Then balance gender ideology alongside other beliefs, including opposition to it.

This one example, which also suggests it is legitimate for a boy to undress in the girls’ changing rooms, and if a girl doesn’t like it, she should be moved, makes clear why guidance from the DfE is needed. How is it possible for a boy, aside from his body, to be ‘in every other respect a girl’?

Last week in the House of Lords, peers engaged Schools Minister, Baroness Barran, on this subject. Lord Farmer asked her for an update on the timing of the draft guidance. Baroness Barran recommitted to previous statements, and remained elusive on timing, but her language provided an indication of what we might expect from the impending draft guidance. Baroness Barran said ‘we are developing guidance to support schools in relations to transgender pupils’ and ‘The guidance to support schools in relation to transgender pupils will set out schools’ legal duties’.

The indication is that Baroness Barran seems to believe there is such a thing as a ‘transgender child’. This implies that the DfE is also likely to affirm the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘transgender child’. 

This is worrying because we know that affirming a child as transgender is not a neutral act.  To borrow words from the White Horse Federation of Schools, it seems to indicate that Baroness Barran, Conservative Schools Ministers, relevant officials at the Department for Education, believe something along the lines that ‘although the individual in question may have the body of a boy, they are in every other respect a girl’. How does this work? Do Conservative Education Ministers believe in a gendered soul? Do they think there is an, as yet unidentified, locus in the brain, where sits our gender identity? This seems to ignore the now widespread understanding that there is a very significant social and social media trend promoting gender ideology. Even transgender health organisations acknowledge the role of social contagion.  Fashion brand, Burberry, inexcusably, promotes double mastectomies and its scarring, as cool / fashionable. Stonewall, even BBC Bitesize, have promoted whole arrays of neo-identities to school children - the BBC at one point claiming there were over a hundred of them.

So in an environment of social contagion and fashionable exploration and identification - who are the real transgender children and how can we be sure? The tiny group with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Evidence already shows that the vast majority will desist.  Affirmation sidesteps safeguarding, a primary duty of schools and all adults involved in education. At what point should challenge come? Before chemical castration?

If you look at reports from a decade ago that concerned the treatment of trans-identifying adults or gender-dysphoric children, no-one said these adults and children actually were the opposite sex. The discussion around the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 referred to transexuals - people who wanted to appear and present as the opposite sex.

So how should the DfE navigate this complex issue in its forthcoming guidance? Surely the neutral starting position is for the DfE to speak of ‘gender identity’ as a belief system. Some individuals believe in an inner 'gender identity' independent from biological sex. Many of us do not subscribe to this belief system and think it is immensely harmful.

The neutral starting position for the DfE is therefore to stand back from the belief system, not buy into it. Same for Conservative Ministers and government. Then to consider the appropriate accommodation of the belief system within a school setting. It becomes self-evident that, at most, it needs to sit in a balanced way alongside other belief systems, including that of strong opposition to gender ideology. Indeed, you could argue that whenever 'gender identity' is discussed in schools, the 'gender critical' position should be presented alongside.

The only possible approach is that of respecting a diversity of viewpoints and belief systems - alongside tolerance, free speech, and freedom of conscience. Teaching must remain anchored in science. The wider moral and discursive aspects of a school’s remit can engage openly, tolerantly, questioningly, with the world’s competing belief systems. New beliefs unanchored in science cannot be presented as 'true'. Safeguarding must be prioritised, particularly for children who do buy into gender ideology. 

Once you simply recognise gender ideology as a new belief system, unanchored from science, popular on tiktok and with teens, but not with the wider public; and then stand outside it, working out how to accommodate it within the school system becomes so much easier. This is what Conservative education ministers and the DfE need to do.