Head of Education Steve Beegoo explains recent changes to equalities guidance for schools
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has scrapped parts of its guidance on transgenderism in schools.
Activist LGBT groups that poison children with trans ideology had been relying on these aspects of the previous guidance to promote their ideas in schools. These sections being removed helps relieve the pressure on schools to yield to these activists’ demands.
The EHRC is responsible for giving specific legal advice to politicians, public bodies and businesses on equality and human rights law.
Even with this helpful development, the powerful truth that we have been made in God’s image, biologically male and female, remains under threat.
Now, schools urgently need new, clear guidance directly from the Department for Education which the government has promised for months.
Discrimination claims over not using ‘chosen names’ removed
The EHRC has updated its technical guidance for England first published in 2014, in the light of the cultural chaos and legal challenges evident across schools.
It has scrapped sections warning schools that, “not using the pupil’s chosen name merely because the pupil has changed gender would be direct gender reassignment discrimination”.
The guidance had previously explained that should a teacher persist in referring to a girl who wanted to be a boy as a girl that this “would also result in direct gender reassignment discrimination”. This has all been removed.
Although the guidance is not statutory, it is used to advise schools where there are potential or actual legal proceedings. This new guidance signifies a shift in the tide. The EHCR itself seems to have become frustrated at the lack of clarity and continued prevarication of the Department for Education and so has made the first move to adjust their technical guidance.
Can children have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment?
However, the technical guidance still emphasises that a child can have, “the protected characteristic of gender reassignment”, despite children being unable to legally change sex and be ‘reassigned’ until 18 when a recognition certificate can be obtained.
There really are no ‘transgender children’, a term used by activists. But there are children with gender dysphoria or suffering from gender confusion.
The remaining guidance that in order to hold the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, “A person can be at any stage in the transition process, from proposing to reassign sex, undergoing a process of reassignment, or having completed it,” is deeply problematic as young and impressionable children can just ‘propose’ and this then be affirmed by the adults around without any medical or even parental involvement.
The effects of transgender ideology are being covered up
Earlier this year, the EHRC itself refused to publish the independent report on how rampant the restrictions on free speech regarding transgender issues has become in universities.
Again, the Department of Education this month refused to publish the independent panel’s report on Relationships and Sex Education in schools, which the Prime Minister had called for.
The scale to which extreme transgender ideology has infiltrated every level of the education of our children and young people is being hidden from the public, even when investigated. We may ask why!
Single-sex toilets must be provided
The EHRC’s guidance also confirms that single-sex toilet facilities must be provided in schools for children over the age of eight and single-sex changing facilities for children over 11.
‘Non-gendered’ facilities have become a huge issue for children in schools. This is especially true for girls, many of whom are not using the toilet while at school for concern of the presence of boys. Reports are increasing even of sexual assaults.
Helpfully, the EHRC guidance goes on to advise schools to segregate facilities by biological sex rather than gender. Pupils with gender dysphoria or gender confusion should not automatically expect to use the shared toilets or changing rooms which align to their perceived, but fictional, ‘gender identity’, even if they propose to have their sex re-assigned later on.
Confusion in schools
Baroness Falkner, the chairwoman of the EHRC, seems to have courageously pushed for action from the DfE by publishing the new edited guidance.
She is quoted as saying, “It is crucial we avoid any confusion on this important topic”.
Confusion reigns in many schools, and teachers are being not only confused as to what they should do, but are being punished when they do not act in line with the transgender ideology, as we have seen in the cases of ‘Hannah’ and Joshua Sutcliffe. Many Christian teachers have been deeply disturbed by what they are seeing as confusing teaching in their schools through RSE, as the summer report by the Association of Christian Teachers identified.
What is the definition of ‘sex’?
Confusion about the definition of sex continues to be evident in the technical guidance. Firstly, it states, ‘A person’s sex refers to the fact that he or she is a male or female of any age.’ And ‘Sex’ is understood as binary – being male or female – with a person’s legal sex being determined by what is recorded on their birth certificate, based on biological sex…
However, it continues that, ‘A trans person aged 18 or over can change their legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate through procedures set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004.’
So, teachers who wish to teach children that you can legally ‘become female’, but be biologically male and vice versa, after the age of 18, continue to have this guidance to support them.
The law, and the formal state documents of one’s birth certificate, will make a nonsense of the historically understood binary biological definitions of ‘male and female’. This confusion of language will undoubtedly continue to be taught to many of our children unless transgender ideology is prohibited from being taught as fact, or modelled in affirmative practice, in our schools.
Separate ideology from the law
It has been clear that the Equality Act and the protected characteristics have been used as a trojan horse to bring confusing and downright harmful ideas into the minds of children. Stephanie Davies-Arai, director of Transgender Trend explains,
“In line with the new EHRC Technical Guidance for Schools, the government must separate ideology from the law and be clear about which is which. Concepts and terms that fall under the banner of ideology include: gender identity, gender affirmation, misgendering, transgender child, cisgender, non-binary, preferred pronouns, deadnaming, gender assigned at birth. None of these concepts appear in the Equality Act.”
The forthcoming DfE guidance on transgenderism must reinforce the helpful changes which have been made by the EHRC, but must go further by banning the social transitioning so prevalent in our schools.
May the truth be distorted no longer: the truth that we have been created male and female, in God’s image, and that children should be protected from confusing and harmful language and ideology.
Let us pray that the tide of transgenderism will be fully turned.
