In 2019 the Conservative government introduced a requirement that schools teach children about the concepts within gender ideology via new Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) Guidance.
What has happened over the following years is a case study in how complex systems respond to quackery. The two main drivers of the systems response were financial incentives and an axe to grind.
Easy money incentivised any number of grifters to gear up with a silly story to flog to school children. It wasn’t difficult because with no science or evidence behind the idea of gender ideology you can just make stuff up. So people did.
Those with an axe to grind, the real gender ideologues, began to lay it on ever more thickly. Not just a vulnerable few, but before long ‘everyone’ had an inner gender identity. Pansexual, aromantic, greysexual flags flourished. New remembrance events were invented – the most important being IDAHOBIT (May 17th).
The third ingredient that has enabled gender quackery to flourish in schools has been invisibility. Before the advent of ‘Ed-Tech’, embedding it would not have been so easy. Education technology has driven a ‘worksheet’ approach to curriculum delivery whereby teachers in a hurry can download a few slides from online curriculum resource providers. In turn, these providers generally rely on subscriptions to make money. The result is that their worksheets are necessarily hidden from public view as part of the business model. The resulting public invisibility that is an inbuilt part of the model has been a disaster for resource and curriculum quality and accuracy. The whole approach and its impact needs to be exposed and challenged at a policy level.
Campaigners against teaching children gender ideology at school have generally adopted a two-pronged approach. They have called for a revision to the RSHE guidance to remove the concept of gender identity from the curriculum. And they have campaigned for resource visibility on the assumption that this will bring derision and anger down on the heads of those promoting quackery to school children.
Therefore it was interesting to be sent by a parent an example of a school hosting a great deal of its RSHE curriculum on its website, including its approach to gender ideology. The school is Chelmsford County High School for Girls – a “highly selective state grammar school for girls” where “academic standards are extremely high”.
The relevant materials are intended for Year 8 girls aged 12 to 13. It is interesting that the school is not embarrassed by them and also that parents have presumably not kicked up a fuss. In situ, being used by a school, they are evidence of the low quality and awful quackery that is flourishing in this area. They are also evidence that simply creating visibility does not solve the problem.
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall to see a teacher coping with this:
The next slide illustrates the dreadful quality of so much of this material, clip art, clashing colours – and what does it actually mean? That we are all partly male and partly female? That is so grotesquely narrowing and essentialising. And even then – being a man with a pink leg? A woman with a blue arm? We’re not really meant to make sense of it. It really is just stupidity being shown to school children.
Next up is more grotesque essentialising and stereotyping. Girls, unless they identify as boys, should feel their female/woman/girl-ness as part of a so-called gender identity – and vice versa. But people don’t feel like this. We are confusing and lying to children.
This is also lying to children:
All credit to Chelmsford County High School for displaying this material. It is such poor quality and flagrant pseudoscience that it does make you wonder about the school’s wider commitment to accuracy, quality, truth-telling and safeguarding.
But it also makes clear that the problem comes back to the Government and its curriculum guidance. The bottom line is that the Government told schools to teach children pseudoscience. Schools responded. Grifters grifted. Our shared commitment to teaching children the truth in the face of an instruction not to has been publicly tested.
So now schools need a new instruction. The RSHE Guidance needs to be revised. Children should not be taught about the concept of gender identity in schools. Or if they are, it should only be as a case study on quackery. Quackery harms – and state-sanctioned quackery harms the most.
Caroline Ffiske is a Director of Conservatives for Women. Find her on X.
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IDAHOB(B)IT? What would Tolkien say?
Is IDAHOBIT a bit of the state of Idaho in the USA?
“…the Conservative government introduced a requirement that schools teach children about the concepts within gender ideology via new Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) Guidance.” emphasis mine
Huh? How can it be required to follow guidance?
The requirement refers to schools having to teach it. The guidance refers to the children it’s taught to. Schools are required to teach it, the children are not required to believe or practice it.
