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The following talk was given by Helen Saxby, women’s rights activist and Brighton resident, at the FiLiA conference in Brighton on October 12th 2025. The workshop was entitled Sex and Gender in the Classroom, and also included talks by Brighton resident Rachel Cashman, and our Director Stephanie Davies-Arai.

Brighton is another example of a council in thrall to gender identity ideology, where the school-to-clinic pipeline is well-established from local Allsorts trans-inclusion schools guidance through to the WellBN clinic.

We are very grateful to Helen Saxby for allowing us to publish her talk, which documents some of the communications she has had with Brighton Council over the years, including the revisions of the Allsorts trans-inclusion schools toolkit.

Sex and Gender in the Classroom: Brighton, October 2025

There will be people here who are very well-versed in the subject of sex and gender as it applies to Brighton’s schools, and there will be those who know very little or have only recently (maybe through their own children’s experiences at school) come across some worrying or confusing aspects of Brighton’s approach to the subject.

I would like to start this workshop by giving a history and an overview of the story of sex and gender in Brighton’s schools. For those of you who know the story I hope you’ll enjoy remembering Brighton Council’s greatest hits, and for those of you who don’t I hope it will give you some understanding of what has been going on in Brighton, and also maybe the courage to challenge it.

I first noticed the extremist stance of Brighton Council when I submitted evidence to the trans inquiry of 2015 organised by the Women and Equalities Select Committee. Written submissions were available online and amongst them was one from Brighton Council, wholly in support of what it called ‘trans rights’ and wholly unconcerned seemingly with the impact on anyone else’s rights. At that time there was no public conversation around the trans influence on children, schools and education but there was anecdotal evidence coming from worried parents on platforms such as Mumsnet and Facebook. My own children had left school in Brighton just in time and I had no personal reason to look into the subject.

When I read the Transgender Inclusion Schools Toolkit for the first time I was shocked by the contents. Published in 2014 by Brighton Council and Allsorts Youth Project, the toolkit provided policy advice for Brighton schools, governors, teachers and headteachers, which was blatantly unlawful. The main thrust of the document, across all policy areas, was to let the child in the class who identified as ‘trans’ have complete say over which toilets, changing rooms, dormitories and sports they would prefer to use, with no concern over the rights of any other pupils, particularly girls. In fact, if any of these legitimate concerns WERE raised, the toolkit advised re-education and/ or the removal of the child who complained rather than the child who was using a space meant for the opposite sex.

My favourite instance of this was one of the toolkit’s examples of best practice:

Scenario 1: My daughter doesn’t want a boy changing next to her, what if he looks at her body?

For example, in this scenario it would not be appropriate to remove the trans person from the changing rooms if a concern is raised by a parent or carer. In this situation, it would be far more appropriate to look at offering an alternative changing arrangement for the child who feels uncomfortable around the trans person. A Human Rights response would be to state that although the individual in question may have the body of a boy, they are in every other respect a girl and as such have the right under the Equality Act to change with the girls and to be treated fairly as such.

Similarly, in Scenario 2, dealing with sports, the advice is that

…pupils or students who feel that a trans child should not be involved in certain sporting activities may themselves need to be supported to do a different activity.

And further, that

The responsibility lies with the individual who has the problem, to deal with that problem, not with the trans person to accommodate that person’s insecurity…

The rest of the toolkit follows along the same lines, disregarding the rights of girls, of students from certain faith backgrounds and in fact anyone (child or teacher) who does not believe that humans can change sex.

Transgender Trend published their own schools guide early in 2018, to provide an alternative evidence-based resource for schools, fully compliant with the Equality Act and safeguarding best practice.  Copies were sent to all Brighton schools, and parents began to use the resource to open conversations with their own children’s headteachers. Brighton Council however, doubled down and defended their own guidance in the local press.  

I wrote to the council to complain later that year, and had a long backwards and forwards email conversation with the Equalities lead at the time, Anna Spragg, in which I explained the specific points of equality legislation which the toolkit contravened.  I received woolly generic replies about how the toolkit was ‘nationally recognised as good practice’.

This was true: the Brighton toolkit was used as a template for many such toolkits across the country, and many still use it.

My conversation with Anna Spragg ended on a curt note:

“Trans girls are girls. Trans people can legally use facilities appropriate to their identity.“

The toolkit was updated in 2018, and again in 2021, burgeoning in the process from 38 pages to 72, as the task of convincing everyone that sex is a spectrum, and the onerous duty of correcting and coercing people’s behaviour required more and more detailed instructions. Scripts were introduced for trans-identifying children to practice. For example, a boy might say:

I have always been a girl

The curriculum itself had to be altered to shore up the ideology being promoted. For example, in PSE teaching (and presumably biology lessons too) the statement:

In labelling the genitals 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.

In 2019 I compiled the Children’s Rights Impact Assessment, which was published by Transgender Trend. This laid out the impact on children, both trans-identified and otherwise, within a human rights, equality and safeguarding framework, and it highlighted the many problems with the toolkit. The impact on the rights of girls was the most extreme: girls effectively lost all rights to single-sex spaces, facilities and sports in the Brighton toolkit, with its insistence that:

Pupils and students have the right to access the toilet/changing room/overnight accommodation/sport that corresponds to their gender identity

A copy was sent to every councillor on behalf of local women’s groups Brighton Resisters and Safe Schools Alliance, with a covering letter detailing the main points. In 2020 follow-up emails were sent, but without a single reply.

