Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No83
Newsletter Theme: LGBT Youth Scotland and transgender ideology must be removed from schools
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The last two weeks have seen a torrent of bad news stories for LGBT Youth Scotland and for schools promoting transgender ideology to high school and primary school children. LGBT Youth Scotland, for those of you who don’t know, is essentially a state-sponsored ‘charity’ that promotes transgender ideology to children in our schools. They also write pamphlets, advise governments, train teachers … the list goes on.
One of their pamphlets was cowritten by Andrew Easton, who has just been convicted as a paedophile. As a result, Children in Need have withdrawn their funding to LGBT Youth Scotland. This is not the first concern or conviction regarding LGBT Youth Scotland, but the Scottish government and police continue to give them a free reign and a lot of money to promote their ideas.
High schools continue to adopt transgender ideology through the curriculum and by adopting the LGBT Charter for Education. Meanwhile, primary schools are appointing LGBT champions and encouraging very young children to think about whether they could be ‘transgender’. To be a good school today, it would appear that you have to promote transgender ideology.
When SUE was set up, we pointed out that whatever your opinion is on the transgender controversy, you did at least have to accept that it was a controversy. Based on this, and this alone, the very fact that primary schools teach transgender ideology – as fact – goes against a basic liberal and educational approach to schooling.
The ‘transgender rights’ lobby groups get away with promoting their ideology because they present themselves as being progressive. Part of the message is that if you do not adopt children’s chosen ‘gender identities’, they may harm themselves or commit suicide. This is a form of propaganda, and last week it was found that a school in Edinburgh was teaching children that transgender people are regularly murdered. This is not true; there has, in fact, been ‘no known murder of a trans person’ in Scotland.
Some children may identify as transgender but that doesn’t mean that it is a reality. The idea that someone can be born in the wrong body, for example, is simply not true. The idea that having XY chromosomes doesn’t make you male, is similarly not true either. Biological sex, as we have seen recently in the Olympics, is a reality, and if we deny this, we end up in the barbaric situation of watching biological males beating up women in a boxing ring.
Tragically, these basic facts of life are consistently ignored within our schools.
LGBT Youth Scotland has been at the forefront of promoting the myths about ‘transgender children’ and in the process is given a free hand in schools to push the idea that some children have a ‘gender’ that does not ‘match’ their actual sex.
The point to note here is that there is no such thing as gender. We have used the term as a replacement for sex for many years, and there is the idea about gender being a social thing. But all this means is that gender stereotypes are things that have a social and cultural dimension: ‘men are all strong’, ‘women are all frail’, etc. But this is not what the transgender activists mean when they use the term gender.
For these activists, gender is as real as biological sex. In other words, we all have an inner gender, like a soul, that can be different from our biology. This is not true.
It is very clear, for anyone who is not ‘captured’ by the ideology, that the idea that we are all potentially transgender is a myth that has been promoted by activists, especially online and on social media. As one institution after another bought into this idea, what happened was that more and more children were socially conditioned to think that this is a truth.
This idea of being socially conditioned (or social contagion) simply means that it has become a trend, a belief, that has grown and grown so that children start to adopt it among themselves. This is one of the reasons why there are far more girls than boys identifying as transgender, as girls tend to influence one another more, especially in terms of appearance and body image, than boys.
The potential confusion this can cause amongst children is significant. This week, for example, Susan Dalgety explained that an eleven-year-old family member thought that trans women i.e. men, can have babies. One wonders where this leaves biology teachers faced with having to teach actual facts to children.
Scottish Professionals Advising on Gender (ScotPAG) have issued a statement to the Scottish government to stop what they see as a public health emergency. This is a public health emergency because children are being encouraged to think that they are transgender; it is one that will lead to many children adopting this ideology and eventually mutilating their bodies and being left taking drugs and potentially needing operations for the rest of their lives.
This is ScotPAG’s challenge to the Scottish government:
All guidance in public services endorsing gender ideology must be removed with immediate effect.
Gender ideology messaging must be removed from all public institutions e.g. from school curricula, health communications and notices, and social work language.
Gender ideology must be removed from educational materials and from all professionals’ social work, education and health training courses.
Third sector organisations lacking the knowledge base, specific training, and professional skills to assess mental health conditions, must not be providing input to our schools, nor promoting gender ideology in any of our public services.
Evidence-based, systemic reviews must be recognised as the sole basis for interventions in the provision of public services.
