By SANCHEZ MANNING and CONNOR STRINGER – The Daily Mail
Activist teachers have vowed to defy Government guidance urging them to tell parents if a child says they want to change gender, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
But some teachers warn they will refuse to follow it and are willing to be sacked rather than comply.
Their defiance came in response to a query on an internet teaching forum asking what they thought about ‘the Government proposing guidance for schools to potentially outing trans kids/kids questioning their identity/gender norms, to their parents.’
One wrote: ‘I’m a gay teacher and I’d refuse to do this if a child came to me in confidence.’
Stephanie Davies-Arai, a campaigner against gender ideology in schools, said that defiant teachers showed that the new government guidance ought to be ‘statutory’
A second teacher said: ‘It would be putting their lives at risk in certain families, and I will never do it. It isn’t my business if a kid is questioning their gender or sexuality, I’m not going to ask them, and if they tell me something I’m going to keep it private and quietly support them as they work it out.’
Another insisted, ‘I will never do this,’ while a fourth said, ‘Yeah fire me first in all honesty.’
One, who teaches in a majority Muslim area, insisted: ‘I would rather be fired than ever out a single student. Arrest me. Do it.’
It has also emerged that several branches of Britain’s biggest teaching union, the National Education Union (NEU), had published an open letter urging the Government not to make teachers keep parents informed if a child said they wanted to change gender.
This document was drawn up by the Southwark, Lewisham, Doncaster, Coventry and Walsall chapters of the NEU in June this year.
The letter said it was ‘not always appropriate – or even necessarily safe – to alert parents and carers to a child’s gender identity (or their sexuality)’ and that schools should have to ‘make robust risk assessments before any such disclosure’. It also cites advice from the LGBT charity Stonewall that schools should not disclose information that could reveal a child’s ‘trans status’ to others, including parents and carers, unless there is a safeguarding risk or the young person gives permission.
However, last year, Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman said it was a ‘safeguarding risk’ for schools to not tell parents their child was questioning their gender identity.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, a campaign group set up to counter the rise of gender ideology in schools, said of the defiant online posts by teachers: ‘Comments like these make us feel strongly that the guidance needs to be statutory, which under the current plans it will not be.
‘If a school knows a family is abusive there are already safeguarding procedures they can employ. We all want to safeguard children, but teachers cannot just unilaterally keep important information from parents that could result in their children seeking serious medical interventions.’
The published trans guidance for schools will go to a public consultation before being finalised.
The Department for Education did not respond to a request for comment last night.
This is what communism looks like.
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