We’re hosting this piece from a mother who doesn’t want to be identified. Too often these stories - and there are many of them - are rejected on the grounds that those involved don’t want to go ‘on the record’.

In effect, it means that bullies outside the halls of some news outlets can hold sway. In many ways they still do. The extent to which gender identity affirmation is embedded in schools is still not well-covered. This year Julie Bindel and producer Sam Smith built a podcast - Julie in Genderland - that told some of these stories. It would have been an ideal fit for Radio 4, but the conditions still don’t obtain for that to happen. So we’re grateful to this mother for sharing her story, and her feelings about developments in health care and education around so-called ‘gender incongruence’.

This is her journey.

******************************************

In April this year, I met with some parents whose children previously went to the same school that my daughter attends now. We were joined by our former MP, who had supported us individually while he was in office (and their children were at the school) and had brought us together to share our experiences about our gender questioning children. Our stories differed but had a common core: the clarity that our children’s secondary school is either ignorantly or wilfully putting many vulnerable children at significant risk of harm.

Our children’s stories map out a timeline of consistently concerning behaviour from the school which spans a number of years, involving teachers, senior leadership and safeguarding leadership.

This is an updated version of an article that was first published by Safe Schools Alliance in July this year, incorporating recent developments at both a national and a personal level. Despite what has changed over this period, time and again I’m still seeing the same themes. Children like my daughter who’ve been diagnosed with (or are suspected to have) autism - together with schools that both fail to recognise this significance and which actively promote the idea that anyone with concerns about gender identity is at best unkind and at worst, a danger to children.

Understandably, not all the parents that I met with back in April were ready to share their stories in the media. Even with anonymity, some of the parents remain concerned that they risk causing their children further distress if they read and recognise their own experiences. This is my and one other family’s story.

The other family’s daughter attended the school a few years ago and was diagnosed with autism whilst still a pupil there. During this time, their daughter also became gender questioning - described by the parents as being ‘fanatical’ about the issue.

The parents had objected to the school, Children’s Services and CAMHS all using gender affirming language, but were advised by these bodies that they (the parents) had no say in this. The father threatened legal action against the school, but the school informed him that it had taken legal advice and had been told that it must take a gender affirming approach. The father requested to see the advice or to have a meeting with the school’s lawyers - because he knew the law was being applied incorrectly - but neither was forthcoming.

Eventually, worn down by the fight and in an attempt to avoid family breakdown, the parents gave in and ‘let it ride’. They now say they wished they had fought some of this pressure harder, but at the time they also felt that they were being threatened by Children’s Services.

Safeguarding and potential medical interventions

There were other examples of difficult experiences like this, and it was notable that during the parents’ conversations with the school, we all experienced the feeling that the Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL) hadn’t ever encountered the idea that someone’s same-sex attraction or autism could be an underlying factor behind them becoming gender questioning - despite each of us having had conversations with him about this, independently over the last few years.

It was also clear that all of the parents were concerned that the school’s active affirmation of any gender questioning child might signpost them towards irreversible medical interventions. I shudder to think that there will be gender questioning children, just like ours, who are about to qualify for the NHS to experiment on their brains and bodies in the Pathways clinical trial of puberty blockers, which starts its recruitment in January 2026. How this trial passed the ethics board beggars belief. It really doesn’t make it OK that they will collect data about any possible brain, bone or fertility damage.

We didn’t need nationally-run trials to fill in the knowledge gaps on, for example, whether lobotomies benefited children with mental health issues..and most people tend to agree that even with such data, experimenting on children is unethical.

To make matters worse, cross-sex hormones can currently and routinely still be given to children aged 16 or older in the UK. The legality of this was challenged in the High Court by Keira Bell, a detransitioner, who argued that vulnerable children and young people are at a high risk of permanent harm, given what is already known about the impact of testosterone on a female body and oestrogen on a male body - including on the brain.

