issue. Perhaps they have discovered trans monkeys or giraffes? I say this jokingly, but if you ask AI about this, you’ll find that our helpful artificial friend appears to think that this could be the case, although it does at least accept that ‘animals lack the cognitive capacity to understand and identify with a gender identity’ – which is something, I guess!
If you would like to raise any questions with Edinburgh Zoo and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, do feel free to do so, at rzss.org.uk.
From the natural world to the world of the environment – last month, we received a letter drafted by Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, Jenny Gilruth, and the Net Zero Secretary Gillian Martin. It was sent to us by someone working in education, who we will call Ewan, who believes it has been sent to every teacher in Scotland. It is addressed to the education directors and chief education officers across Scotland and appeared in the inbox of all the teachers at Ewan’s primary school.
Using the wishes of the Children’s Parliament as a justification for the letter, it encourages our education chiefs and teachers to prioritise the teaching of ‘sustainable education’ and ensuring that children are taught the importance of engaging as ‘responsible global citizens in tackling the climate emergency, promoting social justice and equality and valuing the environment’.
A number of bullet points are provided to encourage schools and teachers to provide young people with, ‘information on how to take climate action’; to provide materials and encourage parents to speak ‘with younger school-age children about climate change’; and even for our youngest children we find a ‘webinar to strengthen awareness of the guidance and to share simple and practical methods to embed Learning for Sustainability in Early Learning and Childcare settings’.
Additionally, and demonstrating the unthinking nature of our government, there is talk of providing ‘advice for dealing with climate anxiety’ at the same time that we are informed that children will be educated about ‘preparing for the effects of climate change’. In other words, Scotland’s children will be systematically, and from nursery school onwards, trained to understand that we have a ‘climate emergency’, despite the idea that this idea of an ‘emergency’ being widely contested. Then, having terrified our children, they will provide advice on how to deal with this terror!
Out of the mouths of babes, here we find the Scottish government using the Children’s Parliament to push their environmental agenda into schools and onto children. This is not to dismiss all things environmental, but when you start training nursery kids, encouraging parents to train their children and even encourage schoolboys and schoolgirls to learn how to take ‘climate action’, it’s difficult to once again not conclude that political indoctrination has become a serious dimension of schools in Scotland.
Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair
Gender ideology: fantasy beliefs with dire consequences for children and teenagers
Dr Jenny Cunningham was a paediatrician in Glasgow for more than 30 years.
The recent Supreme Court ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex and not gender identity means that ‘transwomen’ are not women, whether they self-identify or are the bearers of a Gender Recognition Certificate. They cannot usurp women’s rights to single-sex spaces and services or transgress women’s exclusive associations, such as lesbian dating sites.
Predictably, there has been outrage from transgender rights activists and hyperbolic claims that the ruling makes transwomen unsafe and threatens their very existence. Stonewall described the decision as ‘incredibly worrying for the trans community’. Transgender ‘allies’ were equally condemnatory. These cheerleaders for gender identity – in political, cultural, academic and medical institutions – were vociferous in their support for ‘our transgender friends and associates’. The British Medical Association’s resident doctors (previously ‘junior doctors’) passed, at their conference on 26 April, a motion condemning the Supreme Court ruling as ‘trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical’ and ‘reductive’ (presumably meaning overly simplistic or crude).[1]
The focus of the furore seems to be skewed towards the apparent threat to transwomen, a small (and belligerent) minority, against the reality that the majority of those who have undergone medical gender transitioning over the past 10 years have been female teenagers identifying as male. This is the cohort most captured by gender ideology, and there are thousands more of them who remain on waiting lists for assessment by gender identity services.
