Two 14 year-old girls have written an open letter to the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education draft transgender schools guidance. The girls have to remain anonymous for reasons that will become clear by reading their letter. The letter was first published on the website of the excellent Transgender Trend, whose motto is “No child is born in the wrong body”. You can donate here.
Dear Gillian Keegan
With the release of the Department for Education’s transgender guidance quickly approaching, we – two 14 year-old girls in separate secondary schools – want to contribute our thoughts to the discussion. There is a lack of student voices on this issue and it’s vital to have some perspective of what it’s like in a school environment where dissenting voices are stifled, extreme ideologies are presented as fact and girls are injured by boys in mixed-sex sport.
Schools are meant to be politically neutral; differences in thoughts and opinions should be encouraged and fostered, not shouted down and censored. There is a growing atmosphere of fear around this topic and many students, including us, are frightened to speak out openly due to the threat of ostracisation and bullying from students who adopt the authoritarian dogma of gender ideology. In our schools, opposition to this extreme theory is met with vitriol and restrictions on speech – in one of our schools, a student was discouraged from covering the topic of sport from a critical lens by a teacher and the discussion was branded too “triggering”, whilst a different student who was talking about the topic from a positive view was allowed.
It is vital that teachers present political topics in a neutral manner that allows differing viewpoints to be accepted. When controversial political ideologies are presented as absolute fact by teachers, whom students are meant to trust, this eliminates all chance of discussion, all chance of a nuanced debate. The concept of a ‘gender identity’ is a contested theory and it is not appropriate to present this ideology as absolute fact in classrooms. We urge the Education Secretary to construct an atmosphere of tolerance and respect by ensuring political neutrality is upheld in classrooms. By this, we ask for ‘gender identity’ not to be presented as unopposed fact. Teachers are required to be politically neutral in schools, so why is there a double standard when it comes to the transgender issue?
We’ve both – along with 72% of students from other schools across the U.K., according to Policy Exchange – had lessons on gender ideology in schools and every time it was presented as the complete truth. In schools across the country, kids like us are being told that girls can have penises, that humans can change sex, that there are seventy-two ‘genders’, that ‘gender identity’ is innate and unchangeable, despite NHS guidance stating that children who identity as ‘transgender’ may be going through a phase. This must stop, and if students are to be taught about ‘gender identity’, it must be presented in a neutral manner that specifies that this is a belief system, not fact.
