Schools as a vector of infection
How can we stop schools spreading gender-identity ideology?
In this issue I’m going to pick up the question of how to stop schools spreading genderism. Schools are by no means the only place children are picking up this neo-religion, and I don’t underestimate the difficulty – teachers have been indoctrinated in it for at least a decade, and in some countries for much longer. But the education system is the main vector of infection that is, at least theoretically, under the direction of authorities and open to the influence of parents and voters.
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In the UK, guidance for schools on how to respond to children who assert a trans identity has been under development for seven years. A draft produced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission under previous, highly ideological leadership was leaked in 2019. It was a mess, endorsing children being permitted to attend school “in stealth” – that is, with their true sex concealed from their classmates. It said using a trans-identifying child’s preferred pronouns should be compulsory for everyone to use, and that access to single-sex spaces and sports should be according to stated gender identity, with any classmate who objected excluded.
After the leak caused uproar the EHRC abandoned the task and passed it to the Department for Education, which by then had become deeply ideologically captured. It idled and argued internally for years. But by last May, when Rishi Sunak called a general election, it had produced a halfway decent draft, run a public consultation and analysed the answers. But the end result was never published because of the snap election Sunak called, and although the current Labour government has been promising its own revised version since shortly after taking office, nothing has appeared. No one knows when one is likely to appear, or even if one ever will.
Into the vacuum left by government inaction stepped activist groups ready to sell their ideological vision to local authorities. In 2013 Brighton and Hove, the UK’s equivalent to San Francisco, published a “trans toolkit” heavily influenced by Allsorts Youth Project, a charity with a mission to support “LGBT under-25s”. Revised and reissued several times since then, it is every bit as extreme as the leaked EHRC version. It was copied and adapted by local authorities all over the country.
Nobody knows how many children were allowed or even encouraged to socially transition at school while the EHRC and DfE twiddled their thumbs. But it’s been years since I have talked to a parent of a school-aged child anywhere in the UK who doesn’t know of a single trans-identifying child at their school. By coincidence, as I was writing this I saw this reply by J.K. Rowling – and it sounds completely plausible, even commonplace.
My Boomer mother-in-law's jaw dropped when I told her how many trans-identifying kids were at my children's school. Then I told her we were out for dinner with ten friends and between us, we knew (truly knew, not just vague aware of) twenty-five trans-identified kids.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 5, 2025
A while ago I supported a couple who were put in touch with me by a friend. Their daughter’s school – a state school in a nice but not swanky area teaching boys and girls aged 11-16 – had emailed out of the blue to inform them that she was “now a boy” and would be re-registered as such in school records. The only reason they were even told, they later discovered, was because a girl two years older had been transitioned by the school in stealth, and when her parents eventually found out they had raised hell. In the couple’s meetings with staff at the school, one mentioned in passing that a tenth of the pupils in the school were registered as either the opposite sex or non-binary. They didn’t seem to think this was strange or needed explaining.
So there are surely tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of children around the UK who identify as trans, at least for a while. If all they were doing was playing around with identities in their friendship groups… well, I’d still dislike the regressive sexism involved in children believing that being girly makes you a girl, and being boyish makes you a boy, but we can hope for it to be a passing phase, and work to counter it. Most of those kids won’t go near a doctor, still less take puberty blockers or hormones or get any surgeries (although my friends-of-friend’s daughter was about to start using a binder when her parents found out; mercifully they were able to dissuade her).
But all over the country schools are taking these children’s declarations seriously, using their preferred pronouns, pretending to think they’ve changed sex or don’t have a sex, permitting them to intrude on their classmates’ privacy and (if they’re girls) put themselves in danger by using opposite-sex spaces. They’re concretising what would have been a passing phase, encouraging a tedious type of rumination, interrupting their healthy identity development and creating another cohort of identitarian ideologues.
Every day that goes by without the authorities putting a stop to this, the number of such pupils will grow. And every one will be a conundrum for their school, if and when the order finally comes down from on high that this should never have been allowed. I dread to think of the trouble that will follow if children who’ve been permitted to socially transition are told that the pretence is over when implicitly, and often explicitly, it was allowed because otherwise they were supposedly at risk of suicide.
I’m really afraid of the consequences when large numbers of confused children, some very sad or mentally unwell, are told they can no longer do something that was billed as life-saving. And yet it’s hard to see how something so harmful can be “grandfathered in” – that is, permitted to continue for those who have already started. Every day boys are permitted into girls’ spaces is another day in which girls are put at risk, and similarly for all the other reality-denying consequences of this belief system. It was truly evil ever to lie to children like this.
