Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No162

SUE will be publishing three pamphlets over the next few months, including one on reading and one on history. The first pamphlet, however – written by Jenny Cunningham and Carolyn Brown – looks at the continuing promotion of transgender ideology in schools.

Below, we have an introduction to this pamphlet which gives a summary of what is going on.

Usefully, Malcolm Clark has written about this topic on his Substack. As he notes, just when we thought that transgender ideology was on its last legs, we find that the UK government plans to gift £21 million to the LGBTQ+ lobby. More than this, he notes that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has produced their new draft guidance following the UK Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender. The guidance is, however, not without its flaws, and outrageously, the EHRC’s video introducing the guidance neglects to mention the word woman!

Despite Malcolm's concerns, Sex Matters give the new guidance 8/10 and others tend to see the positives. Personally I'm a legal sceptic and tend to think that the law bends to the will of the elites and their prejudices unless they face public pressure to do the right thing.

We will wait to see if the UK parliament approves the EHRC guidance, and if they do, what this will mean for women's spaces and trans ideology.

As Malcolm explains, behind the scenes the many virtuous politicians who have bought into the idea that you can magically become a different gender have been pecking away at the challenges made to the transgender movement. We have, for example, the comedic appointment of transgender rights ally Harriet Harman as the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Women and Girls, while up here in Scotland we have a transgender Green MSP elected to Holyrood proclaiming that he will be pushing for biological men to be allowed to use the women’s toilets in the Scottish parliament.

In Scottish schools, as Jenny explains below, the same old rubbish is being encouraged. Transgender rights activist organisations are still operating in schools and setting the policies, and children – from primary school onwards – are being educated about being transgenderism.

As we have pointed out a number of times, there are no genders, there are only sexes, and there are two of them. There are boys and there are girls. To educate children about ‘being trans’ is not only a lie, but it is harmful to children.

For transgender rights activists, simply saying this is seen as an assault on ‘trans kids’. However, the opposite is true. Educating children about their biological reality is liberating because it means that confused children can be liberated from the identity trap they are being placed in.

All forms of identity activism are a trap of sorts. Viewing yourself primarily as ‘black’, for example, and seeing everything and everyone through this prism inevitably results in you becoming a caricature of yourself and your ‘blackness’.

Adoption of a ‘trans’ identity is arguably even more of a trap, because it demands such an intense inward focus on your own body, your physical existence and being, which makes it difficult and arguably impossible for a ‘trans’ person not to be obsessed by their sense of self and their body and the reaction of everyone around them to their special identity.

Something that should be a simple fact of who you are suddenly becomes everything, and this fact of life becomes life itself. Not only is this extremely boring, but it restricts you from getting out and on in the world outside yourself.

Tragically, promotion of this confused self-absorption is now what passes as enlightened education, and our politicians and educational leaders need to be held to account for what they continue to do to our children.

Dr Jenny Cunningham is a retired paediatrician who worked in Glasgow for 30 years.

Much has changed since the Scottish Union for Education published the pamphlet Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance? (2023). [1] This condemned the way in which the government’s document Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools: Guidance for Scottish Schools (2021) became the conduit for introducing gender ideology into education policy and the curriculum. It allowed transgender activist organisations, chiefly LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS), to directly shape policy and enabled LGBTYS to set up pupil groups in schools and ‘advise’ education staff. The Guidance encouraged teachers to socially transition pupils who claimed their ‘gender identity’ was the opposite of their natal sex. Pupils have been allowed to change their name, pronouns and even dress in school – sometimes without their parents being informed. This undoubtedly put many of these children or adolescents on a trajectory towards gender identity services, seeking medical transitioning through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgical ‘realignment’ (e.g. mastectomy, castration, and modification of reproductive organs).

The decisive changes included the following.

• On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the term sex in the Equality Act 2010 means biological sex and not gender. This means that female-only facilities, services, and charities, and female categories in sport, should exclude biological men, and the same applies to lesbian relationships and associations.

• In Scotland, a Court of Session decision, a week later, obliged Scottish primary and secondary schools to provide separate toilets for boys and girls.

• The Cass Review on behalf of NHS England (an internationally recognised study, comprising seven systematic reviews) found that there was a ‘very weak’ evidence base for all aspects of paediatric medical gender transitioning. The Review cautioned against the social transitioning of minors. [2] On the basis of the Review, the UK Health Minister banned the prescription of puberty blockers for under-18-year-olds, and NHS Scotland paused the use of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in those under 18.

• The Cass Review was reinforced and superseded by the US Department of Health and Human Services Review, which found the quality of evidence for paediatric gender transitioning to be ‘very low’. [3]

Rid education of gender ideology and stop medical gender transitioning includes five essays exploring some of the issues encapsulated by these two demands. Four are written by Dr Jenny Cunningham, retired community paediatrician and SUE member, and one by retired depute principal educational psychologist Carolyn Brown.

1. Revised government guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools: time for educational professionals to start exercising judgement – uses the Scottish government’s revised Guidance on supporting transgender pupils in schools to illustrate that the government has paid lip service to the developments outlined above. It has made some minimal technical changes (associated with single-sex provisions), but the framework of the Guidance is identical to the original LGBTYS prototype, and the content remains the same disingenuous transgender ideology. Educational professionals are urged to apply rational judgement to the Guidance in five key areas: (i) the notion that children and adolescents can have an inner ‘gender identity’ different from their sex; (ii) the unholy marriage between transgender ideology and gender transition medicine; (iii) social transitioning of pupils continues to be encouraged by the Guidance despite Cass pointing out that this is not a neutral act but an intervention; (iv) misrepresentation of statistics supplied by transgender activists; (v) a major vector of gender ideology indoctrination is third-party activists, namely LGBTYS and Time for Inclusive Education (TIE).

