Times - School parents join forces to fight ‘trans propaganda’

School parents join forces to fight ‘trans propaganda’

Jayden Lowe, 18, who took his own life last year

BPM MEDIA

Sian Griffiths, Education Editor

Sunday August 04 2019, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Original article is here

For Tanya Carter, a mother of four girls, the death of Jayden Lowe, a transgender teenager who took his own life last year after buying hormone treatment from doctors online, was the last straw.

Carter had already begun to question some of the advice being given to children about changing sex when Jayden, 18, died.

He had attended the sixth-form college in Cambridgeshire where one of her children is a pupil.

“My heart breaks for the loss of . . . a truly special and talented individual with so much to offer,” she said.

Carter, a former chairwoman of school governors, has watched with concern as schools across the country draw up LGBT policies and guidelines. She said some are inviting specialist lobby groups to advise children who are questioning their gender identity about how to transition from girls to boys and vice versa.

“I am extremely concerned about what I am witnessing my children encounter in their schools and online and also the national picture,” she said. “I have seen other girls at school with my children ‘transition’: according to what I have seen online on their social media accounts, sometimes this happened without parental consent.”

Now Carter has joined other parents, teachers, doctors and psychologists to campaign for change. The Safe Schools Alliance has 150 members all over the country and more than 1,000 followers on social media.

The group says schoolgirls’ rights to single-sex changing rooms and lavatories have been eroded by school policies that encourage gender-neutral facilities.

It also says that children questioning their gender identity are being encouraged towards “drastic and irreversible” medical interventions such as drugs that block puberty. In some cases parents are not being told by schools that their children are asking to be treated as a different gender.

The group has written to ministers to raise its concerns. It wants to work with schools to improve their LGBT and safeguarding policies and to offer alternative counselling to children and families.