Dr Bernard Randall: ‘Schools can’t lie to children – you can’t change sex’

Jan 23, 2024 by Jill

by Peter Stanford, Telegraph:

The former chaplain, sacked for telling children they should question gender ideology, says his sermon was inviting ‘balanced debate’.

The culture wars over transgender issues have caused some notable casualties, notably the Harry Potter writer JK Rowling, but many others too who have fallen foul were just going about their everyday lives. “I’m clearly not in the same league of JK Rowling,” says the Rev Mr Bernard Randall. “She’s a proper person. I’m just me.”

But for the 48-year-old father of one, the personal cost of getting caught up in the battle has been just as traumatic. After provoking a furore in June 2019 when he delivered a sermon in the chapel of the Derbyshire private school where he was chaplain that invited – “rather instructed,” he points out – pupils to reflect on the Church’s teaching on sex and marriage, he has been sacked, barred from leading services anywhere in the Church of England, and referred to a range of official bodies from the local authority designated safeguarding officer (the “LADO”), national educational regulatory authorities, and the Government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent.

All three saw no reason to take any action against him, to his relief, but still he faces the prospect of never being able work again or follow his religious vocation to ministry. “Who will give me a job when I have no references from a previous employer and when I bring with me all sorts of baggage?”

[…] Before the pupils arrived back for the new term, the staff gathered to brush up their skills by attending a session from Educate & Celebrate, a charity that works with school communities to tackle and reduce homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.

It had been named in a list of useful resources by Valuing All God’s Children, a 2014 Church of England report on education, though it has no religious attachments itself.

“Elements of what they told us were fine,” he recalls, “that we should not tolerate bullying for example, and things around diversity, but I found that their references to ‘smashing heteronormativity’ [the assumption that most or all people are straight] did not sit well in a Christian school.”

Read here (£)