2. Time for Inclusive Education (TIE): implementing LGBT Inclusive Education and insulating it from criticism and parental concern – examines the intimate relationship between TIE and the government’s LGBT Inclusive Education. TIE presents itself as a charity addressing ‘homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying’, eliding sexual orientation and transgender identification. It provides resources for teachers and a national professional learning course for all education staff. It has set up a new Digital Discourse Initiative to provide teachers with ‘tools’ to counter online prejudice and disinformation. This raises the following questions: ‘whose prejudices?’ and ‘what disinformation?’ The government and TIE emphasise that parents cannot withdraw their children from LGBT Inclusive Education as it is spread throughout all curricular areas.

3. When peddling a lie causes harm to all and undermines our education system – Carolyn Brown illustrates just how widely the Guidance is being used in schools. All councils refer educational services to the Guidance; a high proportion of schools support self-identification by pupils as ‘trans’ and teach concepts such as gender identity; many use LGBTYS and TIE to provide professional development for staff and for advice on planning and projects. The ‘lie’ at the heart of transgender ideology – that children can be transformed into their preferred gender – is made material through social transitioning. This poses a danger to all children – the individual and those compelled to deny the reality before them. Several pieces of research indicate that adult deception undermines trust between adults and children, provoking insecurity and anxiety; and when deception is normalised, children can adopt antisocial behaviours such as lying and cheating. Trust between schools and parents is being damaged. Brown interviewed two senior educationalists in August 2025, both expressing disquiet about the promotion of gender ideology in schools and the unscientific nature of the Guidance.

4. Invoking ‘children’s rights’ and eroding parental authority – examines the emergence of the ‘children’s rights movement’ from the 1960s and the growing rift between advocates for children who emphasised children’s needs and a movement that pressed for children to have quasi-adult rights. Until children emerge from childhood through development and maturation, they are dependent on adults – primarily their parents. Hence parental rights are inseparable from the interests of children. From the start, the children’s rights movement was oriented towards laws and the courts, especially International Law, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC has become a vehicle for advancing adult agendas in the name of children’s rights, often at the expense of parental rights. This has been amply demonstrated since the UNCRC has been incorporated into Scottish law. For example, the government has justified the introduction of LGBT Inclusive Education as being UNCRC-compatible. More recently, it has been the basis of the Children (Withdrawal from Religious Education and Amendment of UNCRC Compatibility Duty) (Scotland) Act 2026. Its aim is to assert a child’s right to oppose their parent’s wish to withdraw them from religious education and/or observance.

5. Pernicious puberty blocker trial – social contagion is at the root of a medical scandal – begins with the proposed UK puberty blockers trial as it brings into sharp focus the maleficence of the medical transitioning of minors who are confused or distressed about their gender. The Cass Review argued that puberty blockers should only be prescribed in clinical trials. Numerous critics, including the authors of the US Department of Health and Human Services Review, argue that the trial is scientifically and ethically wrong. There is still a wilful obscuring of which group of transgender-identifying minors are caught up in this medical and ideological snare. The majority of them are adolescents, predominantly teenage girls. The scandal is that this phenomenon has all the characteristics of a social contagion rather than an objective psychiatric condition.

References

1. Scottish Union for Education. 2023. Transgender ideology in Scottish schools: What’s wrong with government guidance. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bei_RpeJHl_-CMjmtOGx-hyPLMS4dK2V/view

2. Cass H. April 2024. The Cass Review: independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. Final report. https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

3. US Department of Health and Human Services. November 2025. Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices. https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report.pdf

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.ph/4o6XL Stephen Daisley, Scotland’s parliament is in thrall to transgender activists. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/FJ3bZ Daniel Sanderson, The private-school past of Green MSP who ‘grew up starving’. Q Manivannan attended an expensive school and university in India before campaigning to be voice for the ‘working class and marginalised’ at Holyrood. 23/05/26

https://www.gbnews.com/news/woke-madness-primary-schoolchildren-white-privilege-education-anti-racism-drive Dan McDonald, Primary schoolchildren told to be mindful of their ‘white privilege’ under education ‘anti-racism’ drive. 18/05/26

https://archive.ph/FGQ1W Paul Sagar, The scandal of two-tier degrees Extra time infantilizes students. 19/05/26

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/19/labours-conversion-therapy-ban-will-do-untold-harm-to-children/ Bev Jackson, Labour’s ‘conversion therapy’ ban will do untold harm to children. Adults could be criminalised if they question a child who claims to have been ‘born in the wrong body’. 19/05/26

https://archive.ph/BQT5e Geraldine Scott, Single-sex spaces must be based on biological sex, guidance rules. 21/05/26

Malcolm Richard Clark, The Rainbow Thieves Are At it Again. Just when it seemed the LGBTQ+ lobby was in retreat the UK government is set to gift it £21M of taxpayers money. It will now use this to embed trans ideology even deeper in our institutions. 22/05/26

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