Thank you for contacting me about the Department for Education's draft guidance on how schools should respond to gender-questioning children.
My position has been consistent and clear: biological sex is an immutable fact, and that has consequences for society and for policy, especially for women and girls.
While I broadly welcome the draft guidance, I feel that it can be tightened up in a number of respects. I concentrate below on one aspect in which the guidance needs strengthening, namely, social transitioning.
I welcome the largely unambiguous insistence that children must be separated by biological sex in the clearest contexts in which safeguarding is an issue, namely, toilets, changing rooms and sports. In these areas, the sex-based rights of girls and women must be paramount to ensure privacy, dignity, fairness and safety. Good too is the recognition that gender ideology is a contested set of beliefs which no-one should be compelled to follow by, for example, being obliged to use the wrong sex pronouns.
The proposed measures on ensuring that parents are informed by schools of any instances of children asking to change gender and any responses schools propose to make are especially welcome. That this matter is, first and foremost, a matter for the family must be the default assumption.
On social transition, on the other hand, too many loopholes remain. The draft guidance's recognition that social transition is not a neutral process and can 'affirm' ideas and feelings that, if dealt with differently, are likely to dissolve naturally, is sensible in itself. However, the beneficial effect is undermined by the vagueness of the criteria under which headteachers may permit social transitioning. One example is this: 'the benefit to the individual child outweighs the impact on the school community'. This leaves too much open to subjective interpretation, especially in schools where trans rights activists, often supported by the unions, have a lot of influence. I would like to see the guidance strengthened by its incorporating the common sense assumptions that no child can change sex, and that no child is born in the wrong body (he or she would not have been born otherwise).
It may well be that the law, including the Equality Act, needs to change so that the aims of this guidance can be realised on the ground. Among those aims must be the replacement of the default 'affirmative' model of response to gender-questioning children with a more rounded, balanced and compassionate view (because not driven by ideology) that such questioning usually disappears during puberty, that it can be a manifestation of other issues including autism, trauma, online exploitation and anti-gay bullying, and that it is often a product of social contagion.
The guidance is a good start. I look forward to the Department for Education's response to the consultation.
Thank you again for taking the time to write to me.
Craig Whittaker MP
April 2024.