Well spotted
Makes no sense to me
Mentally ill retards, perverts and criminals.
Abuse, toxify, inject poisons, castrate, confuse and confound what needs to be left alone, and which was never a problem – 2 gender normalcy.
This ‘industry’ of quacks, idiots, perverts, pedos and castrators should be put into a large dumpster and set on fire.
The kids simply need to walk out of all such lessons and their parents – if any have a brain – need to support them.
End Queer-Trans Fascism.
Make Being a Teenager Normal Again.
No, it’s not pseudoscience.
Something much much worse.
Demonic abuse.
Sad – it used to be a good school when my daughters didn’t get enough marks in the 11+ to go there.
As it is, the bright and highly educated teachers, and notably the very bright and highly highly educated head teacher, are willing to adopt teaching materials free of any evidence base, and to impose it on the brightest girls in Essex.
It would be nice to think the bright girls would laugh at it… but then remember those bright teachers who’ve swallowed it even without the influence of authority figures.
Tomorrow’s doctors, novelists and politicians will start from a bad place.
I’m out of the loop but does anybody know if Reform have pledged to put a stop to this gender ideology/indoctrination of kids in school, much like Trump did prior to winning over there? I’ve heard an awful lot about all things ‘migration’ but what has Farage said about tackling this particularly toxic and damaging ideology? Because the only thing that can really stop this madness is a new and much improved government. There just aren’t enough people with any power and influence opposing it, therefore it’s now ingrained. The education system being the most dangerous place for it, of course, given that kids’ minds are still developing, they’re naive due to their age and they naturally trust their teachers.
Their Contract last election says “Ban Transgender Ideology in Primary and Secondary Schools. No gender questioning or pronoun swapping. Inform parents of under 16s about their children’s life decisions. Schools must have single sex facilities.”
Since the Contract was drawn up fairly swiftly in view of the snap election, I would imagine the next one will elaborate.
Given that the system of governance known as diversity requires fixed identities in order to create the communities that are then managed by the imperial centre, this sort of propaganda is therefore a necessity.
The effect of Trump’s tariffs, and whatever other measures to follow, will require countries to improve their productive capacity of technology and industry, and increase domestic consumption. For that to occur in the UK every minute of time children spend in school should be given over to teaching them a body of knowledge that will enable them to save their country, as well as earn a decent living.
The only societies that teach their children an ideology that amounts to pseudoscience are such as the USSR and the Third Reich. Both ghastly failures. In the latter, middle class parents complained that their children became the property of the state.
How long ago was it when we were all taught (including children at school) that cloth masks asymmetrically block movement of viruses, that is, they block it inside-out but not outside-in and that people should get covaxxed to protect other people’s health?
Sex education, climate, viruses, air pollution, etc, etc, etc – State-sponsored voodoo pseudoscience and malinformation abounds.
How any of this evil crap takes hold is beyond me
I’m a man and always was and always will be. I’m fine with that in so far as it’s a simple fact – but it doesn’t have much other significance to me. If I want to be a parent then I need to get with a woman. But other than that, I’m just me, trying and sometimes failing to be a decent human being and to enjoy life. How anyone finds the energy to obsess about what their sex means to them or anyone else just doesn’t make sense to me.
Never forget it was a so-called Conservative Government which imposed the teaching of this biological nonsense on children …. and a fair number of “Conservative” MPs, not least Penny Mordaunt, thankfully now kicked out of Parliament, fully subscribed to it.
Caroline, how do you manage to continue being a Conservative when it is they who allowed this stuff into schools and also endorsed so
many other unConservative policies such as Net Zero, unhitching Northern Ireland, closing fracking wells, EV mandates on cars, etc?
Leaving aside the actual content, someone seriously needs to proof read this stuff for basic spelling, grammar and layout. E.g. “When out gender identity does not match”. I don’t think the author has even read it through once!
Big Ender?