- Family and Sexual Ethics. Christian Concern.
Carys Moseley looks at the recent controversy over Altrincham Grammar School for Girls’ decision to stop referring to its students as ‘girls’.
There has been a renewed push by transgender activists from the very start of 2018 given the rising tide of public concern last year at the implementation of policies to normalise transgenderism. Make no mistake about it, the transgender movement is a movement with a mission. Transgender activists are not just asking for the right to ‘be themselves’ or to ‘self-expression’, but are determined to rewrite the framework of reality for the whole of society. This campaigning continues apace in schools.
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls stops calling girls ‘girls’
This week it emerged that Altrincham Grammar School for Girls has started using gender-neutral language when referring to students, and stopped using the word ‘girls’ for fear of offending transgender students. The Manchester Evening News discovered that it was ‘training’ by an unspecified organisation that prompted this. This is curious because only a few months ago Joshua Sutcliffe was dismissed from Cherwell School in Oxford for ‘misgendering’ a female pupilwho identified as a boy when he addressed a group of which she was a member as ‘girls’. Did Altrincham School cave into the advice for gender-neutral language in order to avoid being sued by activist students or former students?
Former student demands that Altrincham Grammar School for Girls change its name
Regarding the same story, the BBC reported that a former student who doesn’t want to be known as a girl is demanding that the school drop ‘girls’ from its nameto include transgender pupils. In an astonishing statement this student told the BBC that keeping ‘girls’ in the school name “is a bit like putting Blu Tack on the boat after it is already sinking" - as if the word ‘girls’ were as trivial as blu tack. This really is taking insult and misogyny to a new level.
The psychological definition of being male or female is the problem
The very fact that this former student wants the school to change its name reveals the muddled thinking of transgender activism. For in changing its name the school wouldn’t change the fact that it only accepts biologically female pupils, because sex is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. What is revealed here is the clash between the normal biological definition of being female and the transgender definition, which is that ‘gender identity’ is ‘what is inside your head’, i.e. whether you think that you are psychologically male or female (or not).
The Blair government didn’t bother assessing the impact on children
The split definition of sex as both biological and psychological goes back to transsexual rights activism at the European Court of Human Rights in the 1990s as I have previously explained. When the United Kingdom lost a case at the Court, Tony Blair’s New Labour government decided to pass the Gender Recognition Act. The Final Regulatory Impact Assessmentconducted by the Department of Constitutional Affairs did not bother considering the impact that introducing this split definition of sex would have on institutions (except for administrative costs), or on adolescents. Although the age of gender reassignment (or ‘sex-change’) was fixed at 18 in the Act, anybody asking for this had to have already lived as a member of the opposite sex/gender for two years.
The negative effects of the Equality Act 2010
Unlike the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act (which came into force in 2010) does not stipulate a lower age-limit for gender reassignment. By now it should be clear that activists have taken advantage of this to assume that there is no legal lower age-limit, despite the fact that the relevant clause in the Gender Recognition Act has never been repealed. This is precisely why it is of great concern that Question 6 of the Scottish Government consultationon reviewing the Act asks whether the age for gender recognition should be lowered below 16 in Scotland. This raises the question as to whether the UK government harbours similar plans.
Targeting top girls’ schools is targeting tomorrow’s elites
It is rather concerning that the Manchester Evening News did not reveal the name of the organisation which provided the ‘training’ on transgender issues for Altrincham Grammar School for Girls. There are questions to be asked here as to whether or not the school was targeted. This is because just before Christmas the school was named the sixth top state school in the North-West of Englandby Parent Power, the Sunday Times Schools Guide 2018. The Sunday Times currently has an editorial stance that is opposed to liberalising the Gender Recognition Act, something that has annoyed transgender activists a great deal.
Since 2011/2012 most children and adolescents referred to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman Clinicin London have been girls who had problems with being girls. Hence it is no surprise that activists are targeting girls’ schools with ‘training’.
The targeting of top schools by transgender activists is no accident: it is aimed at tomorrow’s elite and its purpose is to indoctrinate young people in transgender ideology so that it is the respectable norm, with all opposition stigmatised as ‘hate speech’.
Single-sex institutions need to stand up to the transgender movement
Single-sex institutions and organisations of all kinds need to stop being passive in the face of this relentless drive to efface the reality of male and female from institutions. Before Christmas, women’s groups made the case in the House of Commons for amending the Equality Act 2010 so that service users of single-sex services and facilities would be allowed to have a say in who else uses them. This would be a welcome move as it would strengthen the statutory grounds for keeping single-sex schools as they are. This is also important for preserving parents’ and students’ choices in the education system.
What children and teenagers actually need
The transgender movement is demanding the erasure of perfectly normal, even necessary words like ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ because transgender people hate belonging to their actual sex. If this were their only problem, and if successive governments had addressed it as such, mental health professionals would be treating it as a form of self-harm. Instead what is happening is that activists are demanding that none of us are referred to according to our sex, because this reminds them on a daily basis that they really belong to one sex and not the other.
Teenagers have many and varied needs, and these days foremost among them is being able to develop and mature as members of their sex. The institutions and organisations to which they belong need to display and reflect the reality of their sex in a manner that encourages them to belong unselfconsciously with dignity.
