Recently the Telegraph reported that school children are being taught that Joan of Arc was “non-binary“.
The anachronism is contained in the Who We Are anthology which is published by Collins for use in English lessons at school. It is aimed at 11-14 year olds. The relevant part reads: “Joan of Arc (1412-31) is today considered by some to have been non-binary.”
The term comes from gender ideology. If as a man/woman you don’t feel entirely manly/womanly then you are non-binary. This leads some girls to believe there is a right way to be a girl – and they are not it. Some of these girls end up on a pathway to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and irreversible harm.
The Joan of Arc story is an example of how the teaching of gender ideology in schools has escaped out of the ‘Relationship, Sex and Health Education’ curriculum where it started and into the mainstream. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” – it’s an illustration of Sir Walter Scott’s aphorism, contained in ‘Marmion’, and which school children would be better off learning; deception unleashed is hard to control.
The story also illustrates how it is not just a small number of LGBTQIA cranks who foist harmful pseudoscience upon school children. Collins is part of HarperCollins, considered one of the ‘Big Five’ English language publishers. It has a 200 year-old reputation to protect, but it has come to pass that it openly promotes gender ideology to school children.
Collins sells a three book series for use with children in Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) and covering all of the PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic) and RSHE (Relationship, Sex, and Health Education) curriculums. Encapsulating the PSHE and RSHE requirements of successive governments, the series is a fascinating read. The best of the Western canon, the wisdom of the ages, it is not.
Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” When we decided that our state schools should not teach our children the 2,000 year old exploration of the human condition that is contained in the Christian canon it left us with books like Collins’s Your Choice, Books One, Two and Three. The title does not bode well. The series’ starting point is identity politics; Unit 1 is entitled You and your identity.
The extracts below show how the spread of gender ideology has resulted in even our reputable publishers undermining their reputations for rigour and integrity.
This is confusing nonsense – targeted at 11 year-olds:
This is the discombobulating crankery of about two parents being normalised:
The suggestion below that a child’s gender should “feel right” is pernicious. Gender ideology and its idea that we all have an inner gender identity encourages children down a pathway of introspection. Abigail Shrier in her book Bad Therapy explains how damaging this is; rumination and inner-state fixation are markers for depression. Consider the alternative starting point of Jesus’s instruction “to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself”. Which of these, an outward focus towards others, or inner reflection about your identity, encourages greater curiosity, a more enquiring mind, a more outward focus and generous spirit?
The normalisation of gender ideology crosses into other RSHE subjects – this section below is on “Exploring your sexuality”. How did the human race cope before RSHE? Note the anti-parent push here too.
Here, elementary science is undermined as being a myth. What are children meant to make of this? Who benefits from our confusing them in this way?
Here children are taught that ‘trans women are women’. How did such arrant nonsense make its way into a school textbook published by a mainstream publisher of 200 years standing? Why did no-one in the entire Collins hierarchy say no?
Collins Your Choice Book Two has a two page spread on “Caring for your feet and back”. It has six pages on alcohol use. But it introduces children to gender surgeries and hormone treatment without a note about their high risk and irreversible consequences:
Finally, here is Collins lecturing kids about how to support friends who buy into this pseudoscience.
The complicity of Collins in this promotion of harmful gender gobbledegook illustrates what a serious problem we have. Science and reason are bedrocks of our society. So is the role of the adult to speak the truth and pass on our shared accumulated wisdom to our children. But via gender ideology we are undermining science, defying reason and lying to children. Gender ideology has exposed our human fallibility.
Campaigners against gender ideology being taught to school children have focused their efforts on calling for updated RSHE guidance as well as greater parental visibility of the curriculum. But the Collins books are publicly available, entirely visible and full of gender ideology. And the Joan of Arc material is from an English textbook. We have a wider problem.
For decades we have had a culture where parents have generally trusted schools and the school curriculum. We have dropped children off at the school gate and arrived back at pick-up.
But now those days of trusting negligence are surely over. Instead we need a culture that takes a far greater interest in what we are teaching our children at school. We currently see more reviews and greater public discussion about the new Snow White movie than we do about the books being used to teach our children. If we do read about the school curriculum it is usually only via exposés, for example, the ‘Joan of Arc is non-binary’ story.
Part of the solution needs to involve normalising all of us taking a much greater interest in what we are teaching our children, the cultural legacy we are passing on. We should regularly be reviewing school materials, assigning star ratings, creating public discussion and engagement.
From me, Collins’s Your Choice Books One, Two, and Three gets a bad review and zero stars.
Caroline Ffiske is a Director of Conservatives for Women. Find her on X.
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Is that people need something to believe in or is it that most can’t think for themselves and so need to be told what to think and belive?
