The Conservatives are pushing divisive gender politics

On Sunday the Times reported that a father is willing to go to jail rather than allow his son to participate in LGBT lessons. Jabar Hussain withdrew his nine-year-old son from Parkfield Primary School in Birmingham last year because of his concerns over the concept of “gender identity”. He was worried his son might be encouraged to question his gender identity at an impressionable age.

His son was “confused about the differences between boys and girls,” after one school assembly. One of the books in the “No Outsiders” syllabus which Parkfield uses, involves a teddy bear which questions its gender identity. Thomas, a teddy bear tells his best friend: “I know in my heart I’m a girl teddy, not a boy teddy.”

I’m with Hussain on this one. Kids have enough to navigate without needing to confront the suggestion that they may have been born in the wrong body. Parents in Canada have filed a civil rights complaint after their six-year-old daughter became confused when her teacher taught the class to question their gender. The little girl asked her parents if she could go “to the doctor” about the fact that she was a girl.

Who thinks that our kids need this? The answer to that, strangely, is the Conservative government. It is the Conservatives who have introduced the new Relationships and Sex Education Regulations. These require primary and secondary schools to incorporate new stipulations into their curriculum from September this year. The guidance for primary schools says that “Primary schools are strongly encouraged and enabled to cover LGBT content when teaching about different types of families.”

To support the agenda, the LGBT charity, Stonewall, has produced primary school curriculum material that has been endorsed by the Government Equalities Office. This provides materials to help schools introduce LGBT content across all lessons — maths, science, design and technology, PE, and computing. The “child friendly glossary” says “Babies are given a gender when they are born, for example ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘boy’ or ‘girl’”.  And “Everyone has a gender identity. This is the gender that someone feels they are. This might be the same as the gender they were given as a baby, but it might not. They might feel like they are a different gender, or they might not feel like a boy or a girl.”

Imagine being a kid trying to deal with all that? Sure, kids have to deal with complexity when something is true or widely accepted. But in this case it isn’t. Hardly anyone had heard of “gender identity” a few years ago.

So introducing our kids to this stuff might be okay if they are able to debate and challenge it. By the time they get to secondary school, most of them will be meeting “gender identity” issues online, or in their peer groups. Why not give them the opportunity for thoughtful debate and exploration within the safe setting of school?

Well funnily enough, the Crown Prosecution Service has produced guidance for schools, which suggests that it is transphobic to challenge the narrative. The CPS treats gender identity as established fact. In its schools guidance it says that, “People are assigned a sex at birth” and that a gender fluid person is one who “feels that their gender is not static and that it changes throughout their life. This could be on a daily/weekly/monthly or a longer-term basis.” As for transphobia: a transphobic incident is “Any incident which is perceived to be . . . transphobic by the victim or by any other person.”

Okay, so challenge the narrative and you might be accused of transphobia. The CPS takes transphobia very seriously. According to the CPS, children should even be careful about thinking the wrong thoughts. Transphobia includes “personal negative thoughts about trans people”. Transphobia is a type of “hate”. And we all know now that the police can investigate you for “hate”.

Do you see where we have got to? A concept which almost no-one believes in, with no science behind it, is being promoted as fact to children in our schools. But if kids attempt to debate it, they risk being accused of transphobia. If accused of transphobia the CPS says they have engaged in “hate”. If you are accused of hate (by anyone) the police may investigate you.

Funnily enough, not believing in gender identity, and getting a call from the police, is probably still better than believing in it. Because, of those young people who do, a percentage will head down the pathway of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, potentially having healthy breasts and penises removed, sterility, and unknown other health issues. I’m with Mr Hussain — our kids don’t need all this. But for some reason our public institutions believe or are told that they do. Schools, the CPS, the police, the NHS. The Conservatives have been in government since 2010. They oversee all of this. They need to stop pushing gender identity at us and our kids.