The Countess has been highlighting the safeguarding issues arising from gender ideology and it’s widespread adoption in Irish society. This long read by The Countess Schools & Safeguarding working group lead, Judith Murphy, a retired social worker, gives deeper insight into why this is such a major concern.
I realised that the drastic changes in legislation and government policies were made at the behest of transgender lobby groups, including TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland) and BelongTo. These groups are put forward as the experts on the needs of trans-identifying people, including trans-identifying children. BelongTo and other LGBTQ+ organisations train teachers and youth workers on how to support trans-identifying and LGB children and young people. This training promotes the affirmative model, which relies on social transition and medicalisation as a solution to a temporary crisis of identity.
Children and teenagers are coming into contact with ‘trans content’ on social media, through peers and adults who identify as trans. Youth clubs and sports clubs strive to be trans-inclusive and since September 2023 the Junior Cycle curriculum has introduced the concept of gender identity into the Social Personal and Health Education curriculum (SPHE). The draft revised Senior Cycle SPHE Curriculum also includes teaching of gender theory as fact. The Junior Cycle SPHE curriculum, defines Gender Identity as ‘a person’s felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex registered at birth.’
Sex is also described in places as being ‘assigned at birth’. This is a clear demonstration that the NCCA, the body responsible for designing the new curriculum has accepted and aims to promote the core doctrine of gender-identity theory, namely that everybody is born with an innate gender identity. SPHE and CSPE schoolbooks contain these statements as fact.
The existence of such an internal and individual experience of gender, separate from the sex observed and registered at birth, is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, and unknowable. It is not a fact but a theory. That this theory or belief is taught in Irish schools as fact has become a very controversial issue.
Many parents of children being taught this theory are not aware of it and do not know that it is taught to their child in school as a fact. Other parents may be aware but do not agree with this theory and there are some who do believe that everyone has an innate sense of gender and want it taught in schools. The same variety of experience and opinion is found in many teachers, school principals, and also many social workers.
This situation is causing some confusion, tension, and conflict for teachers, parents, and children. We have already seen conflict around this issue. When adults create a situation that puts children at the centre of a conflict between them, it is the adults’ first duty to the children to find a solution to this conflict, because this is in the children’s best interest.
If I were asked for professional advice on how a solution could be achieved, I would recommend that schools and/or the Department of Education be very transparent about the content of SPHE lesson plans and listen to and respect parents’ wishes. I would go as far as to suggest that parents should be offered the same training and guidance as teachers, to enable them to make an informed decision on whether they agree to their children being taught gender-identity theory.
Parents are the primary carers and educators of their children. The school does not have the right to teach children a novel belief as fact without parents’ expressed consent, just as it does not have the right to keep any incident or issue of importance about the child from the parents. Some schools/teachers have inappropriately adopted the role of co-parents. They are not co-parents, schools/teachers act in loco parentis, taking such care of children as a careful parent would of his/her child and with the implicit the understanding that the care offered by teachers does not seek to undermine the beliefs/values of the family of origin. This would be a violation of parents’ rights.
In this context it is very concerning that the Irish LGBTQ+ Youth Support Service BelongTo advises teachers and youth workers in their training manual ‘not to “out” children to their parents/guardians’ and that they should, if directly asked about a child ‘s sexuality/gender by a parent, lie and say, ‘I don’t know’.
The rationale for this advice is ‘being transgender is not a child-safeguarding concern.’ As a social worker with almost two decades of experience, I am not sure what this sentence is supposed to convey. It appears that BelongTo is confusing the roles of schools and teachers with those of a professional therapist, who, with the consent of parents, agree that in a therapeutic relationship the therapist will keep anything that was said during the session confidential, with the caveat that if the child discloses something that indicates a child safeguarding concern the parents (unless they are the source of the protection concern) and Child Protection Services need to be informed.
A teacher is not a therapist and is obliged to inform parents of any significant issue or incident regarding the child. BeLongTo’s concern is that a child might be harmed by parents’ refusal to affirm a child’s trans identity. This relies on the most egregious of lies — that the risk of suicide is elevated among people who are not affirmed in their gender identity. To suggest to teachers that students are at greater risk of suicide if their parents do not affirm them is profoundly manipulative and callous. If a teacher has concerns about a child’s safety, he or she has a professional obligation to follow the Children First guidelines and report this child protection concern to the intake team of the local Social Work Department.
If a teacher follows BeLongTo’s guidance, he or she is violating parental rights, and undermining basic safeguarding principles, including:
- A trusted adult should never keep a secret with a child,
- Do not undermine the authority of parents,
- Do not collude with the child against the parents, and
- Do not interfere in the parent–child relationship.
