MY CASE is important to everyone in every public institution in this country. I lost, and that is why it is so important.
I was a maths teacher at a further and higher education college when one of my students, whom I will call Student A, sent me a message saying she wanted to be a boy. I raised a safeguarding concern asking if we had parental consent, if she was making an informed decision and if she was at risk of self-medicating with cross-sex hormones.
The response from the safeguarding team was that they would not tell her parents. They then encouraged her to socially transition by telling her how to change her name and pronouns on the college system. This was the complete opposite of my safeguarding concern. My student’s safety would have been better protected if I had done nothing.
Later in the year A’s friend Student B waited behind after a class and instructed me to refer to A as male, under the threat of a complaint. I explained to B why this was not a good idea, and she diligently wrote everything down. This was then used as a basis of a complaint against me and presented to the court as if I had said it in front of class for everyone to hear.
Then at a transgender training session another college lecturer explained how she had directly supported four transgender students. It was reasonable to have concerns about the nature of this support and to raise it a safeguarding concern about it, so I did. Not only was this not investigated, but it was used as evidence to support the transphobia complaint concerning Student A as a male and to support a safeguarding referral of me to the local authorities.
The result was that I was suspended and referred to Swindon Borough Council on the safeguarding ground of causing emotional harm to a transitioning student, fired, then referred to the government’s Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and barred from teaching for life.
This is the absurd and topsy-turvy world that our schools have become. A world where boys can be girls and vice versa, where actions to ensure safety are safeguarding incidents, where teaching and discussion of facts is subservient to protecting feelings, where children can dictate how teachers behave, and where a student who potentially manipulates another on to a life-limiting and life-shortening medical pathway is considered to be kind.
This crazy world did not happen by accident and the children are not to blame. They are the victims.
Vested interests in the transgender community want to target schools because this is where most of their potential recruits are to be found, and their motivations for doing so are self-validatory or financial or both. They have been aided and abetted by the Department for Education to do this, and the DfE even wrote into its guidance the nonsense from Stonewall that transgender is not a safeguarding issue.
The schools were an easy pushover because there is no longer a culture of critical thinking, either by students or from teachers. The increasing focus of teaching towards vocational skills, which is in vogue, is antithetical to developing critical thinking skills. So, on the current track, things will get worse, not better.
Even teachers versed in the most basic aspects of critical thinking are unable to act on their thoughts. As I found out, they have nowhere to turn when things inevitably go very bad. The transgender ideology had so completely captured the minds of the senior management at my college that raising a safeguarding concern was as effective as shouting at a storm. My union, the NEU, backed the transgender ideology over their obligations to protect me and withdrew their support.
The council knew from my complaints to them that I had raised two safeguarding concerns which had not been investigated, but they let the college ignore them. When I reported the college’s failure of my safeguarding concern to the police, I was told they could not see any evidence of harm. The Department for Education whistleblowing service ignored my concerns by saying it was just an employment matter.
When I raised my safeguarding concerns to Ofsted, they agreed child safety was at risk and then did an inspection. The inspection report bizarrely said the college must improve in all areas but praised how well the staff and students were working together in the LGBTQ+ club.
My household insurance policy would not pay out for legal cover because they said Student A had the right to demand that I referred to her as a boy, and I had discriminated against her for not doing so. One firm of solicitors said I had a legal duty to follow the college’s policies, a second said that Student A had a right to be called a male, and a third said the case was too big and difficult for them to deal with. It cost me nearly £7,000 in legal fees to get nowhere.
Don’t blame the teachers, at least don’t blame all the teachers. There are as many who find the trans ideology abhorrent as there are who support it. But those who do find it abhorrent are forced into silence by the wholesale collapse of the institutions that should be supporting them, and which are the custodians of the cultural values of our country.
This is how the most extreme medical experiment ever, of transforming children from one sex to the other and encouraging them to do so, became embedded in the education system. It shows how susceptible our society has become to false information and how we have no collective defence to it.
I have put myself forward as the witness for the judicial review that the Bad Law Project is instigating of the Department of Education’s wilful negligence in allowing the transgender ideology into schools in breach of the Education Act, sections 406 and 407. These two sections ban the pursuit of politically partisan teaching and ensure balanced treatment of political issues. For the benefit of the families that have been so harmed we need to show the DfE was negligent, and we must also ensure that nothing like this ever happens again, and no other ideology captures our schools and institutions in the way that the transgender ideology has.