The BMA’s resident doctors’ characterisation of the Supreme Court judgement as ‘biologically nonsensical’ and ‘reductive’ is a prime example of gender ideology. It implies that sex, far from being a biological binary, is much more complicated than the judges could possibly appreciate, it being determined by chromosomes, hormones and physical factors, and supposedly being on a spectrum between femaleness and maleness. Both contentions are wrong. As evolutionary biologist Colin Wright explains, sex is defined simply as the type of gamete (sex cell) that an individual has the biological function to produce: sperm in males and ova (eggs) in females.[2] Rare chromosomal anomalies, such as XXY, XYY, and XXX, do not create new sexes but ‘represent genetic disorders within the existing male–female framework’. The argument is made that the existence of ‘intersex’ conditions, in which some people are developmentally atypical in some of their sex traits, implies that sex must be on a continuum. The vast majority of people with ‘intersex’ conditions – more accurately termed differences of sex development – (which are extremely rare) are unambiguously male or female. The conditions do not introduce new sexes but ‘rather developmental disorders within the two-sex framework’. Some gender ideologues assert other pseudoscientific notions such as the ‘gendered brain’: that people have an intuitive gender identity that may be opposed to the sex they are assigned at birth (that well-known ideological chestnut that your sex is arbitrarily conferred on you rather than observed). The male or female brain is a biologically incoherent concept, as our bodies are a fully integrated system.
Gender ideology is a belief system that holds that what makes a man or woman has nothing to do with biological sex but is based on the social roles, stereotypes and expectations with which individuals identify. So a person who identifies with feminine social roles and stereotypes is a girl or woman, and someone identifying with masculine social roles and stereotypes is a boy or man. Those who do not identify with the roles and expectations associated with their sex are transgender, and those who don’t identify with either are non-binary.
As Colin Wright points out in an article he wrote on ‘how to make a trans kid’, most adults reject such beliefs as ‘regressive and sexist’.[3] After all, women’s rights and human rights groups fought for well over a century against such ideas, in the struggle for women’s equality. Consequently, transgender activist organisations have oriented themselves towards recruiting and indoctrinating children and adolescents.
In Scotland, groups like Stonewall, LGBT Youth Scotland, Scottish Trans and Time for Inclusive Education have actively insinuated themselves into schools and colleges, influencing teachers and the curriculum. They have had the active connivance of the Scottish government and education authorities through the government’s guidance for Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools (August 2021) and the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) programme, running through from primary into secondary schools.
Both the guidance and the RSHP introduce pupils to ideas about gender identity and being transgender. This has normalised the social transitioning of pupils who express the desire to become the opposite sex, by encouraging staff to allow them to change their name and adopt their ‘preferred’ pronouns (sometimes without parental knowledge or agreement). Their peers are then obliged to use the new name and pronominal identifiers for the newly minted ‘trans kid’.
RSHP is the key tool for instructing children and adolescents about gender identity, and a particularly favoured resource is The Genderbread Person. With an arrow to the character’s brain, gender identity is defined as ‘how you, in your head, experience and define your gender identity, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand the options to be’. Expression is ‘how you present your gender through your actions, clothing and demeanour [...] and how these presentations are viewed based on social expectations’. The options for gender identity and expression are illustrated with lines from ‘0’ to Woman-ness and from 0 to Man-ness, and include ‘personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes and role expectations. We can think about these things as existing on a continuum, where a lot of people see themselves as existing somewhere between 0 and 100 on each.’ In effect, what is being described are non-conforming behaviours, interests and preferences, which are equated with being transgender.
This gender ideology is reinforced in children’s minds through children’s story books (found in most school libraries), such as I am Jazz, about a boy who is ‘different from other kids’ because ‘she has a girl’s brain in a boy’s body’.
Unsurprisingly, many non-conforming pupils will come to see themselves as transgender or non-binary. But many vulnerable children and teenagers, especially those with autism spectrum disorders, with mental health conditions, such as anorexia nervosa or self-harming, those suffering abuse or being looked-after, will latch onto the idea of being transgender as the cause of their social difficulties or unhappiness, especially given encouragement from LGBT Youth Scotland, who operate in and outwith their schools.
Convincing children and adolescents that they are transgender, and even worse, socially transitioning them – which has been shown to entrench their transgender identity psychosocially – led to the explosion in referrals to gender identity services from around 2014–2015. The national Scottish gender identity service for children and adolescents at the Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow has been affirming these patients’ gender identity and medically transitioning several hundreds of them, using puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, up until last year (when NHS Scotland stopped the prescription of hormones for under-18-year-olds, in response to the Cass Review). Many of those who have undergone gender transitioning may pay a high price in terms of their potentially compromised bone development, risk of infertility, loss of sexual function or libido, and lifelong medicalisation. Some of them may have gone on to surgical interventions once they turned 18, such as mastectomy, castration and realignment of sexual or reproductive organs.
