Schools do not have to accommodate children who want to change gender, the attorney-general said.
Suella Braverman said that schools are under no legal obligation to address children by a new pronoun or allow them to wear the school uniform of a different gender. She reiterated that girls’ lavatories and changing rooms have special legal protections as safe spaces.
In an interview with The Times, Braverman said teachers need to take a “much firmer line” and suggests that some schools were encouraging gender dysphoria by an “unquestioning approach”.
She described JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author who has campaigned to protect female-only spaces, as a “heroine” of hers. “Very brave, very courageous. I’m on her side.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Braverman said:
● Pupils who were born male should not be able to use girls’ lavatories or changing facilities.
● The Girls’ Day School Trust was right not to admit boys who identify as girls, protecting their single-sex status.
● It is “outrageous” if a pupil, teacher or parent could not question someone’s assertion they were transgender, after an 18-year-old pupil said she was forced out of her school in a transphobia row.
In a separate article in The Times, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that a woman was “someone who is sexually a woman, who is born and identifies as a woman or who has transitioned”.
The Most Rev Justin Welby said there was a difference between “how you identify a woman and how you ensure that trans people are valued and cared for in exactly the same way as every other human being”.
He said: “They’re not less, they have their particular challenges, every human being has their particular challenges. But we can’t get away from the science. We’ve got to start there.”
JK Rowling has the backing of Braverman and the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD
The hounding of Rowling for her views on the subject was “wrong”, he said. “It’s fine to disagree vehemently but not abusively . . . The culture wars approach is where we end up in the greatest trouble.”
Braverman’s comments represent the most forthright intervention by a minister on the issue and come as the government is drawing up formal guidance for schools.
Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, has suggested that schools should “accommodate” pupils with gender dysphoria by allowing, for example, pupils born male to use girls’ lavatories and changing facilities when not in use by others.
However, Braverman said the law is clear because under-18s cannot not legally change their gender, meaning schools are entitled to treat all children by the gender of their birth.
Some teachers and schools, she suggested, were effectively encouraging gender dysphoria by taking an “unquestioning” attitude. Some schools, she claimed, were failing to tell parents that their children want to change genders.
The legal position, she says, is simple. “Under-18s cannot get a gender recognition certificate, under-18s cannot legally change sex. So again in the context of schools I think it’s even clearer actually. A male child who says in a school that they are a trans girl, that they want to be female, is legally still a boy or a male. And they can be treated as such under the law. And schools have a right to treat them as such under the law. They don’t have to say ‘OK, we’re going to let you change your pronoun or let you wear a skirt or call yourself a girl’s name’.
“Equally if they say they’re non-binary they still remain legally, and physically, the sex they were born to. The school doesn’t have to say ‘Actually OK, we’ll take what this child says and we’ll change our systems and service to accommodate this child’. It doesn’t have to do that.”
The Equality Act, she said, contained “very important single-sex exemptions”. Asked whether pupils who are born male should be able to use girls’ lavatories or changing facilities, she said: “I would say to the school that they don’t have to and that they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t allow that child to go into girls’ toilets.
“I think protecting single-sex spaces for biological females and biological males is really important, particularly in schools. There’s no duty on schools to compromise on single-sex spaces. From a safeguarding point of view you can argue that there is a duty on schools to preserve single-sex spaces, and ensure spaces are for biological females. I would extend that to school uniforms personally, I think the law allows schools to do that.”
The debate is new, and largely uncharted, territory for the government. Zahawi is drawing up guidance for schools on how to support children with gender dysphoria with input from the attorney-general.
This month he told The Times that schools should accommodate trans children and suggested they could allow, for example, pupils born male to use girls’ lavatories and changing facilities when they are not in use by others.
It is not a view endorsed by Braverman, 42, who said that teachers and medical professionals should take a much “firmer line” on gender dysphoria”. She added: “You can see that by huge disparities around the country. Some parts of the country there are very low rates of children presenting as transgender, in some parts of the country it’s quite worryingly high. That must be to do with the way teachers and local education authorities are approaching this subject. I think there is something to be said for young people seeing what their peers are doing and being influenced by that.
“Medical professionals, teachers should be taking a much firmer line. They shouldn’t take an unquestioning approach, they shouldn’t just take what the child says. There could be a whole host of other causes to why that child might be coming forward with these issues. It might not actually be that they want to go down the line of gender reassignment.”
Braverman’s forthright position is not untypical of her approach to politics. She is firmly from the right of the Conservative Party, a hardline Brexiteer and a prominent supporter of the government’s plans to send cross-Channel migrants to Rwanda. She is frequently the subject of abuse on Twitter: “I get a lot of abuse. I get trolled, Twitter has a very strong left wing bias,” she said. “Actually for me, my barometer, it’s got to this point where if I get trolled and I provoke a bad response on Twitter I know I’m doing the right thing. Twitter is a sewer of left-wing bile and there’s very little sensible, moderate voices either way actually get drowned out. The extreme left pile on is often a consequence of sound conservative values.”
Her conservatism was forged by her family. Her mother was a nurse who came to Britain from Mauritius to work as a nurse, while her father was from Kenya.
