The Church of England draft guidance on HBT (homophobic, biphobic and transphobic) bullying in schools has been published and is out for consultation. It is now to be one of a handful of different guidances under the umbrella of Flourishing for All. The other guides will tackle bullying on account of race, disability/SEN, religion and sexist bullying and sexual harassment. Perhaps this is to lessen the spotlight on HBT bullying which has been the Church’s focus for ten years, and which had come under increasing criticism.
Like others I have been very vocal in my criticism of the previous HBT anti -bullying guidance Valuing All God’s Children seeing it as another useful vehicle for Stonewall and other activist lobby groups to get the concept of gender identity and the accompanying ideology and language embedded into the school system. This method has been very effective and the VAGC itself has been used in Church schools for nearly ten years.
VAGC was straight out of the Stonewall playbook, with an exact same glossary in the appendix, despite Rev Genders, Chief Education Officer denying this to me and others. The name of a former Stonewall employee was personally thanked in the document and Stonewall credited with providing the finance but this we were told was because Stonewall had merely passed on the money from the Dept of Education.
Anyway, one major difference with the new guidance Flourishing for All is perhaps the total absence of any references to Stonewall at all despite VAGC being peppered with them. I was told that the many references to Stonewall in VAGC was because their LGBT Bullying Schools Report was the only one of its kind and the former guidance needed to refer to it a lot. All reference to this report has now gone as well. Has it therefore been discredited? We are not told.
The erasure of Stonewall is to be welcomed but I would have preferred some clarity about what exactly has changed in this new draft guidance and why? Like why has Stonewall been dropped? We are told that the guidance needed updating following the December 2023 guidelines from the Department of Education on Gender Questioning Children and the publication of the Cass report this year but we are not told exactly what had to be replaced or why. We have to compare the two documents ourselves.
To begin with the tone is different. I think it is more diffident and arguably less certain of its ideological base, less sure that a trans child must be accommodated regardless. It is cautious, defensive even, often providing an explanation as to why concepts have been used as well as a lot of references to the legal and regulatory framework.
Like other individuals and organisations who wish to place themselves above the fray rather than accepting responsibility for being part of the conflict, the introduction refers to the debate on gender as having frequently been ‘toxic and polarised.’
Bullying by children to children is not a legal issue so it may seem strange to go into so much detail about the Equality Act 2010 and hate crimes. The choice of topics for their anti-bullying guidance umbrella is to mirror some of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act. I know times have changed but my own experience of bullying at school and those of my children was more often than not directed at kids who were too ‘clever’, ‘swotty’, unpopular, and about appearances – being fat, thin, too tall or too small, too pretty, had funny hair or even red hair, snotty nose etc. Kids can pick on any perceived difference and will continue to do so. None of these are covered by the Equality Act nor should they be. How relevant then is the Act? Again my contention is that it provides some justification and support for the whole exercise and not much else. A caring culture in a school is beneficial to all children – we don’t all have to go on training courses or learn the Equality Act inside out to know this.
On the subject of relevance why has the Church introduced a section on intersectionality? This is a contested approach to the equality agenda and arguably should not be introduced unconditionally. The reference given is the Anti-Racism Resource 2023 Intersectionality of Privilege – again a concept that is not agreed on by everyone. Do we really think it appropriate to put young children into a hierarchy of privilege based on identities? Many of us further down the road on diversity are trying to stem this tide of identity politics that young people are being taught to no one’s benefit. This is projecting a particular ideological view and presenting it as fact.
There is now recognition that social transitioning has been cautioned against by the DofE guidance or Cass Report so instead the new guidance refers to the treatment of those who have already socially transitioned. They apparently must still not be misnamed. We don’t see the word misgendered in here. The Church says it has always agreed with the Cass Report’s negative view on social transitioning but as I say in a post below this is just not the case. In VAGC it states that
“Trans young people may require specific support in order to feel comfortable at school, for example, schools may need to make changes to toilet facilities or a trans young person might require support to change their name or the pronoun by which they are referred to by staff and classmates.”(Valuing All God’s Children 2019).
So there is a very clear change of view and advice but no acknowledgement of it.
So whilst the tone of the guidance is different and some of the more extreme ideological stances on gender identity may have gone, such as the unequivocal support of trans kids in their belief that they are the opposite sex and the guidance to schools on accommodating them, that the Church’s view on this issue has not changed much. For example, a lot of the ideological language has remained in this new draft guidance.
The term LGBT of the VAGC guidance has now given way to LGBT+ which they justify by saying they are following OFSTED and the government, adding that the terminology has evolved. What child is a +…. why introduce the very idea of this as a possibility to children?
The guidance uncritically adopts the use of the expressions ‘trans child’, ‘assigned at birth’, ‘cis’ and the concept gender identity itself is central to the report. It is only if you read through the glossary and find the footnote to the entry of gender identity, which is defined as “ a sense a person may have of their own gender, whether male, female or another category, such as non-binary” that you will find the quote “Current government guidance states that this is a ‘contested belief’.
Why then is this not made more of throughout the report? Indeed the glossary whilst being a fraction of the ‘Stonewall’ glossary of VAGC is still problematic. Some examples are:
Sexuality – an emotional, romantic or sexual attraction.
In the glossary the distinction is made between gender and sex.
Sex – This term is typically used to refer to biological status as male/female but may refer to genetics, anatomy, physiology or legal status.
Gender – The cultural constructions associated with being male/female or other gender categories, as distinguished from biological sex
Yet the terms are used interchangeably throughout the report. In the glossary even,
Homosexual is defined “ this might be considered a more medical term used to describe someone who has an emotional, romantic and/or sexual attraction towards someone of the same gender.” The correct term is sex…as in same sex attracted. This of course doesn’t allow for male lesbians which the activists insist exist.
So whilst the softening of the tone is to be welcomed the uncritical adoption of the concepts and language of gender identity ideology make the guidance unsuitable for schools.