The profile of those referred to the gender identity services in Scotland, the UK and internationally over the past decade changed from small numbers of mainly young boys to large numbers of adolescents, most of whom (over 70 per cent) have been teenage girls. One explanation for this switch in the gender ratio has been the well-established susceptibility of adolescent girls to social contagions or crazes. The Cass Review (April 2024) found some evidence of peer group pressure among teenage girls with gender incongruence or dysphoria; Cass additionally pointed out that this group was also more at risk of developing mind–body delusional disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder (a preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance, unobservable or appearing minor to others).[4]
Colin Wright has advanced a further, very plausible explanation for the gender switch. He notes that the definition of ‘transgender’ currently used by scientific, medical and human rights organisations is literally synonymous with gender noncomformity.[5] The majority of these organisations defines a transgender person as someone who does not conform to traditional stereotypes of masculinity or femininity associated with being male or female. For example, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the largest psychiatric association in the world and authored the internationally used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, last published in May 2013, in its fifth edition: DSM-5 (with more than 450 distinct definitions of mental disorders). DSM-5 defines ‘transgender’ as ‘an umbrella term describing individuals whose gender identity (inner sense of gender) or gender expression (outward performance of gender) differs from the sex or gender to which they were assigned at birth’.[6] (It will be evident by now how well versed and well-practised organisations like the APA are in gender ideology.) As Colin Wright concludes, these definitions are equating common gender non-conformity (that is, masculine females, feminine males and androgynous people of either sex) with transgenderism.
As a result, common gender non-conformity is now being medicalised.
Wright argues that some females exhibit extreme masculinity and some males extreme femininity. For children and adolescents, females exhibit more gender variance than males. He looked at studies between the 1950s and 2012 that found that girls show more gender variance than boys, often being twice as likely to exhibit cross-sex behaviour than boys. Parents in these studies describe their daughters as ‘behaving like the opposite sex’, ‘dressing like or playing as being of the opposite sex’ and ‘expressing a wish to be of the opposite sex’. It seems likely that girls are generally given more leeway by their parents and peers to cross gender boundaries than boys. Because girls are more likely to exhibit gender non-conformity than boys, and because the definition of transgenderism is now synonymous with common gender non-conformity, it is unsurprising that among the explosion of children and adolescents identifying as transgender, the majority are girls. In fact, looking at the criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria in DSM-5, they read just like the parents’ descriptions of their gender non-conforming daughters – among them:
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.
All these criteria describe subjective feelings. Previously, parents would have given a shrug or a wry smile at their boyish daughter’s behaviour and preferences, knowing that their aspirations, activities and interests could change with maturity and experience. Today, parental levels of anxiety will be high as their gender non-conforming daughters are likely to be transgender identifying.
The diagnosis of gender dysphoria is the only mental health condition in DSM-5 for which treatment involves ‘social affirmation’, ‘medical affirmation’, including ‘puberty suppression’ and ‘gender-affirming hormones’ (testosterone for older adolescent girls) and ‘surgical affirmation for some adolescents’ (mastectomies in girls and even removal of some reproductive organs in extreme cases).
Why such a fantastical and flimsy belief system became so widespread and influential in universities, governments, police forces, the NHS and corporations has a number of related reasons, too many to examine here. But one important factor was the rise of transgender rights activism after Stonewall adopted the transgender cause in 2015. Stonewall had fought a successful struggle for homosexual rights in previous decades. Once equal rights for gays and lesbians appeared to have been won, Stonewall was able to use the moral authority it had gained (and many connections it established throughout society) to put the transgender cause on the agenda and promote gender ideology and gender identity politics. The uncritical acceptance of this belief system by so many institutions has a lot to do with the perception that this was a progressive cause, which would give its supporters a sense of moral purpose. The aggressive and bullying tactics of transgender rights activists and their many acolytes effectively hounded and silenced anyone brave enough to express doubts or opposition – by wielding the accusation of ‘transphobia’.
The consequences of the spread of gender ideology into schools and threat of medical gender transitioning for children and adolescents has forced parents to recognise that we have a real fight on our hands. Parents need to organise together – both those with children or teenagers already caught up in the transgender whirlpool and those whose children have not (yet) been sucked into it.
