Self Id In Glasgow Nurseries
"I don't like the man-woman" pleaded the four year old to her mother, but the nursery insisted on 're-educating her'.
This week the Head of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Mridrul Wadhwa finally stepped down from his post as CEO after a prolonged battle in an employment tribunal in which he was found guilty of having led a ‘heresy hunt’ against a staff member for questioning self-id for the centre. In other words under this trans-identified individual’s leadership *any* male could claim female identity and access the resources in the centre, and be housed amongst vulnerable women there escaping male violence.
In the intervening years (unsurprisingly) a sexual predator was able to exploit this gaping loophole and self-id into the service engaging with many vulnerable women. Many breathe a sigh of relief as Wadhwa finally departs. We cannot be sure of what other harms might have come. We know Wadhwa’s support and reach go far and wide in the political echelons of Scotland as prominent politicians and organisations sung his praises.
The enormous effort it has taken to remove this person from post begs belief but perhaps is unsurprising given the above public displays of loyalty. That the most vulnerable members of society were able to be sidelined in the love-fest should give us all pause. One would hope this event represents a tipping point of sense for our citizenry and electorate regarding the harms of self id. But that would be wrong.
Unfortunately, the cult of ‘self-id’ is still ever present in Scotland -including with nursery children. (full story below)
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To my knowledge Glasgow Education is still operating on a basis of self-id within its schools and nurseries both for children and staff.
Anyone who buffers these ‘self declared’ individuals will be expected to validate their fantasy. Children who are trying to make sense of the world - in general - now have the added challenge of navigating a fantasy presented as real.
In my podcast and post last week on the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child- which is now supersedes Scottish Child Law (!)) I draw attention to an academic study, “A Significant Events Approach to Children's Rights with Children Under Three in Education and Care” looking at how UNCRC is to be embedded in pre-verbal environments. In this ‘Brave New World’ children are assessed wholly on the basis of ‘rights’. So a kid cannot be ‘having a bad day’, ‘be a bit grumpy’ - their expressions of childhood are only to be seen in a ‘rights’ framework.
“This paper presents an observational approach, the Significant Events Approach to Children’s Rights, for early childhood researchers and educators (any adult trained to work with children before compulsory education) as a way of recording and analysing children’s daily experiences from a rights-based perspective by noting children’s interests, priorities and concerns as expressed in their strong emotions. Children’s emotions are rated using the Leuven well-being scale (Laevers et al. 2005, 2012) and mapped against the 42 substantive Articles of the UNCRC”.
We are talking about pre-verbal children. We are talking about toddlers. This parsing of emotions into commodified blocks is deeply worrying. Further on in the study one of the nursery workers asserts that ‘being in a caring and nurturing environment’ is enough. This nursery worker is reprimanded for not understand that no this is not enough. Children have rights! There are no references to child development.
A key component of this ‘rights based’ approach is the notion of consent. We can see how this is brought in from early years and is a key component of Scottish RSHP (Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood). I have written about that in detail here. Children cannot consent. They lack the developmental capacity to understand consequences and when the sh*t hits the fan, it’s the parents who pickup the pieces. Boundaries are not mentioned. Nor responsibilities.
What often is misrepresented is “Gillick Competency” and “Fraser Guidelines”. (I aim to do a separate post on this in due course.) In short Gillick competence is concerned with determining a child’s capacity to consent. Fraser guidelines, on the other hand, are used specifically to decide if a child can consent to contraceptive or sexual health advice and treatment. Both have very stringent frameworks. Just ‘saying’ it is not enough to fulfil the criteria. And (largely) it does not apply to children before the age of 13. Even for children up to the age of 16 it is to be used sparingly.
Which brings us back to where these obfuscation of rights buoyed by (developmentally inappropriate) consent principles may lead us. Some suggest that UNCRC is a way for children to ‘self-id’ into transgender identities through the back door.