Social workers who learn of anything that impacts a child must inform the parents. The same applies when the child has said something important to a social worker, even if the child asks not to tell the parents. The only exception to this rule is when there are concrete indications that the child would be harmed if the parents were told. In that case, a social worker is not authorized to make that decision alone. It needs to be signed off on by the social worker’s line manager. BeLongTo’s advice to teachers is clearly in breach of these safeguarding principles.
It is irresponsible to suggest that it is acceptable and safe for teachers to decide to keep something as fundamental from the parents as a child declaring a trans identity. A teacher is not in a position to judge what consequences this might have for the child.
It is deeply concerning that the Department of Education sanctions training programmes for teachers and youth workers that recommend breaches of important child safe-guarding principles.
In other jurisdictions there are reports of schools and teachers socially transitioning children without parents’ consent and knowledge. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/trans-pupils-our-daughter-school-furries-transgender-treatment-c09lqffzb
To the best of my knowledge, children being secretly transitioned in Irish schools has not yet been reported. If it were, this would be a major breach of parents’ rights. I think that schools know this and won’t agree. However, to socially transition a child or young person is always a matter of concern, because it is not a neutral act, but a profound psychosocial intervention. It is common for children and young people to question their gender identity, to feel uncomfortable in their developing bodies, or feel they are not fitting in with their peers, during some period of growing up. Often children and young people try out different identities for a while. Most of them develop into adulthood reconciled with their gender. When the adults in their lives confirm to a boy or girl that they are the gender they prefer, and use the name and pronoun they have chosen, they concretise their belief that they are the preferred gender. Their ability to change their mind about it is severely diminished because if the adults say it, it must be true. Should their feelings on the matter change, it would be extremely difficult to say so because they made parents, teachers and peers believe them and support them.
BelongTo, TENI and other LGBT organisations advise schools to affirm a child’s claim to be something other than their birth sex and to use their preferred name and pronouns, with the support of the Department of Education, as outlined in the Being LGBT in School, document written by GLEN, (Gay and Lesbian Network). The chapter on Transgender was written by TENI (Trans Equality Network Ireland). https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/e73c15-being-lgbt-in-school
To socially transition in school puts this child/young person on the first rung of the ladder to seeking medical treatment in the future, which puts a huge medical burden on the child/young person.
Teachers do not know the effects social transitioning will have on the child/young person and his or her family and will not have to deal with the consequences. Furthermore, the teacher does not know how the child’s friends and classmates will deal with it. They might feel pressured into agreeing and accepting that their friend’s name, pronouns, and sex have changed and might be negatively affected by this. The other children in school will be expected to become ‘allies’ to the child who came out as ‘trans’. It would be extremely difficult for a child/young person to object to this. The school have a responsibility to all of their students, whose needs have to be considered just as much as the child who wishes to transition.
In my view, it is completely unethical to violate children’s boundaries like that. Again, the teacher would not have any idea how the other children might feel about the social transition of their schoolmate. They might be confused and upset about the fact that their friend is no longer who he or she was. If they do not agree with the concept, they would not be able to express this because they might be regarded as transphobic or bigoted and reprimanded for their unacceptable views.
Socially transitioning a child or young person in school, as recommended by LGBT organisations and the Department of Education, would also be breaching safeguarding principles, such as that a trusted adult should not cross children’s boundaries.
Should a school socially transition a child or young person without parents’ knowledge and consent, it would violate parents’ rights and interfere unduly in the family’s life. This would also breach an important safeguarding rule that an adult should not keep a secret with a child from parents nor ask children to keep a secret.
Children with additional learning needs
Many adults find the concept that everybody has a gender that might or might not match their biological sex hard to understand. Ideas such as gender fluidity and non-binary are even more complicated. Most children, but especially children with learning disabilities or children on the autistic spectrum cannot grasp what gender identity means. They are likely to get the message that they can change their sex. Children who are struggling with all kinds of mental health or identity issues, might be attracted to the idea that they could be trans because they are led to believe that transitioning would solve all their difficulties, that they would become a different person. The concern that particularly vulnerable children would wish to transition was confirmed in the Cass Review final report of the independent review of the NHS Tavistock Clinic’s GIDS (Gender Identity Disorder Service), by Dr Hillary Cass. The Tavistock GIDS was the largest children’s gender clinic in the UK. Dr Cass’s interim report found that a high percentage of children who were referred to the clinic had:
- a diagnosis of autism
- mental health diagnoses
- experienced trauma
- been children in care
- multiple diagnoses
- had been placed in the care of the state
As a social worker, I am aware that the development of an identity is a long process, which spans all of childhood and adolescence. It is a difficult task for us all to integrate the different aspects of ourselves and accept ourselves as how we are. Children who have been neglected or abused, or who experienced much loss, or other trauma or mental health issues, often feel very bad about themselves, feel unlovable, and find it extremely difficult to develop a positive identity. For children who are in the care of the state, separated from their family of origin, identity is a huge issue. The promise that they could escape from themselves and transform into somebody else can be a very tempting proposition. The accounts of some detransitioners, young people who had medically and/ or surgically transitioned, regretted this at some point, and reverted to identifying as their birth sex, confirm that these concerns are valid. Many detransitioners say that they feel betrayed by the adults who allowed them to make such a serious decision, at a time when they were too young to comprehend the long-term consequences of transitioning and that their mental health issues were neither considered nor addressed when they were affirmed by the adults as having a trans identity; they were misdiagnosed and harmed by affirming care.