Despite her challenge being unsuccessful, the Health Secretary is apparently still considering a full ban on cross-sex hormones for under 18s (for the reasons explained here by ex-BBC Newsnight journalist Hannah Barnes) but it’s clear that too many schools like my daughter’s are failing to recognise their own role in signposting children to demand this treatment.

The Department for Education released its annually updated statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe In Education (KCSIE) in July 2025, with effect from September 2025. Changes from KCSIE 2024 were minor and described by the DfE as ‘technical’, with additional guidance on Relationships Sex and Health Education (RSHE) also arriving in July 2025. Guidance to help schools support gender questioning children was also expected imminently at that time. In November 2025, we’re still waiting for this latter guidance - with no clear timeline on when it will be available.

But after the Cass Review in April 2024, and the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling a year later, could there at least now be hope that we are nearing the end of what was described in the House of Commons, by then Tory MP Miriam Cates, as ‘one of the worst safeguarding and medical scandals of our generation’?

In what was a critical turning point to help schools navigate this quagmire through a safeguarding lens, the 2024 KCSIE guidance acknowledged the importance of recognising that being LGB is different from being T - and why this matters for children who might be distressed or confused during puberty. This was the year that the guidance started using the term ‘gender questioning’ instead of ‘trans’ or “transgender”, in recognition of the advice from experts like the former Tavistock clinician David Bell.

He cautions that saying “trans” is unhelpful when referring to children because “it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. That is - the term itself suggests that all gender questioning children should transition, both socially and medically.

The KCSIE guidance is one of several pieces of secondary legislation which sit under the ‘umbrella’ of the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance, also owned by the DfE, which brings all agencies working with children into a shared safeguarding approach. So far, the KCSIE guidance is the only such legislation which differentiates the significant safeguarding, mental health and medical risks associated with being gender questioning (via its reference to the Cass Report) from being lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Increasingly, human rights groups, such as LGB Alliance, are campaigning for this important difference to be better understood because of the risks to young people with an emerging same-sex attraction.

My daughter’s story

My daughter is now in year 11 at the school, after we made the difficult decision to keep her there while she completes her GCSEs. Moving her with her Education and Healthcare Plan (EHCP) still woefully out of date introduces other risks. Also she has finally settled into life at the school after a very difficult three years, including a time when she was bullied severely. On balance, she is benefiting from being at the school, with the access that it gives her to sport and the full range of academic subjects that she wouldn’t get if she went to a specialist autism school.

Like many autistic children, who become (or have been) gender questioning, she is academically bright and has found the sensory aspect of breast development and the onset of periods distressing. My daughter is not currently actively gender questioning but she still finds the concept of what it means to ‘be’ female or male confusing.

The school continues to add to how confusing this is for her, with a constant drip feed that it’s important to ‘be kind’ by using everyone’s preferred pronouns and ‘respectful’ to do so. The clarity of who is male and who is female gets lost in this celebratory (and guilt-laden) message of ‘inclusion’. Children trust what their teachers tell them, often more than they trust their parents when it’s being positioned as educational.

Back in 2024, the school told me that it had removed pronoun posters from its walls, but I recently learned that this wasn’t true after seeing yet another example in a classroom, alongside an LGBTQ display. The latter is an example of political activism and queer theory hiding in plain sight in schools: in which the Q in the acronym seems to stand for breaking down boundaries and categories. That’s the opposite of what schools should be doing to help children learn how to stay safe.

How would Red Riding Hood have had the confidence to believe her own eyes when seeing a wolf who identified as Grandma - if she had been taught to believe that people are simply who they say they are? That not doing so is unkind.

This is the type of obfuscation that many schools in the UK are teaching children. This book and video from Pop n Olly, who create and supply primary school materials, turns boundaries on their head to promote inclusion - children are taught that a wolf in a dress is just someone who is misunderstood. Apparently clothes are just clothes (yes, agreed..) but are also a ‘good place to start to show people who you are and what’s in your heart’.

The sleight of hand moment - that children should trust everyone and should fight any gut instinct not to do so as being their own prejudice - gets lost under all the positive and inclusive language.