I reckon it might be the latter. So if you tear down the traditional church with its values, then another group of people will step in to tell people what to think. Probably the people that tore down the church in the first place.
I think most people including kids instinctively know that this “gender” stuff is nonsense. What seems to be the problem is this need to be seen to be “kind” – often a fake kindness in favour of some manufactured grievance. Maybe that replaces something that has been lost with the fading of religion. I have never been religious but neither do I feel the need to be “kind” in quite the same way. I try to behave decently and do right by my family (above all), but I don’t go round looking for “causes” on which I can shower my benevolence and superiority. Probably I am quite a selfish person, like many, but don’t have much of a problem admitting it.
I agree with Rupert Lowe, as ever, commenting on today’s court ruling. Now imagine if an opposition political party could only swear to abolish all of this crapola throughout society, how many votes ( alongside the whole migration issue ) this would generate;
”This message now needs to be heard loud and clear in classrooms all over the country.
Boys are not girls. Girls are not boys. They are not born in the ‘wrong body’.
Keep this poison away from impressionable young children.
Ban it. Sack anyone pushing it. End of story.”
The very notion of people being born in bodies is pseudoreligious nonsense. From a standpoint of natural sciences alone, bodies are being born and develop a conscious self unique to them over the course of the next couple of decades. This conscious self is a function of the body exactly like the digestive system is also a function of it.
Religions usually claim something else, eg, the Christian notion that the soul is God-given and eternal while the body is mundane and has a finite lifetime, but there’s no scientific support for this. We just know very little about the processes involved here because our knowledge of the complex chemistry of higher lifeforms is generally puny.
I am still disappointed about the Lowe business. I found him a good speaker with sound ideas.
Can the ‘kind’ be kind to those they do not like? And, especially, to those not like themselves?
Vey few of these children would know what the story of the Good Samaritan was.
Indeed. It’s a rather odd sort of “kindness” where you are forced to indulge someone’s delusions as a badge of how “kind” you are. Rather patronising really.
Sex is not decided at birth, it’s determined at conception by God or Fate or whatever.
And it is certainly NOT “assigned” at birth.
Indeed. It is observed at birth and an official record made of what has been observed. Language matters. The enemy like to confuse and mislead by abusing language. We must never use their bullshit terms.
When you go for your 30 week scan, you’re usually asked if you want to know the sex of your baby ….. thus proving that it isn’t decided at birth.
Indeed. I don’t know if they sometimes also test the DNA, when they are doing checks for abnormalities.
You’d think the court ruling today would put paid to this rubbish ( not that it should ever have needed to get to that extent ), or will there be a separate court case to get this toxic guff banned from schools? Meanwhile, more ‘women behaving badly’…Are kids honestly being brainwashed into referring to this disgusting creation as ‘she/her’, possibly on the basis that they have pink hair and how you can apparently choose your own sex in Clown World? Shame on Tim Hanlon and the Mirror;
”A woman smeared faeces on milk bottles and the walls of a nursery and climbed in clinical waste bins for “comfort”, a court heard. Abbi Taylor must have ‘horrified parents’, said a judge at Newcastle Crown Court.
The 46-year-old, from Newmarket Walk, South Shields, South Tyneside, who the court heard identifies and was referred to by all in court as a woman, has pleaded guilty to three counts of dumping bags of toxic materials – nappies containing human waste – at nurseries in the local area.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woman-smeared-faeces-over-nursery-35056718
Sexual deviant, obviously.
If there were one person to epitomize the term ‘female traitor’ it is this deranged bint, because she would have totally welcomed that sicko ( along with all the other perverts and predators cosplaying women ) into the female changing rooms. Nasty, demented, dangerous, back-stabbing woman;
https://x.com/RoisinMichaux/status/1912528443931033636
Female Dementors like her are part of the problem, to put it mildly, and the fact she’s a practicing doctor..FFS;
”Ruining our NHS! Nurses should care, NOT HATE!
This isn’t about ‘dignity’, this is discrimination and it’s happening inside our NHS.”
https://x.com/HelenWebberley/status/1910662696028029399
Take it from me, Kids (being much nearer the end than the beginning), life is one long transition after another through the Seven Ages of Man and Woman.
Teenage years remembered decades later as a strange mixture of angst, exhilaration and confusion, but at least we were spared latterday witch doctors and witchfinder generals, preaching normality as abnormality and vice-versa.
Make the most of your teenage years while you can – they won’t be coming round again. Before you know where you are, you’ll be on the waiting list for hernia op, hearing aids and hip replacement.
Have fun!
Love from Grandad
People don’t understand what this is really about. If you look at the obscenities listed in the above article – there is an attempt at a prizing away from a child of any sense of an absolute. If you do that to a child then what possible future can there be for their spirit? Look at their use of language they have no regard for the aesthetic and that is often a big giveway just like a demon will often give off a stench. As Hemingway said, some people give off evil in the same way that horses give off breeding.
