Another school falls to woke ideology

This time it’s St Paul’s Girls’, one of the leading independent girls’ schools in the UK , which announced on 19^th June that henceforth they will no longer have a Head Girl, because the title is too binary.  Instead, the role will be renamed ‘Head of School’ – which is apparently far more ‘inclusive’ and, in today’s climate of gender fluidity and choice, more acceptable (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/st-pauls-girls-school-ditches-binary-head-girl-k9vtlbjfx)!

Yet another school has succumbed to the ideologically driven delusion, peddled by transactivist groups seeking to promote and normalise ‘transequality’, that gender is a matter of choice and not biology.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latest move by a school seemingly 100% committed to the enforcement of wokedom, rather than pupil welfare, has not been greeted with the enthusiasm the school perhaps expected.   In fact, a large number of both parents or staff are reportedly deeply unhappy, with one outraged parent furiously demanding, “How can you be a single-sex school that exists to empower girls to do well and at the same time support girls to identify out of being a girl …?  Why would parents want to send their daughters to a school where girls are not happy to be girls (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/st-paul-girls-school-ditches-080711470.html)?”

VfJUK agrees.   Parents after all entrust their children to schools to acquire the knowledge and skills that will best equip them for the future.   Beyond all doubt, they want what is best for their child, and they trust teachers to impart correct information and to identify and cultivate their child’s strengths, while at the same time building them up in areas of weakness.

The last thing parents want is for their child to be brainwashed into accepting ideas that, in the normal course of events, wouldn’t have occurred to them.   And until very recently, though there have always been cases of people feeling they were born in the wrong body, the number of children suffering from gender dysphoria was actually miniscule, as was the number of transgender adults.  In a Trans data position paper issued in 2009, for instance, the Office for National Statistics stated, ‘The proportion of trans people in the population is small and capturing adequate numbers of responses through current sampling methods on our suitable surveys is unlikely’ (https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/
measuringequality/genderidentity/genderidentityupdate).   In other words, the number of individuals identifying as transvestite or transsexual was, prior to 2009, so small that gathering data had proved almost impossible.  

Since that time, however, transgender activists have been actively campaigning for gender variant recognition and acceptance, and a large part of their campaign has been focused on schools.  Because they know, like all exponents of totalitarian regimes, that if you can shape the attitudes and views of children, you can change the views and future direction of society.  Thus in 1995, for example, the charity Mermaids, founded to help gender-diverse children, began to put together resources to put gender identity into the curriculum (https://mermaidsuk.org.uk).   They were successful, and these resources are now widely used in schools.  A couple of decades later Stonewall, having achieved its victory with same-sex marriage and looking for a new cause célèbre, announced plans to start campaigning for trans equality, also producing extensive resources for use in schools (https://www.stonewall.org.uk/key-dates-lesbian-gay-bi-and-trans-equality).

Subjected to an intense programme of cultural rebranding hammering the message that gender is ‘choice’ and it’s great to be trans, children began to say in droves that they’d been born in the wrong body.   So much so that between 2009 and 2019, referrals for supposedly gender dysphoric children seeking reassignment treatment skyrocketed by an eye-watering 4,500% (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/09/16/minister-orders-inquiry-4000-per-cent-rise-children-wanting/).

However looked at, this is brainwashing on an industrial scale by dedicated campaigning groups overtly seeking political, social and cultural change.   Under section 406 of the Education Act 1996, the promotion of political views in teaching is expressly prohibited.  Under law, therefore, political groups such as Stonewall and Mermaids should not be allowed access to schools.  Period.

ParentPower, the website founded to advise parents on their legal rights and obligations in education so as to help them protect the best interests and welfare of their children, has recently posted an Open Letter to the Prime Minister, calling for the immediate removal from schools of all materials designed to normalise and promote sexual behaviours and values which, until recently, were regarded as illegal and/or evidence of mental illness, but are now designated part of Britain’s ‘new values’.

They are also calling for the removal of public funding in support of these groups, and for urgent inquiry into the charitable status of Stonewall, which, by its political activities disqualifies it from the charitable status and privilieges it claims.  They are asking for as many people as possible to sign, with the aim of presenting the letter to Boris Johnson and calling for immediate action.

Please read and sign the letter here:
https://parentpower.family/stonewall-letter-to-pm/