It is my considered view that interfering with the process of identity development, which is not completed until adulthood, puts children at risk of not developing to their full potential and of being physically and emotionally harmed.
Gender identity theory does not take the process of childhood development into account, especially the process of identity formation, the lack of children’s ability to make decisions that have long-term consequences, and children’s cognitive ability to grasp complex, abstract concepts. Vulnerable, suggestable children are being influenced unduly and are trusted to make decisions that they are not equipped to make, i.e. to decide what gender they are.
Safeguarding
A central child safeguarding principle is that trusted adults need to guide children and not allow children to take on responsibilities they do not have the capacity to take on. This not considered in the sphere of gender identity. Gender-identity ideology demands that we ignore this basic safeguarding principal, among others, and immediately affirm a child as soon as they declare a gender identity different from their biological sex.
Also of concern is the guidance regarding single-sex spaces in schools and various sports and youth organisations. The guidance produced by BelongTo for schools and youth organisations is that children with a trans or non-binary identity should be allowed use the single-sex space of their preferred gender as well as take part in single sex activities of the preferred gender. In practice this means a boy who identifies as a girl is, according to BelongTo, to be admitted to female bathrooms, changing rooms and female only sports.
However, contrary to what BelongTo would have schools believe there is no legal requirement to meet this demand. Students under the age of 17 may identify as non-binary or trans but this does not confer any legal rights nor any obligation on schools to treat them as a member of the opposite sex or allow them to identify into single sex spaces that are opposite to their birth sex. If a 17-year-old student has obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate with the consent of their parents, they must be assessed for risk according to their birth sex not their self-declared sex. A declaration of trans or gender non-conforming status does not entitle schools to ignore safeguarding or the Equal Status Act which permits discrimination of the basis of sex when reasonable and necessary. Schools are obliged to consider the welfare of all students equally. Worryingly BelongTo’s advice is already being followed in some Irish schools, youth clubs, and sports clubs, and is causing child safeguarding concerns, especially for the safety and dignity of girls. To allow boys who identify as girls – and potentially men who identify as women – into girls’ toilets, changing rooms, sports teams, and dormitories puts girls at risk of sexual and physical assault, causes embarrassment, and undermines girls’ dignity.
There are valid reasons for insisting on same-sex spaces. Both sexes value their privacy. In particular, girls require separate spaces from boys in sports and intimate spaces because boys are stronger and more aggressive than girls, physically and sexually. In my capacity as a child protection social worker, I worked in the area of child sex abuse and the area of young people with harmful sexual behaviour. The understanding that teenage boys are at heightened risk of engaging in sexually harmful behaviour because of how puberty affects them and because they are still immature is well established. Our advice to parents was not to let teenage boys babysit young children because this would put the teenage boy and the children in harm’s way. Sadly, there are some teenage boys who develop predatory behaviour and would not shy away from using the cover of claiming to be a girl to gain easy access to intimate girls’ spaces. A study by the UK National Institute of Health indicated that 30 to 50 percent of child abuse cases involve adolescent boys and younger boys who display sexual harmful behaviour. In Ireland, The Central Statics Office states that in 2022: ‘Of those aged 18-24 who experienced contact sexual violence as a child, 73% reported that a child (person under 18) was the perpetrator.’ Given that about 80 percent of these children were girls, the need to protect girls from boys in their intimate spaces appears obvious.
2022 was not a fluke, but a confirmation of an established pattern. Allowing biological boys into girls’ intimate spaces is not only putting the girls at risk of harm but is also putting the boys at risk of doing something wrong and which might have serious, long-term consequences for them. Most boys who engage in harmful sexual behaviour do not continue to engage in it into adulthood.
The Gender Recognition Act 2015 and government policies treat trans-identified adults as persons of their preferred gender with the right to enter single-sex spaces of their preferred gender. This compromises the safety and boundaries of girls. For example, girls might come across trans-identified males in female-only bathrooms and changing rooms, in sports facilities or clothes shops, and they might have a trans-identified youth group leader in the Girl Guides, Scouts, or other youth organisation, etc. The presence of a biological male adult in girls’ spaces is also clearly problematic.
