Schools keeping gender secrets is a minefield

If Rishi Sunak wants a noisy distraction from partygate, he will swiftly publish his government’s new draft guidance on how English schools should respond to pupils wishing to change their gender. Then open the consultation on it and wait for fireworks to begin.

The Prime Minister has already told The Sun on Sunday that new rules will mean a pupil’s parents must be informed before teachers begin using different pronouns to refer to them in school.

Furthermore, it seems schools will be forbidden from recognising a gender transition unless the parents consent to it, and that even where they do consent, the impact on other pupils must be taken into account before allowing it.

There are several separate questions here.

The first is whether parents should have a right to know that their child wishes to undertake a “social” transition – which may or may not involve changing their name, the pronouns they ask others to use when referring to them, the version of school uniform they wear, or none of these things.

The second is whether parents have a right to veto these aspects of transition that require others – including teachers – to change their behaviour or apply different rules. The third is whether third parties should effectively have a similar veto power.

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The second and third questions are inextricably linked to the weighty questions about child welfare that arise from the broader debate about gender and identity, but the first is in many ways separate.

Some campaigners are keen to compare disclosures about gender identity to those about sexuality, but in reality there’s a huge difference. Asking a teacher to refrain from mentioning a pupil’s disclosure that they are gay or bisexual to their parents is a very different thing from concealing the fact that they adopt a whole different identity when at school.

The Scottish Government published a document, Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools, in August 2021 but there appears to be confusion over how teachers should or should not act when a pupil declares a new gender identity.

The Sunday Mail reported last year that staff at one high school were instructed to keep transitions secret if pupils asked them to, on the basis that – as stated in the guidance – “being transgender is not a child protection or wellbeing concern in itself”. The newspaper’s investigation found there was significant variation in how the guidance was being applied.

Elsewhere in the document, it is recommended that consent is obtained from parents or carers of under-16s before school records are changed, and that “it is good practice to engage with parents in decision-making, working closely with the young people”.

There are suggestions that teachers could arrange meetings with parents to discuss the situation, and if necessary disclose agreed details to them on the pupil’s behalf.

While emphasising the value of open communication, the guidance also refers to potential stress and risk that could arise from “inadvertent disclosures”, adding that these may breach legal requirements.

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The First Minister made reference to such a potentially risky situation during the SNP leadership race, saying that amid discussions around the Gender Recognition Reform Bill he spoke to a young Muslim who was trans, who “told me very clearly that if his parents had known he was transitioning, reprisals would have been pretty difficult”.

It’s worth considering the types of contexts in which such disclosures might occur. If, for example, a teacher refers to a female pupil as “he” or by a male name at a parents’ evening, or a secretary does so in a phone call to the family home, what might the consequences be?

Is it reasonable to expect this level of mental gymnastics to be performed, amid the fear of triggering alarming reprisals? What if there are 10 trans-identifying pupils in the school? What if there are 50?

What of other young people who attend school with a trans-identifying classmate – or, as is not uncommon, a whole social group where each member is identifying as the opposite sex, or non-binary?

The widespread adoption of trans identities in some schools creates a host of potential challenges but surely as a starting point we need to ask if we are comfortable with asking children to participate in keeping a pretty significant secret from the parents of a peer, potentially for six years?

One teacher who spoke to the Sunday Mail said: “If something was to happen to one of these children and a parent found out this information was kept from them while being circulated to hundreds of teachers and staff, they would be understandably furious.”

Surely they are quite likely to be furious, or at least dismayed, regardless of the circumstances in which they eventually learn about it – not least because of the implication that they could not be trusted to know sooner.

Expect robust debate around England’s draft policy and plenty of claims this is a knee-jerk act of “culture wars” villainy. Let’s hope the important questions about how all this works in practice – and the impact of different approaches on the relationships between families and schools – are not drowned out.