The concept of ‘trans’ must be recognised as using regressive stereotypes for identification and is arguably homophobic.
It is worth adding that it is not only children who wrongly identify as transgender who are being affected by what is happening in schools. Every child is now being educated to use ‘correct’ (i.e. wrong sex) pronouns and to believe in the myth of gender. As a result, the very words we use to describe things, things that matter, like the words man and woman, are being changed, transformed and deformed. Even the newspapers that are cited here continue to use the term ‘she’ when talking about a male rapist, for example. This is perverse, and they also need to be held to account for their support or cowardice when dealing with this profoundly serious issue.
Most recently, we also find that Police Scotland have been criticised for allowing rapists to ‘self-declare’ their gender identity, something they justified by arguing that this gives the rapist a ‘strong sense of belonging’. The mind boggles!
Our Parent and Supporters Coordinator, Kate Deeming, has been working tirelessly on this issue, and we need more parents and teachers to speak out, so tell us what is going on in your schools and help us to put pressure on the authorities to stop this indoctrination of our children.
If you would like to help or have a story to tell, please get in touch: info@sue.scot.
Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair
Let's start a campaign to get LGBT Youth Scotland out of schools
Kate Deeming is SUE’s Parent and Supporters Coordinator. Originally from Philadelphia and now based in Glasgow, she is the solo mum to a P7 boy. With three decades of developing performance projects in schools and community settings internationally, she is a long-time advocate for children and childhood. Kate’s writing can be found at her Substack, Deeming Dreaming.
One has to wonder if (and how many) individuals had a ‘wee niggle’ about Andrew Easton, a drag queen and prominent LGBTQ activist in Scotland. Writer of the LGBT Youth Scotland guide Coming Out Trans, he has now been convicted of distributing child pornography. This sick individual demanded to be called ‘daddy’ by and used secure messaging to send messages and photographs of his private parts to his schoolboy victim. He also hoarded 132 images and 1119 videos showing the abuse of newborn infants and children up to age 10. I wonder if concerns were raised about him, which were also silenced in the fear of being smeared as ‘homophobic’?
For some time, many have raised red flags about LGBT Youth Scotland as a notorious anti-child and anti-safeguarding organisation. With full and intimate access to our children, LGBT Youth Scotland, funded by our taxes, has no democratic oversight or accountability. Even in light of the conviction of Andrew Easton, the government’s response is to simply state that the Coming out document is ‘not a Scottish Government publication’ – so that’s alright then!
Easton is not LGBT Youth Scotland’s first paedophile either. In 2003, its founder, James Rennie, was jailed for running the most sinister child sex abuse ring in Scottish history. Did LGBT Youth Scotland dissolve after that fact? No. Did the charity regulator investigate? No.
It took until 2023 for a new police inquiry to be launched. This was after new abuse and grooming allegations came to light.
But it doesn’t end there. LGBT Youth Scotland has fully embraced ‘wrong body’ ideology. It promotes the idea that gender non-conforming children and autistic children’s discomfort in their body is the result of ‘being trans’. It encourages children to keep secrets from their parents. Children with complex psychological needs are persuaded to believe they are trans in programmes run by this charity.
In the aftermath of a meeting in Holyrood in May 2024 to address the issue of transgender ideology in schools, individuals related heartbreaking tales of secret social transitioning in schools, body mutilation, and estrangement – families being ripped apart. Dr Jenny Cunningham writes that the single link to this extremist ideology whose advocates use cult-like techniques to recruit new members was LGBT Youth Scotland.
Using ‘homophobia’ as a shield to access children does not stop with LGBT Youth Scotland, however. There were the cases of Jordan Linden, former councillor branded a ‘sex pest’, who worked with the Scottish Youth Parliament, and former SNP equalities officer Cameron Downing, who was found guilty of sexual assault. Also, lest we forget, the foundations of the Paedophile Information Exchange are in Edinburgh.
Stephen Ireland, founder of Pride in Surrey, has been charged with 37 counts of child sexual abuse including the rape of a child under 13. Ireland was often called into schools to work with children on behalf of ‘Pride Engagement’. He was a DJ for years in a radio station based in a school that CHILDREN also used. He was a patron of the charity Educate and Celebrate, whose mission was to ‘queer’ children. Malcolm Clark writes about them here.
