Council guidelines have advised schools that staff may need to alert social services if parents dismiss a “gender questioning” child’s demand to “transition”.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s “Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit” tells teachers “it may be necessary and advisable to activate safeguarding procedures” if worried about a child’s “wellbeing and or safety” when faced with a parent who says, “I refuse to allow my son to change his name or wear skirts.”
As The Telegraph pointed out on Thursday, the Department for Education’s (DfE) statutory guidance says that staff should refer a child to social services or police if the institution’s safeguarding lead has concerns about a child’s welfare.
In addition, a section advising teachers on how to manage “some of the most common concerns” surrounding “gender questioning” pupils features several scenarios, including a parent calling in to say: “My daughter doesn’t want a boy changing next to her, what if he looks at her body?”
“In response to this parental concern, it would not be appropriate to remove the trans pupil from the changing rooms. Instead, it would be far more appropriate to look at offering an alternative changing arrangement for the child who feels uncomfortable around the trans pupil,” the document says, adding: “It is the responsibility of members of staff to support … trans pupils and students and cisgender pupils and students to feel comfortable around one another.”
Another scenario outlined in the toolkit, which insists that staff and pupils undergo “training and awareness raising” until everyone at the schools understands a person who identifies as a girl is a “real girl”, dismisses safety concerns about male pupils competing in single-sex sports with females, and vice versa.
Such concerns are driven by a false belief that “all boys or all girls share the same physical attributes”, according to the document, which goes on to insist that “trans boys are boys, not girls, and therefore entitled to play rugby with boys”.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s toolkit also features extensive information on how schools should become “inclusive” to “gender questioning” children, such as warning staff giving relationships and sex education lessons not to label genitals as male or female, but instead “make it clear that most rather than all boys have a penis and testicles and most rather than all girls have a vulva and vagina”.
A spokesman for the left-wing council told The Telegraph that the version of the toolkit published on the Allsorts Youth Project’s website “is undergoing final checks before being sent out to schools”, according to the newspaper.
The report came after individuals described in The Times as “leading members of the lesbian, gay, transsexual and intersex community” launched a petition urging Stonewall to reconsider its dogmatic stance on transgender issues, accusing the LGBT campaign group of “demonising as transphobic” anyone who voices views which dissent from its position on allowing transgender access to women-only spaces.