For too long, some teachers and schools have been making it up as they go along when presented with the challenge of accommodating transgender-identified children. Either that or they have contracted out their thinking to Stonewall or other third-party providers. The promised guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) cannot come soon enough. The latest snippet that has emerged will reassure single-sex schools that they can indeed remain single-sex.
The rules around such schools have always allowed for some discretion. A boys’ school, for example, might admit a girl into the sixth form if the local girls’ school doesn’t offer her desired combination of A-Level subjects. But nobody would be under any illusion that the child has changed sex to do so. Her admission would be an ‘exceptional circumstance’, and the school would retain its single-sex-status. She would also need to be provided with appropriate facilities for her sex.
But transgender-identified pupils – of the opposite sex – present a very different challenge. They are unlikely to want to be singled out for special treatment in, for example, sports, changing rooms and toilets. Pressure would no doubt be put on the school to include them, and the other children risk being deprived of their right to single-sex activities and facilities.
Such pupils also present a challenge to the entire concept of single-sex education. If single-sex has meaning it must mean that; not single-gender – whatever gender might mean. Because admitting children of the opposite sex is not a zero-sum game. If boys – male children – are admitted to girls’ schools then girls who wanted a single-sex education lose out.
Of course, children struggling with ‘gender distress’ – a much better term than gender dysphoria, in my view – should not be excluded from single-sex schools designated for their own sex.
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