Demand of your school that they remove transgender and gender identity material from RSHP and the wider curriculum.
Demand that the school puts pressure on the Scottish government and Scottish Care Inspectorate to withdraw their guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools and children and teenagers in the care system.
Demand the removal of transgender ideology–promoting books from school libraries.
Demand that LGBT Youth Scotland groups are removed from the school.
If your child or teenager is seen by gender identity services, refuse to allow them to be referred into the NHS England puberty blocker trial (in which NHS Scotland has agreed to participate).
Talk to your child or teenager about the untruths at the heart of gender ideology: the ‘sexed brain’, or that one can change one’s sex or be born ‘in the wrong body’.
Reassure your child or teenager that gender non-conforming behaviour is quite normal, is fine with you, and above all, should not be confused with being ‘transgender’.
Join SUE and get involved in its parents groups or set one up in your local area with our help.
References
1. Hayward E. Doctors call Supreme Court gender ruling ‘scientifically illiterate’. The Times, 28 April 2025. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/resident-doctors-british-medical-association-supreme-court-ruling-biological-sex-krv0kv9k0 (archived here: https://archive.ph/HVJQs)
2. Wright C. Debunking Mainstream Media Lies About Biological Sex. Reality’s Last Stand. 21 March 2025.
3. Wright C. How to Make a ‘Trans Kid’. Reality’s Last Stand. 13 October 2022.
4. The Cass Review: independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. April 2024. pp. 27 and 92. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. Wright C. The Transgender Umbrella Casts its Shadow Over Gender Nonconformity. Reality’s Last Stand. 31 August 2022.
6. American Psychiatric Association. Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/diversity/education/transgender-and-gender-nonconforming-patients/gender-dysphoria-diagnosis
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://archive.is/SyLCZ Michael Searles, Doctors brand Supreme Court trans ruling ‘scientifically illiterate’. Junior medics claim binary divide between sex and gender ‘has no basis in science’ 28/04/25
Joanna Williams, Woke is not dead yet. Our elites won’t give up their mad ideas without a fight. 01/05/25
Sarah Phillimore, Sex v Gender - I am still confused. Praise is heaped on the Supreme Court for finally offering 'clarity'. I am still confused and predict many more years of litigation to come without political will to legislate. 01/05/25
Ann McElhinney, Trans on Trial: the tragi-comedy of gender ideology. Ann McElhinney, the producer of a new filmed drama based on the landmark case Mermaids vs The LGB Alliance, on why supporters of transitioning children are on the back foot - but not gone yet. 02/05/25
https://archive.is/8SFNV Hannah Brown, Scottish Government scraps Misogyny bill over Supreme Court Judgment 02/05/25
Natalya Murakhver, Breaking News: HHS Gender Guidance Aligns with Cass Report. Signals end to ideological capture 02/05/25
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162748326 Andrew Doyle, Iceland has abandoned free speech 03/05/25
https://archive.ph/2025.05.03-070800/https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/protect-the-dolls-why-we-need-to-protect-children-from-school-gender-scandal-5110837 Susan Dalgety, ‘Protect the dolls’? Why we need to protect children from school gender scandal. Vulnerable children, such as those with autism, are being persuaded in schools that their problems stem from their gender 03/05/25
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/transgender-ideology-pushed-by-social-care-workers-has-caused-real-harm-to-children/ Marion Scott, Top social worker accuses care bosses of causing ‘untold harm’ over gender ideology. 04/05/25
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-schools-a-battleground-of-blame-and-violence-due-to-far-right-influence-union-chief-warns-5109170 Alexander Brown, Scottish schools a 'battleground of blame and violence' due to far-right influence, union chief warns 02/05/25
https://archive.is/2025.05.06-052904/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25139180.trade-union-action-supreme-court-ruling-not-off-table/ Hannah Brown, 'Trade Union action on Supreme Court ruling not off the table’ 06/05/25
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https://open.substack.com/pub/paulsutton/p/dream-state-teaching-in-the-english-fca?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1bl9cq
I read this last night, very insightful, well written - will chime well with anyone who currently works in state schools in the UK!
I particularly gravitate towards any individual who reveals the abhorant behaviour by the teaching classes during co(n)vid!