Carys Moseley looks in detail at Oxfordshire County Council’s Trans Inclusion Toolkit.
Recently, Oxfordshire County Council made a statement saying that it was withdrawing its Trans Inclusion Toolkit and also withdrawing from the pending judicial review regarding the Toolkit, due to legal action brought on behalf of a teenage girl by Safe Schools Alliance UK. This is the second time that a public body has withdrawn a transgender policy in reaction to a threat of legal action, the first being the Crown Prosecution Service. In that case too, the action was brought on behalf of a teenage girl by Safe Schools Alliance and Fair Cop.
Sorry but not sorry
Oxfordshire County Council said that it would follow the national guidelines soon to be drawn up by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). There was no mention made in its announcement of protecting single-sex based rights. This means that Oxfordshire County Council is not truly sorry for pushing transgender indoctrination onto schools. It is very clear that it is playing a game.
From the point of view of most parents, children and teachers, things are going to get much worse if the EHRC guidelines are allowed to dominate schools across the United Kingdom; the EHRC has a history of being well and truly obsessed with transgender politics. The fact that it is busy drawing up guidelines should serve as a warning to local authorities to step up their game now to oppose transgender indoctrination before it is too late.
List of councils that have Trans Inclusion Toolkits
There is publicly available evidence that several local authorities in the UK including Oxfordshire have either published Trans Inclusion Toolkits or considered doing so. They are East Sussex, Leicester and Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Cornwall and the Vale of Glamorgan. In addition, Cornwall County Council has many transgender resources. Most of these authorities have had these since 2018, but the earliest council for which there exists online evidence is Brighton and Hove, which published one back in 2013. You can read a revised version of it here.
The important question here is, which other councils will publish such toolkits next?
Trans activist entryism into schools
The credits in the Oxfordshire Trans Inclusion Toolkit are very revealing, as they show which public bodies are feeding the problem. For example, on page 4 we read this:
“The toolkit follows best practice identified by the Government Equalities Office National Programming, information from the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) website on supporting individual children and young people and PSHE Association guidance on curriculum materials.”
What this shows is that the gender identity lobby further afield than education is highly influential in promoting entryism into schools.
Then on page 5 we read this:
“The toolkit is a best practice guide which provides schools and other education settings with the information and resources required to become a trans inclusive environment and to ensure that they are compliant with relevant law and Department for Education (DfE) guidance.”
In reality, the problem is that such guidelines frequently misinterpret the law. Such guidelines have the power to intimidate teachers, parents and governors who uncritically assume that they are in fact ‘the law’ on sex and gender issues.
We need to confront the ways in which such guidelines undermine basic freedoms, rights and responsibilities. Two major problems stand out from the Oxfordshire Trans Inclusion Toolkit: an attack on truthfulness, especially Christian truthfulness, and a deliberate strategy of providing scripts for teachers, parents and governors to use.
Undermining truthfulness
The Toolkit clearly aims to interpret the concept of ‘British Values’ found in the Counter-Extremism Strategy according to transgender ideology. We see this in a suggestion inserted in section 2.6 (page 11):
“Schools and education settings can create an environment that is inclusive of everyone through Spiritual, Moral, Social, Cultural Development (SMSC) and British Values. Creating school/college values based on the four British Values helps to develop a culture that explicitly celebrates differences, treating everyone equally and respecting individuals.”
I have previously shown how inadequate and potentially dangerous is the fact that the Counter-Extremism Strategy uses the term ‘gender’ instead of sex when listing protected characteristics. Clearly as there is no agreement on the meaning of ‘gender’ in the law, this is a serious problem for schools, which come under the Strategy.
In the same section on page 12, the Oxfordshire Trans Toolkit singles out religion as a field where trans identification can be promoted:
“Look at the rule of law by studying the Equality Act 2010 and all nine protected characteristics. This can link into wider campaigns such as Anti-Bullying Week in November, LGBT history month in February and Transgender Day of Visibility on 31st March. When working on mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, tie in role models with multiple identities such as trans people of faith. This link from the Proud Trust is helpful.”
This is relevant given that Christian maths teacher Joshua Sutcliffe was pushed out of a job in a school in Oxfordshire for calling girls ‘girls’, when one girl demanded to be treated as a boy.
It is also extremely important to note how the Toolkit singles out religion and disability in a later section on ‘Additional vulnerability’ among minors (page 37 onwards). The reason it does this is again to counter opposition to transgender indoctrination from Christians and people working with teenagers with disabilities, by declaring that there are teenagers who identify as transgendered and who have a faith or a disability.
Putting words into people’s mouths
Section 4.4 of the Toolkit is entitled ‘Scripts – What to say and how to say it’ in response to transphobic bullying. The subsection ‘Explore and Explain’ (pages 21-22) encourages questioning children about ‘transphobic language’, giving teachers the following advice:
“Sometimes, the most effective way to respond to bullying language is by using questions to explore what the child/young person understands, and what they might mean by using that language. This conversation can also be used as the first step towards restoration and repair. Use this as an opportunity to inform the child/young person of alternative or acceptable language and to explore concepts so they may avoid using bullying language in the future.”
This is putting words into children’s mouths, as well as into the mouths of the adults who are expected to follow the Toolkit.
The Equality Act 2010 as a Transgender Trojan Horse
The problem here is that in the Equality Act 2010 ‘gender reassignment’, the protected characteristic for transsexuals, is a protected characteristic in schools, even though under the Gender Recognition Act only people aged 18 and over are allowed to undergo gender reassignment. We can see this clearly from the Toolkit itself.
What this really means is that whilst on the face of it this happened in order to ensure that schools were aligned with the Gender Recognition Act, what has really happened is that it has been used as a Trojan Horse by transgender campaigners to get into schools and produce guidelines and policies for transgender indoctrination among under-18s. I revealed the paper trail that led to this via the Equality Act 2010 on a previous occasion.
Monitoring the spread of transgender indoctrination
The Appendices at the end of the Toolkit provide numerous resources of various kinds, many of them LGBT groups working with children and young people in Oxfordshire, then sample Welsh Government lesson plans, material from UNESCO, and the biggest transgender charities and campaign groups including Gendered Intelligence, GIRES, Mermaids and Stonewall.
Given the seriously concerning content of the Trans Inclusion Toolkit and its equivalents, what is really needed is to unearth similar material across local authorities, schools and colleges all across the UK. The purveyors of such indoctrination are highly industrious, determined and obsessive and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.
