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The government has published new draft schools guidance on ‘gender questioning children.’ The new draft guidance takes away an important protection from the previous government’s draft guidance, which banned the use of wrong sex pronouns in primary schools. The new guidance says socially transitioning a child in primary school is allowed, although it emphasises caution, says it should be discussed with parents and doctors and should happen only very rarely. This makes it sound ‘reasonable’ and ‘middle ground.’

But to lie and mislead any child about something as fundamental as their sex is particularly harmful when they are this young, and should be regarded as a serious breach of safeguarding duties. Not only does the new guidance treat it as an option for teachers, they have embedded the concept in the government’s statutory safeguarding guidance Keeping Children Safe in Education, where the new guidance is placed.

Socially transitioning a child in primary school is not a neutral act; it has serious consequences and risks for all children in the school.

The idea that there is a ‘really tiny number’ of children who will have a longstanding ‘trans’ identity has been enough to continue both the medical experiment on children, in the form of the puberty blockers trial, AND the social experiment on children in schools, in the form of social transition. They are inextricably connected. Through this latest guidance, the school to clinic pipeline is not dismantled, but assured. The idea should be rejected as a basis for both the provision of puberty blockers and the treatment of children in schools.  

There are comparable safeguarding and developmental reasons for not socially transitioning teenagers, corresponding to their developmental stage. But it is particularly cruel to lie to children of primary age because it addresses normal, completely innocent childhood behaviour and pathologises it. In the past, it was not that uncommon to hear stories of one boy in a primary school who played with girls, enjoyed wearing tutus and who everyone called ‘Lily.’ Teachers may have indulged him in ‘being a girl’ as they would in any other case of fantasy play.

This was not labelled ‘social transition’; everyone knew the child’s sex and nobody pretended or believed a boy was really in fact a girl and would grow up to be a woman. Although gender stereotypes were supposedly enforced more than they are today, children were generally allowed to go through their phases, because the adults knew they were children. Only if there were signs of distress, behavioural problems or inappropriate behaviour would it be considered that something else might be going on, such as trauma or sexual abuse.

Socially transitioning a child of this age is a completely different thing. It can only be built on the idea of ‘being trans.’ The most unlikely adult outcome now informs the way such a child is viewed: not as a child doing childhood things, but as a potential future adult ‘trans person.’ Treating a child on the assumption of future adult outcomes is what is termed ‘adultification’ of the child. It is a form of emotional abuse.

Dr Hilary Cass, speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, said:

“there are a tiny number of people who will never be comfortable in their – with their biological sex – the gender associated with their biological sex, and for them a medical pathway is the only way they’re going to live their life comfortably, and we don’t understand why that is, but we have to try and help those people thrive as much as the young people who are going to grow out of this.”

It is the wrong premise to start from. A person can only know how they want to live their life once they have reached adult maturity. The way one lives one’s life is a decision only adults can make, children are not able to decide things on behalf of  their future adult selves.

When asked about how many children there are ‘for whom this is going to be a lifelong issue’ Cass replied “So I think it’s probably a really tiny number.” 

There is no way to tell in advance which children will turn out to be part of this ‘really tiny number.’ Nobody can predict the future; we can’t know how a child will develop. Every child transitioned in primary school represents an unacceptable, serious risk to that child’s health and future happiness.

What the evidence does show is that ‘gender affirmation’ and social transition will create more of these children. Immediately a child is ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex a process is started which makes it as difficult as possible for that child to grow out of a childhood phase. The ‘need’ for puberty blockers is created as the child reaches puberty and reality hits.

Dr Cass admits that social transition risks ‘getting a child very fixed in a certain way of being too early’ and that in doing this ‘you are not allowing them to develop and work it out.’ An approach that does not allow children to develop, but interferes experimentally and profoundly with their development, should be rejected outright, no exceptions.

This is also applicable to teenagers, but especially so in the magical, unconscious stage of early childhood when a child has not yet reached the developmental stage of distinguishing reality from fantasy, nor the understanding that sex is a stable characteristic that cannot be changed.

Dr Cass said something very revealing in her interview with Laura Kuenssberg:

“Left to their own devices, because we didn’t have hormone treatments and the internet and all the rest then, most of them grew out of it and became gay men”

This is an admission that adult interference causes harm. And the group most at risk is little boys who would grow up to be gay men if left alone. Is it really worth the risk, to even one child, on the basis of a very rare outcome, when we know that the overwhelming majority of these children will grow out of it if allowed to develop naturally, and that most will turn out to be gay, not trans? Surely the answer is to support children but leave them to their own devices as much as possible?

When asked about socially transitioning children in schools Dr Cass said this:

“I think it should be rare and particularly rare in prepubertal children. And I think the guidance does a good job in explaining that you have to be particularly careful about young children, because if they socially transition too early, we think they can get locked onto a trajectory that may not have been the correct natural trajectory for them. So super caution with the very young children.”

What Cass terms as ‘not the correct trajectory for them’, we would argue is a fundamentally harmful trajectory for any child, one which leads to a lifetime as a medical patient. There is no way to decide, in retrospect, that it was the ‘right trajectory’ as the alternative has been taken away and the child was never given the chance to experience it. It is all the child knows. A psychologist writes inA childhood is not reversible:

“A child who grows up being told they are a boy whilst knowing they are a girl will only have that experience. They can’t go back and do it again.”

A paper by De Vries (2012) warns of the danger that a young child who is ‘affirmed’ may not understand the concept of natal sex, nor the serious consequences of this pathway:

Another reason we recommend against early transitions is that some children who have done so (sometimes as preschoolers) barely realize that they are of the other natal sex. They develop a sense of reality so different from their physical reality that acceptance of the multiple and protracted treatments they will later need is made unnecessarily difficult. Parents, too, who go along with this, often do not realize that they contribute to their child’s lack of awareness of these consequences.

Note that in this statement, medical intervention is recognised as the inevitable end-point once a child is started on the transition pathway by adults. A child of this age will have the magical belief that a doctor will give them some medicine to make their body into the opposite sex body when they grow up. They have no idea of what Cass described as ‘quite intensive medical treatments and sometimes quite brutal surgeries.’

The psychological harm caused by growing up, from the most formative years, completely divorced from the reality of your own human body has not been measured.

The social experiment is on all children. For every child in the school, reality is disrupted and a key developmental stage is disturbed when adults tell them every day that little Johnny is a girl. The new government draft guidance makes no concession to the impact this will have on other children, within a child-centred learning environment, where the message that sex is changeable will be absorbed unconsciously and in some cases cause great confusion or distress.

“Stealing the children’s innocence. They can’t get it back” was how one parent described it in this disturbing article about the social transition in primary school of one boy and the devastating impact on the girls in his friendship circle.

‘Social transition’ of children should be described honestly as a potentially irreversible intervention for a very young child and a developmental disruption of childhood for all other children in the school. Government statutory schools guidance should recognise that children are not adults and say no to the social transition of children in primary schools, no exceptions.

You can respond to the government public consultation here. Deadline is 22 Apr 2026.