My daughter’s secondary school enthusiastically promotes the idea that we should support everyone’s ‘identity’ in its RSHE lessons and almost ad nauseam across the school. Just as in the Pop n Olly example above, they teach the students that its unkind not to accept everyone’s ‘identity’ as valid. The use of children’s preferred pronouns, where these differ from a child’s sex, is still an active part of the school’s culture and many staff share their preferred pronouns in email signatures to students, even when these clearly obviously match their own sex.

In other words, the school still promotes a belief in gender identity: the belief that we all have ‘gendered souls’ that can differ from our sex, and that it’s important to support people’s feelings about their ‘gender’ by using the pronouns that ‘align’ with it.

Quite the opposite of the ‘caution’ that both the 2024 and 2025 statutory safeguarding guidance calls for in regards to social transition. Instead, this approach risks positioning any parent as potentially unsafe to their own children: effectively framing them as cruel and unkind if the child becomes gender questioning and the parents want to adhere to the caution advocated by both this guidance and the Cass Report regarding the affirmative adoption of the child’s ‘identity’. It’s a situation where school staff, with their preferred pronouns and demonstrable openness to social transition, are advocated as a ‘safe’ alternative to the children’s own parents.

The impact of the school’s approach to gender identity also goes way beyond the gender questioning children themselves: it has the potential to impact every single child in the school directly.

As an example, my daughter recently asked a female student (who identifies as a boy) ‘If you’re female and attracted to boys, doesn’t that make you straight?’

A member of staff told my daughter that her question was transphobic, and a few days later, a boy in the year above announced to a room full of students that she was ‘transphobic and needs to apologise’. In response, the school advised my daughter that it is ‘important that we support everyone’s identity’.

Even setting aside the direct risk of increasing my daughter’s confusion about her own body and sexual orientation, she was effectively being coerced into understanding that it is unkind not to validate a child’s social transition. She was having her speech compelled through guilt and shame.

It’s the Orwellian equivalent of O’Brien explaining to Winston that it would be much kinder if he said he could see five fingers instead of four, regardless of objective reality, because otherwise lots of people might feel really sad and that would be his fault.

The school also told me that it needs to support its staff’s ‘freedom of expression’ if they want to share their preferred pronouns in their email signatures. Yet it fails to recognise that this is a tenet and promotion of a belief in gendered souls - and an indication that such staff will support any child’s social transition without exception.

Not only is this a likely to be a safeguarding failure under the existing KCSIE guidance, it is reasonable to conclude that it also fails teachers’ obligations under both Teaching Standards (statutory legislation which stipulates that teachers’ personal beliefs “are not expressed in ways which exploit pupils’ vulnerability”) and the Nolan principles of public life. These require teachers to be objective - including where the meaning of words like men, women, boys and girls are defined by the law and biology - not by a belief in gendered souls.

The school’s refusal to acknowledge Teaching Standards, the Nolan principles and the statutory KCSIE guidance relating to gender questioning children extends into its policies as well. Its safeguarding policy conflates sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, effectively creating a situation where children can self-ID as male or female, because it is impossible to distinguish between these.

Given the school’s explanation to my daughter about the importance of ‘supporting people’s identity, it’s reasonable to assume that parents are expected to act like Winston in Orwell’s 1984 and say that they can see five fingers - that their child’s ‘identity’ as male, female or otherwise is whatever their child says it is, regardless of what may have led them to become gender questioning, or the objective reality of their sex - as to do otherwise is hurtful to the child.

Parents have always known that sometimes they need to say and do things that make their child feel sad, because it is in the child’s best long term interest; protecting their child from the affirmation pathway described in the Cass Report, that starts with social transition and ends with permanent medical intervention, is just one such example.

I have been referred twice by the school to Children’s Services. On the first occasion, they told me (by email) that this was because of a ‘negative atmosphere’ in our home owing to the way that I discussed the topic of gender identity.

