The Teahouse of the August Moon Part 1
Update 294
I hope you all had a great Christmas, dear readers. We certainly did. Grandchildren playing chess! Wonders will never cease! Anyway…
There is a lot of stuff to deal with after the short break, so I am splitting this one into two parts as I did with the pre-Xmas update! There is also an important discussion paper about the Equality Act just published today in the Epoch Times but I want to ponder that a bit and will return to that in the New Year.
Lots of the experts on our side of the gender critical/women’s rights campaign trace a lot of the gender madness back to America and especially American universities. Just when I should be catching up on modern films, my Christmas film was Teahouse of the August Moon. If you can put up with Marlon Brando playing a Japanese man, I think this is a really underrated comedy and would recommend it. Misfit Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford) is sent to Americanise ( or should that be Americanize!) the village of Tobiki on Okinawa. His commanding officer, Colonel Wainwright Purdy III (Paul Ford), assigns him a wily local, Sakini (Brando), as interpreter.
Fisby tries to implement the military's plans by encouraging the villagers to build a school in the shape of the Pentagon, but they want to build a teahouse instead.
This has started me on a bit of a Brando roll! Watch this space 😎
Before I go through matters, can I give a special thank you to reader Tenaciously Terfin and to my wife for all the links and recommendations they have made during 2023 which have been invaluable. Several of the items in this two parter are care of them as well.
Update of 2023
I have already featured some updates before Christmas, so will just mention here three further ones that I hope most if not all of you will have caught up with, the first from The Mess, the second from Kellie-Jay and the third from LGB Alliance. Interestingly all three are pretty upbeat about 2024. Here’s hoping!
So that saves me from doing an update of the year 😊 - instead I will pick out two of my favourite amusing posts from the year: a non-binary bison with a Liberace hairdo; and the Laughing Auditor chancing on what he initially thinks must be an impromptu rave in a street in London! He gets to meet Alan ‘Sarah Jane’ Baker!
Scroll down for Fred the Bison video clip:
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL MY READERS 😎
LGB Alliance Round Up of the Year
https://mailchi.mp/lgballiance.org.uk/christmas-round-up?e=9e07708fc8
‘Trans’ Guidance for Schools
The draft for this was, of course, published just before Christmas and the deadline for submissions is 12 March. I reported on it here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/its-a-wonderful-life-part-1
There is some concern that teachers will simply ignore the new guidance once it is finalised. Additionally negative internal legal advice has been leaked. I will comment on this once I have referred to the two articles.
Connor Stringer and Martin Beckford in The Mail Online ( Fury as schools ignore the government's trans guidance with teachers and extremists attacking the directives 19 December) report:
Activists, teachers and politicians clashed yesterday after the release of the Government's long-awaited trans guidance for schools.
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan insisted the advice 'puts the best interests of all children first'.
In the first direction of its kind, teachers and pupils will not be 'compelled' to use a child's preferred pronouns.
Gillian Keegan, Secretary of State for Education
And it tells school staff not to 'exclude' parents from decisions taken by a school or college relating to requests for a child to 'socially transition'.
The non-statutory advice was praised by campaigners and MPs who have called for clarity on dealing with children questioning their gender.
But having waited more than five years to see it, a Labour MP and the biggest teaching union took less than an hour to attack the guidance and urged teachers to ignore it.
The full article is here:
Emily Jane Davies in The Mail Online ( Schools that follow government trans guidance are at 'high risk' of successfully being sued according to leaked advice from Department for Education lawyers 19 December) reports:
Leaked legal advice from the government's own lawyers has revealed schools face a 'high risk' of being sued if they follow new guidance.
Advice written by the Department for Education's lawyers warns several passages in the transgender guidance for schools leaves them vulnerable to being sued and likely to lose cases brought against them.
The leaked advice - obtained by SchoolsWeek - showed several passages in the published document were flagged as unlikely to stand up to a legal challenge.
The full article is here:
Firstly, in terms of teachers and schools ignoring any guidance that would be a sure fire court challenge. You cannot just ignore any Government guidance in any area.
With regard to the leaked legal advice, I haven’t obviously seen the actual advice but, subject to that caveat:
I do not believe that, after all this time, the Department for Education would release this draft unless they were satisfied that it was legally watertight. The leaked advice could be an early draft of advice.
In the Equality Act, the protected characteristic of gender reassignment means proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign your sex. To be protected from gender reassignment discrimination, you do not need to have undergone any medical treatment or surgery to change from your birth sex to your preferred gender.
The leaked advice would only make sense if ‘gender reassignment’ could be applied to children.
A child cannot obtain a gender recognition certificate. Nor, it seems to me, can a child have the intent to propose to undergo a process to reassign your sex.
I would be interested to see what our gender critical lawyers say about this.
Meanwhile the majority of Telegraph readers who were polled by the newspaper were in favour of the guidance:
There have been some excellent interviews on the guidance: Helen Joyce on GB News; Kathleen Stock on Times Radio; and Kate Barker of LGB Alliance on Talk TV.
Rather surprisingly, Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson interviewed on Sky News welcomed the guidance! However this was just one short response to one question and I would have liked to hear further questions of her on this. Plus I just don’t trust them any longer.
All thoughts gratefully received.