If some website administrator is reading this, will you ffs stop asking me to login every week. I’ve done it 2x today and had to regenerate the password each time.
Logins to this site sometimes fail for unknown reasons. The solution is to retry. Immediate retry has always worked for me so far despite my password has been declared invalid on a first attempt numerous times.
An interesting set of screenshots. One of the fundamental but unspoken things in them is their utter nihilism, a nihilism which expresses the madleft idea that Western society (i.e. white society) and its morality, expectations and norms, represents an appalling and catastrophic danger to the young. From this follows the insane idea that “to save” the young we have to abolish our society and replace it with the social equivalent of a blank slate.
It’s a very bad idea to tell small children about this sort of thing. Sub 11 or 12 you have no notion of sexual attraction: it only becomes manifest in adolescence when oestrogen or testosterone invade your body in industrial quantities. But 10% or so of us will be homosexual. If you’ve implanted the idea that you’re in the wrong body, then those people who might be happily homosexual could well, mistakenly, demand surgical reassignment. Expensive, stupid, tragic and probably irreversible. Don’t put ideas in kids’ heads which could be detrimental.
This idea of people having a set sexuality is a very new one. I mean if I were in ancient Greece practicing wrestling in the afternoon and then an evening philosophical symposium with lots of drink then I might be persuaded into buggery afterwards. I think we have a profoundly misguided image of the nature of the mind and soul. I would say to the overseer, look at the forced stasis that you have brought about in terms of the perception of mind. We are or were genuinely put into some sort of shackles that held us back and it has been our job to claw it back. On a worldly level the British state has exerted strong scientifically-crafted propaganda on its subjects for over a hundred years. Did we manage to dodge them or are we just unwitting dupes on the other side?
The solution is to abolish PSHE and RSHE and whatever other acronym might have been used to introduce this pseudo-subjects into the curriculum altogether. The state aka the UN(!) has no business teaching people about proper relationships, proper sex and proper behaviour in general (“health”). There are no objective truths in either pseudo-field, just people with strongly held opinions about all of them who seek access to schoolchildren to manufacture support for them.
There was a time when any discussion of sex was considered highly improper. We perhaps shouldn’t go all the way back there but we should certainly stop people who want to blather about sex (and nothing but sex) in front of really young children (kindergarten onwards) from doing so.
I’m sorry. I’m beyond words.
About 5 years ago I awoke (woke?) in a different universe. Been trapped in this bankrupt Police State ever since.
Please God, beam me back to the place where I belong,
All of this should be welcomed in the sense that if you accept that we live in apocalyptic times then this means the lifting of the veil on everything. All of the nastiness shows itself. This is the virtue of our time it is our job to deal with it with wisdom.
Why do you think that they are getting themselves impregnated with the first chancer that comes along? Because they sense that the end is near and they need to drop one before it is too late.You see it in other animal species just before a catastrophe. They aren’t sluts they are doing what they have been programmed to do.
Every totalitarian society operates on the basis that children are far too important to be left to the care of their parents.
The society organised by the system of governance known as diversity requires everyone to act as an administrator of its Utopian objectives. The children most certainly cannot be left to become like their parents who may have ‘regressive’ ideas on male-female relationships, immigration or whatever.
The ‘traditional’ family being the main rival to state power since within it children can be brought up with values and loyalties that are prior to and separate from those given to the state. Or in the present case, to the system of diversity.
In one of the examples given here, the children are told, “Fortunately you live in a time when this (same sex sexual love) is pretty okay. There’s far more freedom to be who you are than in the past.” In other words, history is moving inexorably in the right direction from bad to good. The children only have to align themselves with it for benefits to be theirs. And as non-straight people they are a cut above the regressive types; a special people whose presence will improve the rest of humanity.
Such is the system of diversity. But it needs administrators to operate it. And this publisher is become one of those. Not only they but everyone has to act as such. As another extract says, “DON’T dismiss it as a phase…And DON’T try to change… them” (when a friend ‘comes out’ as trans).
In other words, don’t impede the system of diversity by challenging it; administer it to your friend who is becoming another administrator, and do so without innovating. Furthermore, in the extract the assertion is made, “It’s likely that your friend has thought long and hard about coming out.” The thought, “Have they?”, isn’t to cross your mind. After all, as the extract tells you, it’s you that is confused, not they.
They will need to rewrite after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Now the Supreme Court has ruled, it would appear that statements in these books contravene the law, and therefore the publishers could be taken to court if they continue to promote and sell them. The same would apply to anyone using them as educational material. If not, why not?