According to the school, my daughter’s ‘perspective [of these conversations] has not been a positive one’. Thankfully, Children’s Services recognised that the school had no valid reason to refer me, partly because I had already voluntarily sought and received their help when my daughter had had a mental health crisis and this had impacted the whole family. Frustratingly, the safeguarding leadership team didn’t liaise with the senior school staff member (also on the safeguarding team) who knew all the details about this. I had been communicating the information on everything throughout.

On the second occasion, I was told verbally that it was because she was still struggling. On this occasion, I ended up having some in-depth conversations with the Children’s Services team on the conflation of autism and gender identity. The case was subsequently closed, with Children’s Services being satisfied that we were looking after our family well. No actions were progressed against me.

I firmly believe that the reason the school referred me twice to Children’s Services is because it is managing me as a likely domestic abuser under its safeguarding policy, despite all the support that the school knows I gave to my child while she was gender questioning and continue to give her now as she continues to navigate puberty and autism.

During the course of my many conversations with the school, the safeguarding leadership team has consistently demonstrated a lack of understanding and interest in the reasons why a child may become gender questioning, just as the other parents experienced before me.

I’m glad that I’ve met these other parents - we’re still in touch and will continue to support each other. My heart breaks over some of the things that I heard.

Children are finding information about gender identity on the internet and through talking to each other - there are so many children like ours who start to wonder if their discomfort with their bodies and emotions during puberty means they are not really girls (or boys) at all. It is incumbent on schools to remember what they already know about the way that autism affects girls’ and boys’ experiences of puberty, that children who start to feel an emerging same-sex attraction can feels scared that they are “different” and that children are vulnerable to beliefs which purport to have the answers yet can lead to physical and mental harm.

I’m also glad that our ex-MP has kept an interest in our journeys and those of our children. Despite having previously spoken on the public record about some of the risks associated with gender identity, he agreed to remain anonymous to protect our children’s anonymity.

After we all met up, I asked him his thoughts on the current KCSIE guidance, the RSHE guidance (which was still outstanding at the time we spoke) and the seemingly interminably delayed gender questioning guidance - and when we might expect the clarity that vulnerable children like ours need to keep them safe:

“The stories that I have heard from these parents demonstrate that the government needs to take urgent action in schools because schools are the front line into the dangerous pathway of medical transition for thousands of vulnerable children. The government has an opportunity to deal with this link between education and healthcare.

Whatever the government does or does not do, I have seen up close that parents across Britain really do need to watch out for ‘Progress Pride Flag’-flying schools, and ‘woke’ teachers who are so scared of their own shadow that they’d rather send children - young autistic girls in particular - on a damaging and irreversible path than engage critical thinking about the harm that their virtue signalling is doing.”

Will this Labour government have the moral courage to finish what the Conservative government could not? Although better guidance is still needed, who is making sure that schools follow the existing legislation, which prioritises objectivity and safeguarding over a perceived “inclusion” when it comes to protecting gender questioning children from adults who wilfully or ignorantly pull them towards a belief in gendered souls?

Just as it’s not bigoted or ignorant to say “I don’t believe in god”, nor is it to say “I don’t believe that everyone has a gender identity”. It is not unfair to support the rights that were validated in the recent Supreme Court judgement for organisations like LGB Alliance to exclude heterosexuals, predicated on same-sex attraction rather than a belief that it’s possible for a heterosexual man with a penis to be a lesbian woman.

Nor is it “right wing” or “hurtful” to support the clarity from the judgement which validates that women can have their own categories in football, athletics and other sports which exclude males.

As we await the release of the Gender Questioning Children guidance that will accompany the KCSIE and RHSE documents, the next few months will make it abundantly clear whether this government is taking the future mental and physical health of vulnerable children and young people seriously.

Or will we need to wait for the court cases to pile up? Will we need to hear the pain in the voices of hundreds or thousands of detransitioners across the world - some of whom are yet to be harmed - holding a mirror up to our schools to show them what happened when they separated children from their parents and ‘supported their identity’ - straight down the pathway of a global medical scandal.