As I understand it article 8 was never about ‘gender identity’ but about national identity. Like my son has the ‘right’ to celebrate American Independence Day in July because of his American heritage. Not that his declared ‘made up’ identity is to be upheld. That (as I understand it) was the original intention. But now this word has shifted in intention and meaning to include ‘gender identity’ and many schools are misrepresenting this fact.
Which brings us to self-id in nurseries…..
In the autumn of last year I got a phone call from a distressed Mother whose child came home upset about a “man-woman” in her nursery. Following is the account of what happened as reported in Scottish Union for Education newsletters Number 42, “Transgender nursery teacher in Glasgow: kindness, law and truth” and Number 45, “Are nurseries safe? What the media said about the trans-identifying nursery worker” . How the council chose to respond to the distress of the child and the wishes of the parent is chilling reading.
As I have often said - laws are not manifestos of virtue, they are not philosophies of how we would like the world to be - they are there to protect things at the edges, to consider the ‘what-ifs’. Scottish government is notoriously bad at law making, instead creating scaffolding with its magic mystical symbol of its nation the unicorn - in a fantasy which puts us all in danger. We need to demand better, we need to demand best.
In this weeks
newsletter I laid out the litany of failures to protect children in schools as seen through the lens of LGBT Youth Scotland. As I recount the horror that adults were trading in the most vile dystopian levels of child porn and still able to work with children, I wonder how many other adults had a ‘niggle’ that something was not right? How many didn’t speak up because of tribal loyalties and fears of being called homophobic/transphobic/unkind?As I have said time and time again - there is no magical identity marker that frees anyone from the possibility of doing bad… or good. That is part of our human experience. To deny that is to instil some sort of ‘godly marker’ on some individuals, who are wholly undeserving of it.
These stories are the sharp end of the stick regarding the politicisation of our children’s schools. We see community centres closing as children are denied the ‘fun stuff’ (which makes childhood great) at the same time many are leaving school with a less than basic understanding of reading and writing. I am concerned what their lives will be like, and how society will function. We need to get back to core purpose.
It is worth remembering that Headteachers have enormous leeway to implement strategies into their school environments. In recent weeks I have been contacted by various Headteachers, teachers and parents on parent councils from across Scotland regarding removing LGBTYS from their schools. Most of those working with children are good people wanting the best for kids. This is worth remembering. Many are caught out with the rapid onset of these programs into the schools.
If you would like support in petitioning/approaching your school please get in touch via chat function or join the Scottish Union for Education!
Transgender nursery teacher in Glasgow: kindness, law and truth
In 2010, when gender reassignment was voted to be included in the Equality Act, I can imagine that many did not think what impacts embedding a lie into law would have. Citizens were told of a small cohort of individuals who were distressed about their physical bodies and that allowing them this ‘one small thing’ would allow them to ‘get on with their lives’. It sounds quite reasonable, doesn’t it?
Within the context of our liberal society, ‘live and let live’ is a mantra as familiar as day into night.
But law is not designed to facilitate ‘live and let live’ but to help us to navigate societal situations for a smoother and safer world and decide on things that are not easy. The basis of this particular law seems to have been decided as a matter of kindness, and that ‘kindness’ premeditates us all to lie. One has to wonder if that is a good way to legislate. Men cannot be women. Women cannot be men. There are two sexes. (Note: what are sometimes termed intersex conditions are disorders of sexual development, not a third sex.)
Creating this legal fiction was always going to have larger implications.
On Friday 27 October, I received a worried phone call from a friend. Her 4-year-old daughter had come home from nursery visibly distressed. This was unusual. She asked her daughter about her day, and her daughter revealed that there was a ‘man-woman’ as a new nursery teacher. The daughter was upset about this. She could see the individual was male but was being instructed to call the individual female and to use female pronouns. This did not make sense to her.
The mother went into the nursery to ask about the new staff member and was told ‘this person was hired as female and is female’. They offered to ‘have a word’ with the wee girl, assuring the mother that ‘she would be fine’. The mother was not comfortable with this, as she felt her daughter would be instructed to not trust her instincts and to lie.
