Scottish primary schools are appointing children as “LGBT champions”, while also being urged to ask pupils as young as four if they are “part of the LGBT community” as part of a new, Stonewall-esque membership scheme run by the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
Documents seen by the Telegraph reveal that schools are setting up LGBT clubs and “gender and sexual orientation alliance groups” for pupils in order to meet the various, ideologically driven requirements for membership of the group’s nationwide scheme.
During financial year 2022-23, LGBT Youth Scotland received almost £450,000 in taxpayer funding from the SNP government, a further £340,000 from local authorities, and £154,000 from NHS Scotland.
In a similar manner to Stonewall and its controversial Diversity Champions Scheme, LGBT Youth Scotland incentivises naïve yet performance-benchmarking-obsessed senior leaders in the education sector to engage with its programmes by running an ‘LGBT charter’, where joining fees range from £850 to £2,000.
The group boasts that over the past three years it has trained more than 5,000 teachers, while around 200 Scottish secondaries – more than half of the national total – and over 40 primary schools have joined its LGBT Charter scheme.
According to LGBT Youth Scotland, the programme enables schools, colleges and universities to “proactively include LGBTQ+ people in every aspect of [their] work”.
A key requirement of membership is that school staff must be trained by the organisation, which provides an online guide and letter templates for children wishing to change their gender at school.
In addition, each school that joins the scheme is told it must appoint at least two pupils and two staff members as “LGBT Champions”. Among the 10 annual events they are urged to “celebrate” are “National Coming Out Day” and “Transgender Day of Visibility”. The organisation’s posters must also be put up around the school, and school policies in areas such as transgender inclusion and school uniform need to be rewritten to ensure they are “inclusive”.
Schools wishing to attain “gold” status with the scheme must take a series of additional steps, including delivery of “at least one activity which specifically addresses the needs of transgender young people” such as “conducting a campaign that addresses trans rights”.
Consideration must also be given to conducting a survey of their infant pupils to ask them if they are “part of the LGBT community”.
Another indicator for schoolteachers hoping to secure a gold award – and thereby assist career-minded senior leaders in hitting their KPIs – is to provide evidence of “LGBT safe spaces” for pupils, such as gender-neutral lavatories and PE classes in which a child’s professed gender identity takes precedence over their biological sex.
Documents given to schools participating in the scheme say that staff and children granted the honour of acting as ‘LGBT Champions’ should hold quarterly meetings to “drive forward LGBT inclusion”.
News that the Scottish Government is funding LGBT Youth Scotland to roll-out a nationwide scheme in which gender identity is treated as ‘established fact’ rather than ‘contested theory’, comes after the Cass Review delivered a strong – some would say unanswerable – challenge to the ‘affirmative’ approach to gender confusion in children and young people, which in recent years has become the norm in NHS England’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).
Faced with cases of gender distress, this approach encourages clinicians to ‘affirm’ rather than question a child’s professed gender identity, before then putting them on a medical pathway that can have lifelong, irreversible consequences.
One of the many criticisms that Dr Hilary Cass levelled at this approach was that “the evidence base for outcomes (benefits or harms) of social transition in childhood and adolescence is both limited and of low quality”.
As a result, Dr Cass recommends that “services and professionals should communicate the limitations of the evidence base surrounding social transition to children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence and parents/carers”.
“For [children] going down a social transition pathway,” she continues, “maintaining flexibility and keeping options open by helping the child to understand their body as well as their feelings is likely to be advantageous”, not least because we now know the majority of children wrestling with issues of identity and sexuality ultimately grow out of their gender dysphoria as they reach adolescence.
Although LGBT Youth Scotland were approached for comment by the Telegraph, it remains unclear whether they intend to update their ‘LGBT Charter’ in light of the Cass Review’s apparently devastating critique of its underlying assumptions.
Miriam Cates, co-chairman of the New Conservatives group of MPs, said: “We have seen from the Cass Review the appalling results of using children as pawns in adult political battles. Indoctrinating small children with sexualised ideologies is deeply unethical and breaks all established safeguarding principles.”
Ash Regan, a former SNP minister who quit the government to vote against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law and is now an Alba Party MSP, said: “Reports I’ve received on the promotion of gender ideology in Scottish primary, high schools and even nursery schools present a grave concern, especially in light of the Cass review recommendations.”
