We have sent the following letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak:
Dear Prime Minister
Following the independent Cass review, NHS England is radically revising its approach to gender-distressed children and young people, having recognised that “gender affirmation” lacked a solid evidence base and in fact could cause grave harms. But this does not address the problem that is leading to soaring numbers of children developing gender distress and demanding to “socially transition” while at school.
The government has been complicit in creating this distress by allowing gender-identity ideology into schools and failing to provide schools with clear guidance on the law concerning sex and transgender identity. As a result, many schools are encouraging children to feel disconnected from their bodies and to imagine that they can be the opposite sex. This is eroding girls’ rights and protections, as well as undermining safeguarding for all children. And in failing to stop this promotion of an unscientific and harmful ideology in schools, the government bears some responsibility for the skyrocketing numbers of children arriving at gender clinics demanding puberty blockers and hormones.
The Department for Education must now issue strong, unequivocal guidance to schools making clear that they cannot lawfully accommodate “social transition” by children. That is, they cannot treat any child as if they are, as a matter of fact, a member of the opposite sex. Nor can they insist that the entire school community refers to any child as a member of the opposite sex.
Gender-distressed children need compassion and support, and where appropriate, should be referred to the local CAMHS service. But the only way that a school can treat both them and their classmates fairly and safely is by recognising everyone’s sex as an immutable and material fact. Schools must act in the best interests of all pupils, and they cannot do this while promising to uphold a lie.
If the government delays, practice in schools and gender clinics will further diverge. We can expect to see more and more children developing gender distress at school, and it will fall to gender clinics to try to help them. But that is too late to solve the problem. The government must act immediately to protect children.
We include two testimonials from parents that illustrate the harm done to children by social transition in school.
David Bell, retired consultant psychiatrist and former Governor, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
Stephanie Davies-Arai BEM, founder of Transgender Trend
Marcus Evans, psychoanalyst and former psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
Susan Evans, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and former clinical nurse at the Gender Identity Development Service, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
Az Hakeem, consultant psychiatrist, psychotherapist and former head of the adult gender dysphoria psychotherapy service at the Portman Clinic
Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist and co-founder of Genspect
Parent testimonials
A parent whose daughter began questioning her gender identity at a state secondary in England five years ago asked us to send you this message:
“There is a lot of naivety in school leadership when it comes to gender-questioning children. Schools think they are being progressive, but they have no idea how much damage they are doing to children and their families. When the social transition of a child at school is kept from parents, it reinforces the idea in the child’s mind that telling their parents about what’s going on will lead to them being rejected. My daughter was terrified that this would happen (I can assure you, it never would).
“Another child at my daughter’s school announced a change in their gender identity, and was given a special assembly to celebrate. The government must put an end to this naivety in its schools guidance. Social transition in schools is not harmless. It has put many children, including my own, on a fast track to irreversible medical treatment.”
Another parent, whose son began questioning his gender at a private school in England two years ago, and who she now fears will soon undergo irreversible surgery after extended use of cross-sex hormones, asked us to include this message:
“Social transitioning needs to be ruled out in the government’s new schools guidance. It was in school that my son was fêted and treated as special when he said he was trans, and thus ‘really a girl’, all because the school had no idea what it was doing and took its cue from transactivist groups. I beg the Prime Minister to listen to the devastation of parents who have seen their children funnelled from social transition to medical transition by their school.”
This is happening on your watch Prime Minister.
Genital and chemical mutilation.
This is a Cult and parents and children need you to take it 👇👇👇 NOW!!!!
Sex is binary and immutable in human beings and has profound consequences in terms of risks, rights, health and safety. The tiny number of people with disorders of sexual development, should be dealt with sympathetically on a case by case basis but all can be identified as having been on a clear pathway to either being male or female.
Sex stereotypes should always be challenged and equality of opportunity upheld .
Those disassociating from their bodies should always be treated compassionately but never lied to.
Sex denialism is profoundly harmful, homophobic and misogynistic and a huge threat to all sex based safeguarding, particularly for women and the same sex attracted. It should have no place in our school system apart from being an issue to discuss – much the same as supernational belief or cults.
Risk assessment is based on empirical evidence and accurate, objectively appraised cost/benefit analysis. All of which requires precise language based on objectively defined reality. Without it, our decision making can lead to appallingly harmful outcomes.
Especially for women, children and vulnerable adults. And of course, in education and health.
We are caught up in a vast, physician/therapist/ teacher assisted, reality denying, self harm social contagion facilitated and protected by the state, particularly in health and education. This is not a civil rights issue, it is a crime scene of unimaginable proportions.
Involving children.
The only problem I have with this letter is that while it acknowledges the “gender affirmation” approach “erod[es] girls’ rights and protections”, it doesn’t seem to express concern that schools treating children differently from each other when there is no physiological reason, placing expectations of behaviour on children because of their biological sex, enforcing different uniform and dress codes – is one of the root causes of the whole gender-identity issue. Often gender-dysphoric people will reference their desires to appear like the other sex. If we had gender-neutral uniforms and rules about wearing make-up , rules about hair length – in short, try to remove some of the most obviously arbitrary distinctions with which we identify children by sex and force them into gender identities – we could begin to address the root of the problem. I appreciate this is a big task, but I don’t think changing the attitudes toward kids who have decided they ought to be the other sex without changing a lot of the cultural pressures that push them into dysphoria will be effective.
I wholeheartedly agree that gender affirming should not be within the remit of schools and that it is damaging to tell children that they have been born in the wrong body.
Please read the heart-rending testimonies of Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, a US-based group: http://www.Pitt.substack.com. They have just published a book, a collection of accounts. Children bamboozled by activists and slipping away from their desperately worried parents. The destruction extends much further: to siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents. GI ideology is a force destroying families and society. I speak as a Transwidow, the abandoned wife of a now dead Transsexual man.
We need the government in the U.S. to change this very dangerous trend as well. The transactivists are using our children to create their own army. Everyone needs to wake up because this is getting way out of hand. When parents intervene with this ideology and dispute it, children think they know best because that’s what they are being taught. Parents rights are getting taken away and we are losing our kids to irreversible damage that some of us parents are trying to prevent. It’s a sad world we live in right now and very scary. I do hope this dangerous trend/cult goes away very soon. And before I get people calling me a anti trans person I have no problem with the way adults live their lives but when it comes to them effecting my children that’s where the problem lies.