Image Credit: FatCamera / Getty 
(LifeSiteNews) – The lasted draft of the UK Department of Education’s long-awaited student safety guidance waters down its gender confusion policy to the point that children as young as four could be ‘socially transitioned’ under certain circumstances.
The 201-page document covers many classroom issues, but its second, which pertains to gender, appears at first to be rooted in reality. It states that schools “must not allow pupils into toilets, changing rooms, or boarding or residential accommodation designated for the opposite sex, with no exceptions”; “pupils must not be allowed to participate in sports designated for the opposite sex”; schools “should not initiate any action regarding social transition”; and schools must respect the “leading role” of parents and carers in such decisions.
“Schools and colleges should consider everything that could be affecting a child, including whether they have any wider health issues or neurodiversity,” the policy states and notes that National Health Service (NHS) England’s 2024 Cass Review “acknowledged that there is a lack of good evidence on the long-term impact of social transition on young people, but it is clear that social transition should be viewed as an active intervention that may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning and longer-term outcomes.”
However, while urging primary schools to exercise “particular caution,” the document also leaves the door open for such schools to transition very young children, stating “we would expect support for full social transition to be agreed very rarely. The Cass Review acknowledges that older children will generally have greater agency to make their own decisions. Maintaining flexibility and keeping children’s options open will help to avoid a child feeling they are under pressure to commit to a potentially irrevocable pathway when they are young.”
The Daily Mail reports that the latest draft has been significantly watered down by Labour leaders from the version previously drafted by the formerly ruling Conservative Party, which had prohibited the changing of gender pronouns in primary schools, limited the changing of pronouns in secondary schools to “very few occasions,” and protected teachers and students’ right to refuse to use transgender pronouns.
Despite such weaknesses, the BBC notes that the guidance has the support of Cass Review leader Dr. Hilary Cass. She called it a “huge step in the right direction” that “reflects the recommendations of my review, giving schools much-needed clarity on their legal duties so they can support children with confidence.” She emphasized its support for parental involvement and expressed confidence that “proceeding with a social transition is going to be very much the exception, rather than the rule.”
Others disagree. “Primary school children should not be navigating changes in pronouns at all. But, shockingly, Labour’s guidance opens the door to children as young as four being referred to in a way that does not reflect their biological sex,” declared Tory education spokesperson Laura Trott
“Schools are still being left with the idea that they can facilitate ‘social transition’ – which remains undefined – and that they should negotiate this on a case-by-case basis,” argued Maya Forstater of the biological-sex human rights group Sex Matters. “They are being encouraged to think that children have a ‘birth sex’ as well as some other concept of sex. This has no basis in law or reality, and undermines safeguarding. It should be clear by now that allowing children and parents to think that a child who starts their education as a girl can graduate as a boy or vice versa is a dangerous fairy tale.”
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