It is an established fact that girls need to be protected from men and adolescent boys because some predatory boys and men pose a risk to them. I am not stating that all trans and non-binary identified males are predatory but that predatory males can identify as trans and non-binary. We have no way of telling the difference between the two groups.
To be caught and tried as a sexual offender carries the risk of being convicted, completely shunned by society, and having family and friends turn their backs on them. These deterrents are not strong enough to stop sexual abusers from offending. There is no evidence that would provide reasons to assume that males who identify as girls or women would have different behaviour patterns in this regard. In fact, there studies that show that behaviour patterns of people who are trans-identified don’t differ from that of their biological sex.
The website transcrime uk documents convictions of trans-identifying offenders, including yearly statistics of sexual, and other crimes committed by trans-identified men and trans-identified women. It shows clearly that the offending behaviour patterns match those of the offender’s biological sex.
Many child sexual abuse scandals, discovered in the last few decades testify to the fact that men who wish to sexually abuse children often enter professions that give them access to children, for example the priesthood, teaching, and sports coaching.
It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that predatory males will not shy away from claiming to be a woman/girl to gain access to women’s and girls’ intimate spaces where they are able to expose themselves and watch women and girls in a state of undress with impunity. (Voyeurism and exhibitionism are the most common sexual offences.) They would not have to fear consequences for their actions and could even claim to be wronged by women or girls who object and demand they leave their spaces.
Sexual desire is not the only motivation for sexual abuse. The thrill of being in a position of power is part of it. Deceiving, manipulating, humiliating victims, making unsuspecting others complicit in the act, knowing that their victims are helpless to do anything about the abuse, being able to blame the victim and be believed, increases the excitement.
The Stay Safe programme, which is taught in Irish schools, teaches children to run away and tell a trusted adult if somebody behaves in an inappropriate manner and when somebody makes them feel uncomfortable. This programme is undermined when girls are taught to ignore the reality of a male body in their single sex spaces. Girls are told to ignore their sense of fear and embarrassment. In these instances, girls no longer have the power to keep themselves safe.
The internet and social media
Children spend considerable time on the internet, where they are exposed to all kinds of content, including content about being trans and non-binary. There they learn most about gender-identity-ideology, the terminology, that you are trans because you think you are trans, what to do if you are trans, and what to do if your parents don’t agree to affirm your gender-identity, etc. They might get these messages from peers, but also from adults, some of whom advise children and tell them that they would be there for them if their parents did not understand them. There are adults advising young people to have no contact with their parents if they won’t agree to affirm their gender-identity. The best-known of these adult queer influencers is Jeffrey Marsh, a man who identifies as non-binary. He tells children that their parents do not understand them and do them harm if they don’t affirm them, but that he will be there for them because he loves them unconditionally. This is the most irresponsible behaviour by an adult. He has videos on many platforms, including TikTok with hundreds of thousands of followers.
Parents are the most ardent protectors of their children. To undermine parents and pit them against their children is damaging, and irresponsible.
If I, in the capacity of a social worker in the statutory child protection agency, had come across an adult in a child’s life who told the child that sex did not matter, who had allowed biological males into girls’ intimate spaces and sports, undermined the parents’ authority, had not informed parents about an important matter regarding their child, and/or had socially transitioned a child without parents’ consent and knowledge, I would have considered this person an unsafe adult around children. This assessment would have been widely regarded as well founded and reasonable. It would not have been controversial.
Because gender-identity theory is not based on observable reality and because it teaches children that biology is irrelevant and should be ignored, it is putting children at risk of emotional and physical harm. This is why I have come to the conclusion that gender-identity doctrine is not compatible with child safeguarding.
Further reading: The Department of Education, The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth, Tulsa and the HSE have adopted gender identity theory as fact.
Department of Education: Being LGBT in School Document: https://assets.gov.ie/24762/729f5d8906184a6a8c4be0c5e2a349dd.pdf
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth: Final Report of the Implementation of the LGBT National Youth Strategy 2018 to 2021 Document: https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/297288/5a49b786-bcb4-4459-ac06-a152a744d19d.pdf#page=null
Tusla, Child and Family Agency: Healthy Sexuality and Relationship, The education and Support Needs of Children and Young People in Care Document: https://www.tusla.ie/uploads/content/HSRD_Toolkit.pdf
HSE, Health Service Executive: LGBT+ Sexual Identity and Orientation Document:
https://www2.hse.ie/mental-health/life-situations-events/sexuality/sexual-identity-orientation/