Yet the more parents and other members of the public try to have their concerns addressed, the louder the activists shout ‘homophobia’. All any of us want is for our children to be children and to be safe from harm. This is clearly not happening.
The question is how many cases have to come to light until Scotland actually follows through with the Getting It Right for Every Child mantra.
Children’s vulnerabilities being exploited by people and organisations holding authority is not a new thing. We only have to look in recent history to see how, in the Catholic Church abuse scandal, tribalism and power protected perpetrators of the most nefarious behaviours imaginable. Or the BBC, with the recent charges brought against Huw Edwards, who has been found to have possessed the most vile child abuse images. Or Jimmy Savile. But these were all ‘nice guys’!
It seems bad habits die hard, and we are no better at protecting children today than 30 years ago. I would surmise that the whole critical social justice curriculum in our schools is grooming children to be zealots and robbing them of their childhood – abuse rebranded as developing global citizens.
Certain buzzwords are like kryptonite, keeping us from being able to interrogate WHY and HOW children are being indoctrinated. And this blindness means we are NOT Getting It Right for Every Child. Any good teacher who really cares about children will put themselves, their beliefs, their identity and their careers to the side in order to ensure children are safe.
Yet we have numerous examples where this is clearly not the case. Cult-like mantras replace child safeguarding.
In the words of Malcolm Clark, one of the founders of LGB Alliance:
Our mantra should be a new version of Stonewall’s famous motto. Some gay men are predators. Get over it… This should mean that any gay man who has access to boys is monitored with all the unforgiving intensity accorded to a heterosexual man with access to girls. We are no worse than other men. But neither are we any better. It’s time the whole predator-ridden, predator-excusing, predator-justifying LGBTQ+ lobby was forced to acknowledge this.
Yet this seems far from happening, and I wonder how many children have to be harmed before our institutions catch up. Because the LGBTQIA2S+ cabal needs to do a house clean. The vast, vast majority of teachers are good people, but there are predatory activist teachers and mentally unstable individuals using the mantle of LGBT+ as a shield. And we parents should not stand for it.
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/paedophile-andrew-easton-wrote-coming-out-guide-given-to-schoolkids-as-young-as-13/ Marion Scott, Paedophile wrote coming out guide given to school kids as young as 13. 25/08/24
https://archive.ph/2024.08.30-205450/https://www.thetimes.com/article/2f4a0692-7ff8-4d74-9320-6511af0daa8f Janice Turner, No one is above scrutiny when a child’s at risk. For years, Children in Need gave money to an LGBT charity tainted by child abuse. Why did it get a free pass for so long? 30/08/24
Dave Clements, From safeguarding to solipsism. Why we need to get to grips with the real threats to children's welfare. 31/08/24
https://archive.is/HCIdk Harry Yorke, Parents ‘wreck’ pupils’ futures by letting them stay at home. The education secretary says too many believe truanting is acceptable for ‘cheaper holidays, birthday treats or even a runny nose’ but it will hit their children’s long-term earnings. 01/09/24
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/falsifying-history-can-only-increase-racial-tension/ Jonathon Sumption, Falsifying history can only increase racial tension. Frank Furedi argues that historic memory is the key to the identity of any coherent community, and that attacking it undermines a population’s solidarity. 31/08/24
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/schools-guide-to-coming-out/ Marion Scott, Child health experts slam ‘manipulative’ school guide co-authored by paedophile. 01/09/24
https://archive.is/mzkWn Daniel Sanderson, Many trans people are murdered ‘simply because they try to be themselves’, pupils told. Teachers at a school in Edinburgh are accused of ‘peddling myths and propaganda’ about the minority group in a lesson about hate crime. 02/09/24
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13822595/The-charity-dogged-sickening-depravity-former-chief-executive-bars-sex-attack-baby-convicted-child-abuse-videos-did-LGBT-Youth-Scotland-receive-millions-funding.html Graham Grant, The charity dogged by sickening depravity - a former chief executive behind bars for a sex attack on a baby, another convicted over child abuse videos... So why did LGBT Youth Scotland receive millions in funding? 06/09/24
https://www.thetimes.com/article/45cfb79e-7a93-462a-ad0f-3b8b53782679?shareToken=7ba517cfa534fdc962e990ffbddf283c Helen Puttick, Trans treatments are ‘experimenting with our young’, says doctor. GPs warn of the unknown risks of side effects in hormone treatment in letter to MSPs. 05/09/24
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