THREE Cabinet ministers face court action today accused of breaking the law by turning blind eye to propaganda from trans activists. They are Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, Women and Equalities Secretary Kemi Badenoch and Attorney General Victoria Prentis.
Campaigners backed by specialist lawyers are seeking a High Court ruling that activists promoting gender identity ideology in classrooms are in breach of the 1996 Education Act. The Act forbids the political indoctrination of pupils and the Department of Education has admitted that gender identity ideology is a political matter.
The campaigners – two parents and a teacher sacked for ‘misgendering’ a pupil – are seeking judicial review of the three ministers’ failure to uphold the law.
Gordon Davies, the lead solicitor in the case, said: ‘The law is quite clear – political indoctrination in schools is illegal and must not be tolerated by ministers, officials and headteachers.
‘The Education Department has admitted that gender identity ideology is a politically contentious matter on which views differ widely. Yet it continues to ignore its own laws and to allow trans activists a free hand to encourage impressionable – and in some cases vulnerable – teenagers to change gender as a first step towards the drastic end point of changing their biological sex.
‘Bizarrely, this kind of thing is now routine in our secondary schools. Our intervention via the High Court is intended to bring a halt to this cruel insanity.’
A press statement issued by the campaigners, who are supported by the Bad Law Project, says that affirmation – unquestioning acceptance of a child’s right to choose their gender – is political indoctrination.
‘Political lobby groups are running rogue in schools. They are indoctrinating children in what even the Government has acknowledged is a political ideology: gender identity ideology.
‘Nevertheless, the Department for Education has allowed activists promoting gender identity to run personal, social and health education (PSHE) classes and other diversity training programmes in UK schools and colleges up and down the country.
‘Indeed, the DfE has actively worked with organisations such as Stonewall to thoroughly embed gender identity across the education sector. As a result, the Department has declared that transitioning children is not a safeguarding issue.
‘Pupils and teachers are now routinely told that they must not question this ideology or else they will be guilty of transphobia, bigotry, bullying – even hate crime. Instead, they must accept that having any kind of body dysphoria means you were born in the “wrong” body and must be “trans” or “LGBT”.
‘Schools have widely adopted the political policy that a child’s “chosen gender identity” must be affirmed with no questions asked or considerations of child health and safety.
‘Emotionally and medically vulnerable children (often with autism), who are already struggling with adolescence, are given gender identity “on a plate” as a solution to all their problems.
‘Our children are being “socially transitioned” at and by schools, often without their parents’ knowledge. Encouraging a child to take a new name, a new set of pronouns, and a new identity is indoctrination.
‘Socially transitioning children places them on a pathway towards so-called “gender medicine”: an experimental and ethically questionable field promoting quack cures, female sex organ mutilation (chest binding), hormone therapies and surgery – all of which involve many unknowns and irreversible effects (such as infertility).
‘Schools and lobby groups are not professionally qualified to act as clinical leads authorising the gender transitioning of our children.’
Kevin Lister, a maths teacher sacked by New College Swindon, a local authority school, for misgendering a pupil, said: ‘My 20 years of teaching A-level came to an abrupt end when I was sacked and marched off the premises for refusing to call a girl a boy.
‘The Education Department can waffle on endlessly about their meaningless guidance to schools – in practice schools and their trans activists allies are being allowed to run riot. In my case, the Department said my school was not at fault for encouraging social transitioning of pupils.
‘The classroom has become a minefield. Teachers are terrified that one wrong word can end their careers and so they have left the field clear for groups like Stonewall to spread their propaganda and entice impressionable adolescents on to the transgender pathway.
‘This must be stopped and only ministers have the power to do so. They should use their powers to make clear that gender identity ideology amounts to political indoctrination and is therefore illegal.’