Sex Matters have done a wonderful summary of the guidance:
The DfE’s schools guidance – the report card (19 December)
New draft guidance for schools in England has been published by the Department for Education this morning. In January 2023 we set out a 10-point scoring framework for the guidance. We said it should:
Support schools in line with the law
Provide coherent, consistent guidance across the education system
Direct schools to collect sex-based data
Uphold the Admissions Code
Uphold single-sex spaces
Uphold single-sex sports
Avoid undermining safeguarding
Rule out full social transition in school
Uphold freedom of belief and speech
Support clear sex-based rules and consideration for gender non-conforming children.
This morning we mark the DfE’s work.
Report card
The overall approach is helpful, and has come a long way from previous draft guidance. It talks about “gender questioning children” instead of “trans children”, recognises that the belief that a person can have a ‘gender’ that is different to their biological sex is an ideology, and makes clear that schools must not treat any child as if they have changed sex.
It emphasises that schools must work with parents to safeguard children, and not treat them as unsupportive if they don’t go along with a child’s expressed wishes. It recognises the need to respect other children’s rights, and to have clear school rules.
Although it does not encourage “social transition” at schools, it suggests that schools have discretion to allow some aspects, in exceptional cases. It lists factors that it says schools should consider, but does not tie this to existing statutory processes for making decisions about children with special educational needs and disabilities.
OVERALL MARK 76% – A very good start but there is still room for improvement.
1. Support schools in line with the law. The guidance must be clear, simple and based on existing laws and regulations, and schools’ statutory responsibilities. It needs to provide school leaders with a legal “safe harbour” in the form of a model policy, backed by sound legal analysis.
2. Provide coherent, consistent guidance across the education system. Individual schools are part of a system that educates cohorts of children from age four to 18 or 19. School leaders and governing bodies, local authorities, teachers and other staff, parents and pupils all need to share the same set of clear expectations.
3. Direct schools to collect sex-based data. Schools should be reminded of their statutory obligations to record, store, use and share accurate information on the (biological) sex of all pupils – not their self-declared “gender identity”, which is likely to count as “special category data”, subject to strict controls and irrelevant to their education.
4. Uphold the Admissions Code. The DfE should state clearly that single-sex schools are under no obligation to consider any application from a child of the opposite sex: any case-by-case consideration on grounds of “gender identity” is a breach of the Admissions Code.
5. Uphold single-sex spaces. Schools must be reminded of their statutory obligation to provide single-sex toilets, showers, changing-rooms and sleeping accommodation for the age groups set out in law. All pupils should be told that they must not use facilities for the opposite sex, but schools should seek to accommodate trans-identified children.
6. Uphold single-sex sports. Mixed-sex sports are acceptable only when they do not disadvantage girls. No gender-confused child should be excluded from activities for their own sex; no child should be permitted to join activities for the opposite sex.
7. Avoid undermining safeguarding. Protection for free speech and accurate data on sex are both essential for risk assessment and child safeguarding. Schools and teachers should be reminded of their obligation to work with and share information with children’s parents and guardians on all safeguarding matters. Children must not be subject to lower standards of safeguarding because they are trans-identified.
8. Rule out full social transition in school. It is impossible to treat any child as if they are a member of the opposite sex in a school environment. A full social transition would expose a child to unacceptable safeguarding risks as well as infringing on other pupils’ rights.
9. Uphold freedom of belief and speech. School policies should not restrict pupils’ freedom to hold and express lawfully protected beliefs (including in the material reality of the two sexes). They should require all children to treat each other with respect, but not to pretend that a trans-identified classmate has changed sex.
10. Support clear sex-based rules and consideration for gender non-conforming children. Schools should use sex-based distinctions in policies and rules only where they are justified, and should consider reasonable accommodations to ensure that gender-distressed children are able to access education. This reduces the potential for both unlawful sex discrimination and unlawful gender-reassignment discrimination [ Dusty - I don’t think this applies - see what I say above] , and will help ensure appropriate provision for all gender non-conforming children, whether or not they are trans-identified.
The guidance is being published for consultation (which is open until 12th March 2024), which means that the final version can be strengthened. We will be publishing our feedback and guidance to support others in the new year.
I look forward to seeing the further feedback from Sex Matters and others.
Scarper the Rozzers are coming!!
In case you miss it, EDI Jester has done a hilarious post - my favourite bit being “Gender Identity is as real as Santa.” In the comments you will note reference to an equally hilarious Mumsnet thread on Twitter that my wife alerted me to. Dawn Butler Brent MP ( who said that when babies are born they don’t have a sex when she was Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities!) threatened to report Mumsnet to the police for transphobia which led to a ‘scarper the rozzers are coming’ thread on Mumsnet 🤣
Endpiece
Excellent Christmas song from Mr Menno with help from lots of our heroes 😎
Aww! Thanks Dusty 🤭.
Sex Matters have done some really clear and useful analysis. Good for anyone who wants to fill in the the consultation.
Will have to digest all this properly later Dusty, we’re still busy with grandchildren including a birthday. However, I did just flick through and notice that you did Christmas dinner! I’m impressed and very jealous of your wife 😆.
Re: the school’s guidance. I’ve done this update now and it’s particularly useful to see how you and others are sure that although it is guidance, it is based on the law and that teachers could find themselves prosecuted for failing to safeguard children. This is very reassuring, thanks for the excellent explanations and videos Dusty. Mr Menno 👏