This mother is a first-generation Scottish woman whose family comes from Pakistan. As she speaks English and Urdu/Punjabi fluently, the other parents with less English started to come to her as they also were having questions from their children and did not have the social confidence or language skills to address it. The mother passed all the info she had to the parents but was focused on helping her child relieve her distress.
In the meantime, I received other worried messages from parents who were wondering what to do. They did not want their children to be taught to lie and for their children to go against their instincts.
The mother went to speak to the nursery again about how to resolve this and was told that because she was talking to other parents, this was considered ‘organising’ against this particular staff member – that this was akin to harassment and she could have the police phoned on her! They told her that any problems must not be dealt with collectively and that she was not permitted to organise with other parents about the shared issue that was impacting upon their families. They offered again to speak to the child individually and ‘help her to adjust’ to this new staff member.
The mother was understandably worried. She does not wish to deny anyone their right to work, but she doesn’t want her child to be taught to go against her instincts and to lie.
What does one do?
As I understand it, legally the rights of an adult’s identity in this instance do trump the child’s right to tell the truth. Where does believing in this legal fiction get you, ultimately?
The nursery years are very important developmentally, as children are learning to make sense of their physical and ethical world.
Dr Jenny Cunningham, paediatrician, states,
‘Sex stereotypes are useful for children aged 4–5 years in terms of beginning to categorize groups of things. For example, beginning to put all cats into the category ‘cats’, and recognise the categories ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. However, the latter only become stable at around 5–6 years, when children understand that they are a boy or girl, and this will not change. Children can continue to confuse sex pronouns as late as 7 years of age. It has to be confusing to children to then be met with discussions about multiple ‘genders’.’
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Sex categorising becomes quite important as a child gets older, as noted in the recent court case of ‘HMA v Andrew Miller’. Regarding the horrific instance of a girl being abducted and subjected to the worst sexual torment you can imagine, the judge’s statement reads:
I am referring to your female presentation as you invited your victim into your car. One only has to ask oneself the simple question: would an 11-year-old girl have willingly entered your car had you presented as a man? The answer is that obviously she would not.
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This is not to say that the nursery worker is an abuser; no one has any issue with this particular individual personally. The problem is the lie, and where that lie corrupts child development and where that leads, for life. Because when we teach children to go against their instincts, the fall-out is potentially immense.
Ironically, education is full of confused talk about children’s rights and the ‘voice of the child’, but when children express their discomfort or confusion around an issue that does not suit the ‘correct thinking’ establishment, their voices magically disappear. Instead, we find the sudden need to ‘adjust’ the child and to force them to accept and become a part of the politicised ideology of the education establishment.
Some will point out that this staff member is free to ‘wear what they want to wear’ and ‘express themselves as they wish’. This is the individual adult’s rights over the sense of responsibility to those children. Could the individual wear fetish gear? Could they come to work in a bikini? The law may not be able to legislate on this, but surely at a societal level adults should have a greater sense of moral and ethical responsibility to children over their own needs and wants. Surely this staff member, if they cared about the children, would not want them to be confused, would not want to place them into this ethical, moral and developmental quandary.
Years ago, I had a chat with my father about women’s spaces. My father understands that him being excluded from certain spaces is not a reflection of his character but of the need to put other people – in that case, women – before his own needs.
Good laws should be robust. They should consider how they impact upon society at the edges, in the corners and unseen spaces. What we are seeing now is how bad laws do not protect all the citizens – in this case the most vulnerable, our children. Nor do they reflect the wishes of parents. But there are also common and natural laws. And truth, in that regard, is as old as time itself.
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. For SUE, it is important to give the mother in this case, and indeed all parents, a forum in which to speak and to speak together, to limit the harm of indoctrination taking place within education, and to re-establish a public, parental and collective form of common sense into our schools.
The Scottish Union for Education Pamphlet written by Dr Jenny Cunningham, ‘Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: what’s wrong with government guidance?’, is available to download for free here.
