New Proposed Sex Ed Rules Ban the “Contested Topic” of Gender Identity in the U.K.
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The U.K. Department for Education on Thursday unveiled new draft guidelines that would prohibit education on gender identity in primary and secondary schools, and restrict the ages at which children may receive sexual education lessons or learn about bodily consent.
If adopted, the draft Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) guidelines would create a blanket ban on lessons about the concept of gender identity, which the document calls a “highly contested and complex” idea that is inappropriate for schools. The guidelines also emphasize that any instruction on transgender people should be focused on the legality of transitioning: that “an individual must be 18 before they can legally reassign their gender,” and that while they are in school, “boys cannot be legally classified as girls or vice versa.”
While some, especially conservatives, reject the idea that a person’s gender identity can differ from that expected of them based on assigned sex, the concept of gender identity itself is neither new nor controversial. Pediatric research has shown that children begin forming ideas about gender — their own and others’ — between the ages of two and three. However, in a press release accompanying the draft guidelines, department officials cited the recent Cass Review as evidence that schools should “not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum.”
The Cass Review, a U.K. meta-analysis that recommended “extreme caution” in allowing children to transition medically or socially, has been the subject of significant controversy since its release in April. Numerous medical organizations and trans advocates claim it disregarded relevant research, presented key claims without evidence, and took a biased stance against the existence of trans children at all. Still, the National Health Service (NHS) announced new policies in deference to the review following its release, and will no longer make puberty blockers “routinely available” for gender-dysphoric children.
Apart from its ban on gender identity lessons, much of the RHSE report sets forth guidelines for the minimum grade level a student must be in order to receive sexual health education on a variety of topics. Students in Year Three, generally seven years old, may not receive any kind of sex ed according to the guidelines, but may be warned about the risks of social media and online games. Only in Year Four may eight-year-old students be taught about puberty, menstruation, and adolescence in general — but not about sex itself. Year Five students may receive a “factual approach teaching children about conception and birth,” as well as how to report abuse and inappropriate behavior, but not “in any sexually explicit way” with regard to conduct or acts. The guidelines do not specify what constitutes a prohibited “explicit” lesson.
After leaving primary school, students may learn more about “harmful sexual behavior” including grooming, revenge porn, and how pornography is a “distorted picture” of real-life sex, upon reaching Year Seven. Only when students are in Year Nine — usually 13 years old — may teachers give an “explicit” lesson on sex, sexual assault, coercive control, and intimate violence. But those lessons should still not “encourage or normalize early sexual experimentation,” the guidelines stress. (Developmentally-appropriate sexual experimentation in childhood is considered by pediatric health experts and anti-abuse advocates to be both healthy and normal.)
Schools may offer RHSE lessons earlier than the specified ages “in certain circumstances” including when a student is believed to be in danger of harm, but the lessons should be “limited to the essential facts” if so. The guidelines would also require all RHSE lesson plans to be made available to parents and guardians ahead of time, and allow them to “automatically” withdraw their primary-aged children from any sex ed lessons except those specifically part of a science curriculum.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has repeatedly expressed anti-trans views in office, told the BBC that the new guidance would prevent children from being “exposed to disturbing content” in school. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan further told the BBC that she had allegedly received evidence that teachers had used classroom materials with “things like choosing lots of different genders and identities [...] The sort of, 'it can be a spectrum, it's fluid, you can have different genders on different days' or 'there's 72 of them'. That kind of thing.” But Keegan also admitted that allegation was “not something that we've gone and done a particular survey of,” and that she did not believe such lessons were common in U.K. schools.
Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, told Politico that the guidelines were “yet more culture war noise from an ill-informed and out of touch government.”
“The government appears to be seeding doubts that this [age-appropriate sex education] is not already being done and thought about carefully by school leaders and teachers up and down the land,” Kebede said.
It’s like the DeSantis administration wrote it.
Nadia Whittome, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, compared the guidelines to Section 28 (the infamous U.K. law that banned “promoting” homosexuality as a “pretended family relationship” in schools and government) in comments to PinkNews on Wednesday. “The Tories’ claims about what children are learning are designed to fuel hysteria and build support for Section 28 style policies — which is what this latest guidance seems to be harking back to,” Whittome said.
The RHSE draft guidelines now enter a period of public comment, which lasts until July 11. Once finalized, schools would be required to follow them.
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