The public conversation was growing as more and more parents (and teachers) were coming across the effects of gender ideology in the classroom. Not only were local parents complaining to their children’s schools but local people were asking questions at council meetings, and at the same time the press were becoming more interested in the stories coming from schools, for example when children returned to school after a holiday to find all the toilets converted to ‘gender-neutral’. The case of Keira Bell had received national attention and questions were being raised about the evidence base for the ‘transitioning’ of children.

It was against this backdrop that Brighton Council finally put out for consultation the next update of the toolkit in 2021. This time parents and teachers and other interested parties were to be given the chance to respond to the draft guidance, rather than just people who identified as trans. Together with women from Brighton Sister’s Salon I wrote a document of template responses to the questions and this was shared amongst local parents and schools groups. For the first time Brighton Council was faced with opposition it couldn’t ignore.

You’d have thought.

The updated toolkit kept much of the same extreme gender ideology but attempted to put it in the context of human rights legislation. Stressing the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and recommending that ‘trans-identified’ children be assessed on a case by case basis, there was still no acknowledgement of the rights of girls under the protected characteristic of sex. Wherever possible the buck was passed. For example, recommendations regarding sports stressed consulting the relevant sporting bodies. Such as the FA, with their trans-inclusive guidance written by Gendered Intelligence, and the England Rugby trans-inclusive policy, rather than the highly evidenced and researched policy by World Rugby which identified a 30% greater risk of serious injury to females when playing against males.

Safeguarding advice remained exactly the same:

Being trans is not in itself a safeguarding issue

This is only true if you recognise that a person who identifies as trans has a sex like everyone else and this must be taken into account when it comes to single-sex provision. The toolkit does not acknowledge this fact and therefore in schools which follow its advice, trans is very much a safeguarding issue.

The statistics published along with the consultation report showed that between a quarter and a third of parents strongly disagreed with aspects of the toolkit. Teachers were more in agreement and I assume this is because more of them have been subject to ‘trans-inclusion’ training by Stonewall or Allsorts. It should worry us all that so many teachers uncritically accept an ideology which is anti-science, anti-safeguarding, anti-feminist and anti-women’s rights.

Out in the real world, evidence kept on coming of the detrimental effects of trans ideology on children. The Cass interim review was published in March 2022, In February 2023 Hannah Barnes’ book Time to Think was published, blowing the lid off practices at the Tavistock clinic, sports bodies such as World Athletics and Swim England were bowing to evidence and revising their policies to protect the female category, the government produced new draft guidance for schools, the Cass Review final report was published, PSHE Brighton published the advice on the toolkit by Karon Monaghan KC, and of course there was the Supreme Court judgement which confirmed that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex.

In Brighton Individuals and groups continued to challenge the council on the unlawful schools toolkit, most recently local grassroots group Wall of Silencing, which protested outside Hove Town Hall.

There was a new consultation on the toolkit and version 5 was published earlier this year. At a council meeting in March Councillor Pumm declared

Trans inclusion is a priority for us. Despite the new government school guidance we stand true to the trans inclusion toolkit which has been a real trailblazer and transformed the lives of many gender-questioning children.

Despite this confident assertion, the rollback on advice in the toolkit has been stark. We have gone from: the ‘young trans person’ has a right to use the facilities of their choice, to: decisions should be made on a case by case basis with regard to the wishes of the ‘trans young person’ to: it will need to be considered where it is appropriate to place the ‘trans young person’ having regard to the young people concerned and considering the needs of all other children.

We have gone from:

Pupils and students have the right to access the toilet that corresponds to their gender identity.

To:

There is no entitlement for trans children and young people to access toilets assigned to the opposite legal sex.

This does not mean the toolkit is now legally compliant or that the ideology has been rooted out of schools. For one thing, the original Brighton toolkit is still being used in schools around the country – not all local authorities keep up with the updates, and many still operate under the illusion that ‘it’s Brighton – they must know what they’re doing!’. I still come across the old  ‘scenario 1’ from time to time, when a random parent comes across it for the first time, somewhere in the country, and shares it in shock on Twitter.  

For another thing, the toolkit still accepts uncritically the activist view that some boys are really girls and some girls are really boys. Until the idea of the ‘trans child’ is rooted out of schools guidance altogether, any advice given will be flawed and potentially damaging.

Neither Brighton Council nor Allsorts takes any responsibility for their misrepresentation of the law which has been in schools for over a decade. Parents are still being told that nobody else has complained about the toolkit, yet more parents than ever are complaining about the toolkit.

The latest example I heard of was of a child recently started at secondary school who already had a black mark against his name for accidentally ‘misgendering’ a teacher. Children should never be expected to call an adult by the wrong sex pronouns – apart from issues of freedom of belief there are clearly safeguarding implications if a child is taught to believe that some men are really women.

The toolkit is still steeped in an ideological belief system which is damaging to children, and to their families.

Helen Saxby