How Does Gender Ideology End Up Everywhere?

Late last year, the Department of Health and Social Care updated the official documents for reporting the details surrounding the death of a child.

What happened shows how there is no sacrosanct corner out of bounds for the promotion of gender ideology.

According to the newly updated ‘Child death reporting form’, the three most important things you need to know about a child who has died are his or her age, sex and gender identity.

Should we care? This is data gathering, not the front line of the gender debate, encroaching on women’s single sex spaces or prescribing irreversible drugs to school children.

We should care, because it illustrates the extraordinary reach of gender ideology. This ideology undermines science and the truth – foundations of our society. If we roll out quackery, unchallenged and everywhere, we will eventually lose sight of the truth.

Gender ideology isn’t even harmless quackery like star signs. It causes terrible harm. We actually lie to our children in schools when we tell them they have an inner gender identity. Children are predisposed to believe adults. We breach a duty of trust and care when we lie to them – and we are doing that at a policy level in our schools right now. When some of those children go down a pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and body-modification surgeries they are harmed for life. We’re actively promoting this harm, letting it roll out everywhere.

How does it happen? Case studies are instructive.

Via a Parliamentary question in December, Baroness Hayter asked for the rationale for the change to child death reporting. She received a blow-off from Baroness Merron. “This was to capture the language used by young people and their families to improve system learning and to support the prevention of future deaths.”

Sorry but “capturing the language of young people and their families” will not “improve systems learning and support the prevention of future deaths”. The fact that our civil service and a Baroness were willing to publish such a non-sequitur bodes ill.

I tried an FOI. The ‘National Child Mortality Database Programme’ (NCMDP) which collects and manages these data operates out of Bristol University.

Here are my questions:

The forms for reporting a child’s death have been recently updated to include a question about a child’s gender identity. Please see here.

1) Please can you send me any policy or positioning papers that you authored or received, which argue for/against, or set out the rationale, for this change to the relevant forms.

2) Please send me all emails received by or sent within the department that discuss changes to the Child death notification form and the Child death reporting form, relating to asking an additional question about a child’s gender identity.

3) Please send me any information you have about the final rationale for making this change, including where the original request or suggestion for the change came from, and who signed it off, along with justifying logic.

The short answer to how gender ideology gets embedded across our systems can be found in one (bonkers) email. Here it is:

That was it. Follow-on policy papers, rationale, justifying logic? No. “FOI Q1. The University does not hold any policy or positioning papers falling within the scope of your request.” “FOI Q3. The University does not hold any further information beyond the attached [emails] falling within the scope of your request.”

Here is what followed the email. First, this is the old Child Death Reporting Form capturing a ‘discussion by comment box’.

Then there is a “future annual updates log” which records changes and captures rationale. First, “sex” is changed to “sex registered at birth” – implying it can change! It might be worth trying to see the referenced “extended discussions”.

Then the gender identity question is added with the explanation being the email above. We also witness “non-binary” overriding “in some other way”, exemplifying how our institutions are governed by ludicrous passing fads. What will come next and are previous versions transphobic?

There is an interesting email that records the activity in response to my FOI:

This exchange confirms we’re not missing anything. One email and “someone from NHSE who was to do with social care (I can’t remember name)” are all it takes to remove science and embed ideology deep into our systems.

How can we undo all this if we ever have the political will? Abolishing quangos and bringing them back under democratic control will help. But it will also take something like Trump’s Executive Orders. Our civil servants must be tasked with eradicating gender ideology from our systems wherever they find it.

Caroline Ffiske is a Director of Conservatives for Women. Find her on X.