Local authorities and the transing of non-transgender young people: a serious child safeguarding issue

Jul 31, 2020 by Jill

by Gary Powell, Conservative Home:

Local authorities have a legal and moral safeguarding duty in relation to how their services impact on children and also people with protected characteristics defined by the Equality Act 2010. There are nine protected characteristics, including sexual orientation, sex, disability and gender reassignment. With the onward march of extreme gender ideology, we are seeing an alarming number of false positives among children identified – or “self-identifying” – as transgender. Most at risk of being catapulted along a false transing pathway are children who are actually gay, lesbian, on the autistic spectrum, or gender-non-conforming.

Councils need to take reasonable and appropriate steps to prevent the services that they provide or support causing harm to children because of reckless political virtue-signalling, (which includes allowing boys to use girls’ toilets in schools). If they do not, then those local authorities will be in serious breach of their child safeguarding duties and their duties to avoid causing indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 with regard to sexual orientation, disability (autism) and sex. Betraying vulnerable children will rightly expose councils to legal action in due course by the victims of that betrayal.

The main purveyor in the UK of what I would term extreme gender ideology is the LGBT+ lobbying group, Stonewall: an multi-million-pound turnover outfit that receives over £600,000 from local and national government, and that I wrote about previously in Conservative Home. It has enormous influence on Relationship and Sex Education in schools via its LGBT+ education programmes. As a gay rights activist for forty years, I regard Stonewall as having become a highly pernicious influence in modern British society.

Read here