“Equality and diversity” have trumped child safeguarding

There should be zero tolerance of this dangerous heresy in schools.

This article, by Molly Kingsley, features in our April print issue, which shall be released soon and may be bought here.

When my eldest was five, she announced that she was a penguin, called Maria. For the next three weeks, she refused to answer to any other name, maintaining that she was a penguin, that she really really was called Maria, and getting very cross with anyone who refused to play along. And then, one day, she forgot, or perhaps just tired of it, and once again we were back to being parents of a five year-old girl, with a vivid imagination.

However, imagine if I told you that instead of laughing and letting the incident slip, my husband and I had decided to indulge her imagination. That we’d bought her a penguin outfit and, with the same authority as we might teach her about factual distinctions between animals in the zoo, or planets in the sky, had taught her that little girls could say a spell and morph into any animal they desired. Perhaps we convinced her school to acquiesce in the fantasy, too, by asking them them to play penguin games with her, instructing classmates to go along with the game, and feeding her fish at lunchtime.

Of course, you’d consider us certifiable, and quite probably expect social services to take quite an interest in our family. Though tongue-in-cheek, this tale of adults failing to gate a child’s natural imagination is, in many ways, a fair analogy for the safeguarding nightmare currently unfurling across Britain's schools, laid bare in the recent Policy Exchange Report – fittingly titled “Asleep at the Wheel” – providing the most evidenced analysis yet of the reach of contested gender ideology throughout Britain’s schools.

My eldest is now a feminine nine year old, and though she’s long forgotten her weeks as a penguin, it appears both she and her younger sister – a feisty six year old with cropped hair and a ferocious passion for football, who refuses to succumb to traditional norms which would see her wrapped in pink dresses and playing with dolls – are, without corrective action, at risk of encountering a cesspit of radical teaching materials every bit as divorced from reality as the notion of penguin-mutating children.

Masquerading as scientific fact, these materials teach kids that there are over one hundred genders; that your gender identity may well be different from your biological sex; that you might be born in the wrong body. Interactive tools present children with a dizzying range of options, some offering an entire ‘galaxy’ of endless genders to chose from, including 'gender flux’, ‘blurgender’, ‘cloudgender’; if there is not yet a watermelon bubblegum gender, it will only be a matter of time. ‘Cis-gender’ (the gender which one was born as, to you and me), as presented in the materials, often is the null set, the boring choice to be avoided by any kid worth their (ze’s?) salt. Little thought appears to have been given to the consequences of encouraging children to locate themselves on a gender spectrum long before they have typically finished – and, in some cases, even started – the sexual development that would guide discovery of who they are.

When one considers the scale of the problem – a stunning 72 per cent of schools are apparently teaching that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex; only 28 per cent of secondary schools are informing parents as soon as a child discloses feelings of gender distress; and 69 per cent appear to be requiring other children to affirm a gender-distressed child’s new identity, again without parental input – it becomes apparent that what has taken place is not so much a lapse in safeguarding protocol, as a dizzying systemic failure. “Our research reveals there to be a safeguarding blind spot when it comes to the issue of sex and gender,” says the report, in what might yet be a tragic understatement.

Children need guardrails as much as they need to explore their desire for individuation, so we have to ask how it has been allowed to get this far. In fact, the safeguarding failure in schools is just one facet of a broader safeguarding collapse that has seen rates of children reporting gender distress soar (in 2018 the UK recorded a 4,400 per cent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments and a shift in the demographics of those reporting with dysphoria from mainly pre-school boys to adolescent girls), and which spans medicine (where concern over the pathways being offered by gender identity services did not translate into action in the form of the Cass Report until arguably a decade too late); schools, (where the issue traces long back with successive governments tolerating and even encouraging this pernicious ideology into schools under the banner of human rights); public discourse (where dissenters on this radicalised issue have been vilified and parents shamed and dismissed); and all of this further fermented by a cultural and social malaise that has allowed ideological views to be rolled out on the tide of political correctness: "Equality and diversity” trumps child safeguarding; ideology is confused with virtue.

Wrapped up in the thousands of individual tragedies to which this dystopia leads – children, en masse, pushed onto an affirmative plan before they’d even kissed another person, taking puberty blockers and living in the long shadow of infertility, celebrating “cutting my kitties off” on TikTok as if this was something others should aspire to achieve – is a greater tragedy. Absent the drivel being fed to our kids in schools, for the vast majority of children gender stereotyping, not dysphoria, would be the more relevant evil: limiting what children believe they can achieve, serving to put them in boxes and fuelling dysphoria issues. Ordinarily, we might combat that issue through positive role-modelling and a collective effort to change social and cultural assumptions about gendered-roles (women’s football, female fire officers, male nurses, stay-at-home dads, et cetera). But extreme gender ID hijacks all of that and nullifies female achievement to boot: any woman who achieves, who likes maths, or football, is atypical; a non-conformist, or worse, a man.

The Education Secretary has promised a review, but one wonders why we need a review with what appears to be overwhelming evidence of serious safeguarding breaches under current laws. There should be zero tolerance of this dangerous heresy in schools.