Braverman described herself as a “child of the British Empire”, adding: “My parents were born under the British Empire in their countries, they came to this country with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did for Mauritius and Kenya, and India, where we have our ancestral origins.
“The British Empire is sometimes seen very negatively, and as a source of shame. There’s a trend to start apologising, decolonising, cancelling, erasing that part of our history. And of course, there were some aspects which were bad, but on the whole, I believe the British Empire was a force for good.
“Relatives of mine, on my mother’s side, fought with the British Army in World War Two and I’m very proud of that connection. So there’s a real admiration and gratitude for Britain and what Britain did for my parents growing up, and they didn’t come here with resentment towards Britain, quite the opposite.”
The good that the empire did, she argued, gets drowned out by condemnation of the slave trade. “We’ve also got to remember that Britain ended slavery as well and was a force of abolitionism. Wilberforce is the father of abolition and he was a British statesman.”
Braverman grew up near Wembley in northwest London. After attending a state school her mother and father put together enough money to send her to a private school on a partial scholarship. She says it represented a significant sacrifice for her family, more so when her father became unemployed, and spurred her to apply herself in her studies.
She inherited many of her conservative values from her mother, who served as a councillor in Brent for 16 years. “Every few years our house would be transformed into a campaigning machine with maps of polling districts and leaflets and rosettes and people coming and going. The buzz of elections was something very normal and familiar for me.”
Braverman went on to study law at Cambridge University and gained a master’s degree in law in Paris. She was called to the Bar in 2005 and entered parliament a decade later as the Tory MP for Fareham.
“I love the cliché of the Asian doctor, of the Asian accountant, because they are the product of a whole generation of pushy Asian parents who came here with nothing who were incredibly resilient, doughty, fiercely ambitious and aspirational for their children,” she said. “Who essentially wanted to get their children into the professions, in medical school or into law school.”
Before she was appointed as attorney-general she was best known as one of the 28 “Spartans” who refused to vote for Theresa May’s Brexit deal. She stood down from May’s government over the deal and opposed it to the end.
For critics of Brexit the term “Spartan” is used as a term of mockery but Braverman embraces it. “It’s a badge of honour for me, it’s not an insult at all,” she said. “The deal was a sellout on sovereignty, it was a sellout on the Union, it was a sellout on Brexit.”
Boris Johnson ultimately supported the deal. Was he wrong to do so? “It was so difficult,” Braverman said. “Many of my friends changed their minds. We’re all still Brexiteers. Boris did negotiate a far superior deal. We were looking like a joke on the world stage.”
That deal, however, has had significant consequences. Britain is poised to introduce legislation that will enable it to override swathes of the Northern Ireland protocol, arguing that the EU’s application of it is hindering trade and putting the Good Friday agreement at risk. Braverman has provided legal advice to the prime minister approving of the legislation, something she refuses to discuss.
On the broad principles, however, she is happy to comment. “The problems being caused are very clear,” she said. “We’ve got a real threat to the foundation of peace which is the Good Friday agreement. The agreement depends on the consent of both communities — that is totally out of balance. Not just marginally but severely.”
The EU has warned that it will take retaliatory action if Britain tries to over-ride the protocol, raising the prospect of a trade war. Braverman argued that it would harm the EU more than the UK. “A trade war would not be good for anybody. It would be an act of self harm on the part of the EU. The UK has a very strong position in this dynamic from a trade point of view, actually because of the balance of payments. We have a very clear ask. Making threats isn’t going to solve the issues of Northern Ireland.”
The role of attorney-general is broad. Braverman recently visited Ukraine to meet her counterpart and discuss the prosecution of war crimes. She was “shocked” by the scale and scope of the atrocities. Ukraine has opened 11,000 cases and has hundreds of prisoners of war.
“It’s obviously very harrowing,” she said. “You’ve got instances where villages, residential settlements are being attacked. There’s clearly no soldiers there.
“You’ve got unarmed civilians being targeted deliberately. There is some evidence of civilians who pose no threat whatsoever to Russians being killed. You’ve also got evidence of forced deportation. And now some evidence of rape being used as a weapon of war.”
Braverman said that one of the government’s most contentious policies — sending migrants to Rwanda — is a “good one”. She said: “It’s the right decision, we need to ensure there is a deterrent effect, a limitation of this illegal and immoral trade,” she said. It would, she admitted, inevitably be subject to legal challenge. “We will do all we can to defend it.”
She wants to go further on judicial review and ensure that Britain’s courts are not used for “political purposes”. The government is still considering introducing measures to bar claims being made by groups that have no direct involvement. “Frankly the judges don’t want to be dragged in to crowdfunded political campaigns run by lobby groups or people with an axe to grind against this administration,” she said. “We still need to look at matters like standing.”
She is forthright on the need for tax cuts. A windfall tax, she said, was the wrong approach. In comments made before Sunak’s decision to introduce one, Braverman said: “I wouldn’t want to do that. I’ll be straight above that. I don’t think that automatically rushing to tax our way out of problems is sustainable for our economic welfare. Nor is it the Conservative thing to do. We want to incentivise investment not undermine confidence. Instinctively I’m against it.”
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