In today’s podcast I speak to Carolyn Brown, retired Educational Psychologist with over 40 years experience of working in the Scottish Education sector. Carolyn is also one of the founders and members of Scot Pag - Scottish Professionals Advising on gender - a multi agency group of professionals from health, social work and medicine addressing issues related to children and trans identities/gender dysmorphia.
Whilst much of our conversation focuses around the hot mess that is Scottish Government’s Transgender Guidance, the trans topic points to a much larger issue of the need to look at: the culture of schools. What is good for children? How do children learn? What does a good model of inclusivity look like? How is it we get adult agendas out of education? How do we support the curiosity and natural evolution of experimentation that children embody?
This is a really important conversation as this past week further scandal hit the press with the charity BBC Children in Need’s Chair Rosie Millard resigning from her position over the scandal of funding the charity had provided to LGBT Youth Scotland.
For those of you new to my substack LGBT Youth Scotland is an trans activist quango that has infiltrated schools, government and cultural institutions here in Scotland. It offers an LGBT Charter for Education Scheme (for a pretty penny) stating it is a “straightforward programme that enables your school, college or university to proactively include LGBTQ+ people in every aspect of your work, protecting your staff and providing high quality service to your learners.”
“Protecting your staff” what a curious turn of phrase as the scandal which initiated Millard’s resignation was the discovery that Children in Need had delivered it’s first round of funding to LGBT Youth Scotland in 2009 just weeks after it’s founder and CEO James Rennie was found guilty and sentenced for running the most notorious paedophile ring in Scotland’s history. His crimes included filming the rape of his 3 month of baby godson, which he distributed on his networks.
Yet BBC Children in Need alongside Scottish Government continued undeterred promoting and funding the organisation. It was in this sea of financial generosity that another paedophile Andrew Easton wrote LGBTYS’s ‘Coming Out Guide’ in 2010. Easton was convicted in August of distributing category A material, the most extreme examples of child pornography.
Following on from these spectacular and horrifying revelations “… in 2022 two men revealed how, as vulnerable boys in foster care during Rennie’s tenure, they were groomed and raped. LGBTYS suspended an employee and referred itself to the police.”
And what of LGBT Youth Scotland ‘guidance’? Well, Carolyn Brown alongside her colleagues in social work, education and health at ScotPag have raised the alarm that the current trans guidance (made in association with LGBTYS) which is distributed to every high school in Scotland goes against ALL best practice one would hope for in working with children. (keeping in mind 96% of schools in Scotland are run through the centralised state system, or the marshmallow as I term it)
Not only is this guidance based upon faulty data (why would one develop a resource for children based on a subset of adults based in Canada? As outlined by Dr. Jenny Cunningham for
in this pamphlet)) but the resource has been shown to correlate with a sharp increase of children ‘identifying’ as the opposite sex. One could easily surmise they are creating the problem they purport to solve. And the problem leads to worse health outcomes both psychologically and physically.
Many who are reading this are well aware of the cult like mania which has taken over our global systems regarding the world of synthetic sex identities (as outlined forensically by
). What we need to start looking at however - and this is the nub of my conversation with Carolyn (as well as earlier podcast with ) is the culture of schools.Once LGBT Youth Scotland is out of the way (and some schools are already silently backing down), there will be others in the wings. The problem isn’t only that LGBT Youth Scotland continues to enable and promote child abuse (as if that wasn’t bad enough and what does this say for all our purported ‘Rights of the Child’ etc.) but that these sorts of activist programs are not good for children.
As Carolyn points out there is a tendency to ‘go for the latest’ thing and sometimes doing less, and doing old ways are best. In other words, common sense - as old as time - is robust and good for kids. Our well-being culture, our over-reliance on diagnoses, the tendency to want to label children is doing them no favours. Whilst there are some children that require this kind of assistance, often ‘watch and wait’ something we hear often in critiquing the ‘trans affirmative’ model understands that childhood itself is a time for ‘trying stuff out’ and by affirming children we stop their journey.
So let us cultivate a culture which includes the expectation of play and provides good and high quality opportunities for children to ‘learn stuff’, to make friends, to navigate relationships and expectations, to be challenged and to have fun - be it in drama, dance, music, sport etc etc. And stop funding organisations with adult aims in schools. Our children and our world will be better for it.
Thanks to Carolyn for the many layered conversation - much food for thought! I hope you enjoy it.
**Links to articles referenced:
Scot Pag Website:
Scot Pag X: @scotpag
Social Transition and Junk Science: https://www.scotpag.com/post/social-transition-and-junk-science
Genspect Scottish Educational Psychologists and Gender Ideology in Scottish Schools A Conspiracy of Silence: https://genspect.org/scottish-educational-psychologists-and-gender-ideology-in-scotlands-schools-a-conspiracy-of-silence/
Scottish Union for Education:
For a more forensic understanding of LGBT Youth Scotland check out whose work on safeguarding and the gender lobby is exemplary
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