Well. The best time to sort this out would have been before it started. The second-best time is now. But the other big problem is that teachers, too, have been caught up in the belief that it’s not just their job but their mission to validate children’s trans identities. Shifting this belief is going to be extremely difficult.
Recently, a friend (who lives outside the UK, in a country where transactivists still have unfettered run of the country) sent me her reflections on training sessions for teachers she had attended, run by transgender lobby groups. Many were led by a specific high-profile trans person, an attractive, androgynous figure in her 20s with wild hair, tattoos, beard and lipstick whose claimed gender identity has varied since she came to prominence as a teenager from trans man to non-binary.
This woman, my friend says, has an extremely plausible and polished spiel. In effect, she sells her life story as a “hero’s journey” from suffering child to authentic self, with the adults who affirmed her cast as saviours and those who didn’t as heartless and bigoted. Her current persona is that of someone who was once a vulnerable child and now dedicates herself to championing vulnerable children like her past self. Teachers are brought to tears by her story, and leave the session determined to seek out, affirm and support these special children in their own classrooms.
The lobbyists who run these sessions sell their worldview by an appeal to conscience, reinforced by emotional blackmail: if teachers don’t do as they say, innocent, vulnerable children will hurt themselves, maybe even kill themselves, and it will be the teachers’ fault.
Most of these teachers are women, which makes it particularly distressing that it’s mostly girls whose discomfort is being ignored. It is girls who are told they must validate trans-identifying male classmates’ identities, and treat those boys as more important and vulnerable than them. It is girls who are taught that they must champion and defend these boys, and that it’s their praiseworthy and destined role to silently bear the discomfort this causes them.
These stories work, my friend says, because they align with deep social values held by many women to nurture, protect and stand up for the marginalised. It’s women who volunteer for anti-bullying, inclusion, and child-protection work, and unless you look closely, transing kids seems like a natural extension.
My friend says she thinks counternarratives are needed to remind teachers of the need for wisdom to accompany empathy and to broaden their focus to other types of distress. They need to be helped to switch their logical brains back on, so that they understand that what they are being asked to do is to carry an emotional burden to make themselves feel good, but that accepting that burden can lead them to overlook other forms of harm.
She wants to tell the stories of vulnerable children who were harmed by affirmation or by their boundaries being violated by other people’s trans identification, and of children who are now glad that they were advised to wait rather than transition. She wants to redefine what it means for an educator to be a hero: to be judicious and careful, to have the courage to change course in response to new evidence and to stand up for all children, not just the loudest, most visible or most fashionable victim.
I think all that is very wise – but mostly, I think that people like this trans influencer should be nowhere near schools or teacher training. One sales session from one talented salesperson can convince large numbers of teachers, each of whom will teach many thousands of children during their career. Deprogramming is by comparison slow, painstaking – and uncertain. Selling isn’t done by logic, it’s done by hijacking emotional parts of the brain (men are just as susceptible to sales pitches as women, by the way – it’s just a different set of emotions). I don’t know who first said this, but it’s profoundly true: you can’t reason someone out of a position they hold when they weren’t reasoned into it in the first place.
Where does this leave us? I still hope that clear, unsentimental guidance about the nuts and bolts – children must remain recorded as their (actual) sex on school registers, no one in any position of authority may pretend any child has changed sex, no child (or adult) may ever use a space intended for the opposite sex – takes us an awfully long way. Arguably this was the only lawful position before the FWS Supreme Court judgment, once you worked through all the obligations on schools to keep children safe, treat girls fairly and have due regard to the various beliefs of the families the schools serve.
But post-FWS there’s an extra, killer argument: every single child in the UK today is going to grow up into a world where no trans-identifying person will ever have any right to be considered as the opposite sex in any situation covered by the Equality Act – that is, in employment or service provision. Any school that pretends a child has changed sex is setting that child up for a lifetime of either lawbreaking or disappointment.
And once you have written this down – ideally in statutory form, I’ve been shocked post-FWS by the almost universal willingness to break the law when it’s possible to get away with it – surely schools can no longer invite in speakers or trainers who say anything that is incompatible with that position. The sales pitches and guilt-tripping will become untenable. It can’t happen soon enough – as the transactivists like to say, “I’m so tired, y’all.”
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Note: last issue I accidentally pasted the same link to an interview twice. I’ve fixed it in the online version of this newsletter, but of course that doesn’t update in emails I’ve sent out. Here’s the right link.