Following our initial post in the SUE newsletter above The Sun newspaper decided to follow up on the story. It’s good to see these issues raised in the mainstream media, but the Sun’s story was all about the ‘trans’ nursery worker; no one seemed to be interested in the children. It it telling when we compare the rhetoric of education policy documents and the local authority’s failure to put the child first.
Are nurseries safe? What the media said about the trans-identifying nursery worker
Two weeks ago, I wrote a report for SUE on the case of a 4-year-old who had become upset when she was asked to lie about the sex of a newly appointed ‘trans’ nursery worker. The little girl was distressed because she could see that this individual was male, but the staff were insisting that the worker was female.
When parents approached the nursery, staff offered to ‘re-educate’ the children to ‘help them adjust’. The parents refused the offer; they did not want their children to be taught to lie. Earlier this month the parents contacted me; they did not know what to do. To add to the already stressful situation, one parent had been told that the nursery would report her to the police if she continued to speak to other parents about the issue, as it supposedly constituted harassment. This parent, who is fluent in English, Urdu and Punjabi, had been speaking to the parents who were confused. The nursery had not told parents (some of whom do not have English as their first language) anything about the issue.
So, imagine my surprise when the Sun reported the story last week without a single mention of the child, or her rights, safety, dignity or development. What was reported was the rights of the adult worker. Its now clear that Glasgow City Council has created a policy for nurseries which prioritises the wishes and ‘rights’ of adult staff over what is best for children. This begs the question, ‘How can nurseries maintain that they are safe places for children?’
When I first tweeted about this, not one of the 60,000 people who engaged in the resulting discussion referred to the individual adult’s rights. Everyone on the thread was rightfully thinking about the children. Nursery children are vulnerable; for good child development they must be treated with care and must be able to trust the adults to care for them – this is basic safeguarding.
The failure to uphold this basic idea is a serious betrayal by both nursery workers and our policy-makers. The Getting It Right for Every Child Policy, which underpins the care and education of all children in Scotland, does not say, ‘We want all children and young people to live in an equal society that enables them to flourish, to be treated with kindness, dignity and respect, and to have their rights upheld at all times – except when it is necessary to affirm the identity of a trans-identifying adult’.
The idea that a distressed 4-year-old child should just suck it up and that society needs to prioritise the ‘needs’ of an adult over the development and wellbeing of a child is disgusting. The Education (Scotland) Act 1980 includes the principle that children are to ‘be educated in accordance with wishes of their parents’. Was there a caveat that I missed which says, ‘– except when the state wants to step in and mess with their development and wellbeing for political and ideological reasons?’
Maybe it should come as no surprise that Glasgow Clyde College (who trained this nursery worker) issued an equalities statement rather than addressing the big old child development ‘elephant in the room’. It was at its sister college in Ayrshire that despite awaiting trial for two charges of rape, Isla Bryson was allowed to apply fake tan to young women as part of a beauty course. Equalities innit? The Glasgow worker is reported to have left the nursery ‘on concerns for their safety’, the suggestion being that the parents and children couldn’t be trusted to conduct themselves in a reasonable way. The real safety concern should be with council-run services set up to facilitate child growth but unprepared to put the needs of the children first.
If any individual is so fragile as to feel threatened by the possibility of being misgendered by pre-schoolers, is he or she well suited to the profession? I don’t know what I would do if I had a child in a Glasgow nursery. I know there are good workers who care about kids, but unless this nonsense stops, everyone gets put at risk. It’s a lose–lose situation which could lead to an exodus from nurseries and schools, but maybe that’s the goal? We must continue to speak up and speak out until children’s actual needs and development are placed at the core of the services and the political ideology taken out of it; until that happens, your nursery is no longer safe for your kids.
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If you appreciate my work please consider becoming a subscriber to allow me to continue to research and report on these issues:
Extra special thanks to current subscribers, if you are a free subscriber could you consider becoming a paid subscriber? A yearly subscription is just £30 per year, £4.00 per month or founding membership £250.
Every penny makes a difference & allows me to continue advocating for children & childhood. It is much needed and much appreciated. Or buy me a coffee? Thank you!