Gillian Keegan’s gender meddling will add to moral turmoil in schools

“Gillian Keegan will present herself as the heir to Margaret Thatcher,” was one of the more surreal headlines generated by the media this month. Days later, the great woman demonstrated her right to this inheritance by announcing the content of her new regulations, designed to bring the “gender” chaos in schools under control.

It was, even by the standards of weasel, Vichy pseudo-Conservatism, a classic exercise in transparent duplicity, fooling no one. Under the guise of restoring parental rights in schools, her proposal is to allow children who identify as belonging to a different sex from their actual biological identity, to “socially transition” at school by changing pronouns, if their parents consent.

During 13 years of Tory rule, the legitimate rights of parents have aggressively been eroded to near-extinction. They are sedulously excluded from any knowledge of what their children are being taught, what books and videos they are being exposed to, even what sex they are treated as belonging to in schools that have become miniature, under-age North Koreas. It has long been established that teenage girls can be channelled through the system for abortions without their parents’ knowledge; now the whole education process is a rigidly policed exclusion zone for parents. Under a Conservative government.

Last January, Gillian Keegan claimed 16-year-olds were mature enough to “change gender”, as proposed in Scotland. It is beyond perverse, yet typical of Tory hypocrisy, that the first gesture by this government that is supposedly in favour of parental authority is directed towards bolstering moral anarchy in schools, by authorising woke parents to direct that their children should “socially transition” in the classroom and use pronouns that contradict their true identity.

In the first place, that is hugely damaging for the children concerned. If they genuinely belong to the vanishingly small number of children who suffer from gender dysphoria, they desperately need help, not affirmation. Gender dysphoria is one mental illness that is easily cured, in 90 per cent of cases, by cognitive therapy, without recourse to medication or surgical interventions. In many instances it disappears with the passing of time.

If, as is more likely, the majority of children whom Gillian Keegan proposes to allow to “socially transition” are simply victims of social media-based contagion, or plain attention-seeking, it is equally important to stop the rot by asserting reality. The science is settled, as the Left is fond of asserting in another context. Only men possess the Y chromosome and there are at least 6,500 genetic differences between men and women. Biology is the determinant of sex: how someone “feels” is as irrelevant as if they feel the Earth is flat.

That is the unalterable reality that schools should teach, as they do other scientific facts. If the Twitter mob and the theologians of wokery in universities were to decide it is “hateful” to claim that the Earth is a globe, would the education establishment change the orthodoxy on that too? The perversity of Keegan’s behaviour is that she has sought to restore “parental rights” by seeking to give the most irresponsible parents in the country the right to harm their children.

Parental rights are crucial, but not limitless. Just as children are removed from abusive parents, there is no parental right to encourage them in a delusion that could lead them to breast-binders, puberty blockers and quack surgery capable of leaving them as infertile, unhappy invalids for the rest of their lives. It is not a kindness, when a lunatic imagines he is Napoleon, to present him with a cocked hat.

Yet there is another very important consideration that Keegan’s Law recklessly ignores. If children, by parental indulgence, are given the liberty to “transition socially” and teachers and classmates are required to address them by pronouns that are a lie, that is an aggression against the rights of teachers, fellow pupils and their parents, who have a right to expect their children will be educated in a rational, sane environment. Education is incompatible with the daily fetishisation of a lie that defies objective reality.

Gillian Keegan is pursuing this woke agenda despite receiving an education in the dystopian climate prevailing in 70 per cent of schools in England and Wales supposedly under her jurisdiction, in a letter from two schoolgirls. It is telling that the most sensible comment on the ideological anarchy in our schools has come from two 14-year-old girls, describing the reign of terror, the pressure, the bullying, the ruthless extinction of debate in schools, under the direction of a Tory government for the past 13 years.

Do you remember that great totem of LGBT victim narrative, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988? In the rainbow mythology, it was a period of tyranny that made the Stalin purges and the Third Reich look like a walk in the park. It was introduced by Margaret Thatcher, who did not normally intervene in cultural conflicts: like Elizabeth I (but truthfully) she could have said: “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.”

However, after Dame Jill Knight, the Conservative MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, responding to vociferous parental complaints, had shown the Prime Minister evidence that extremely inappropriate, even pornographic, homosexual material was circulating in schools, Mrs Thatcher supported the addition of Section 28 to the Local Government Act, prohibiting local authorities from promoting homosexual propaganda in schools, at a time when equally dubious heterosexual material was also inadmissible.

In the mythology promoted by Stonewall: “This had deprived generations of LGBT pupils the chance of seeing people like them in the books, plays, leaflets or films their schools could stock or show. Teachers weren’t allowed to teach about same-sex relationships; anyone who broke the law could face disciplinary action.”

Deprived generations? Really? Section 28 was in force for 15 years, from 1988 to 2003: how many generations did that period cover? Not one single person was ever prosecuted under Section 28. Today, however, under the Stalinist “trans” regime that is corrupting the nation’s children on an industrial scale, teachers have already lost their jobs for refusing to parrot the prescriptions of Marxist ideological anti-science.

Now, Gillian Keegan cynically claims of her woke agenda: “At its heart will be parents, ensuring their voices are central to decisions being made about their child in school.” This classic piece of “socially liberal” Conservative BS makes no reference to what will happen if parents’ voices challenge a decision whereby their child is being educated in a La La Land climate where classmates and teachers are living an extravagant and destructive fantasy.

Keegan’s bluff is reminiscent of the weasel words of David Cameron, addressing his party conference and praising marriage and the family, before going on to redefine marriage and family in terms of every situation that was a negation of both. That paved the way for Cameron’s same-sex marriage legislation, the initiative that opened the floodgates to the present anarchy. This radical redefinition of the most basic unit of human society was not preceded by a royal commission or a manifesto commitment: it was not even being demanded by homosexuals.

This month, as several times before, Cameron proudly admitted it was his wife’s idea and her pressure that motivated him to alienate more than half of his parliamentary party and the overwhelming majority of supporters in the country, by bulldozing through this legislation, at his wife’s bidding.

If Samantha Cameron wanted to redefine marriage, she should have sought election to Parliament and pursued her objective through legitimate democratic channels, rather than indulging in boudoir politics in the style of the last Russian Tsarina. Boudoir government is a notorious feature of Tory entitlement: Boris Johnson’s extravagant commitment to the disastrous Net Zero cult was similarly at the behest of his wife.

Dave’s same-sex marriage law was passed on second reading by a majority of 400-175. He relied on Labour votes to pass legislation in the teeth of his own party: out of 304 Conservative MPs, only 127 voted for this ultra-radical measure that started the avalanche that, today, is burying reason and the interests of children in our education system. The drag queen phenomenon typifies the targeting of young children and it is a conscious agenda: this week drag queens paraded through New York, secure in the protection of the extremist Democrat Party, chanting the slogan already ubiquitous online: “We are coming for your children.”

What is the Conservative government doing about the “trans” grooming of children in schools colonised by woke ideologues from the teaching unions? Facilitating the process, is the answer; outsourcing legislation to Stonewall; creating a climate of fear and job insecurity in case of any challenge to an attempt to create a revolutionary Year Zero, by indoctrinating an entire generation into a dystopian nightmare.

The Conservative Party needs to be excised from the body politic. At the 2016 referendum many Tory voters, while putting their cross beside “Leave”, had the added satisfaction of paying back the egregious Dave for same-sex marriage. There will have to be a much more comprehensive electoral exercise next year, finally to drive a stake through the heart of the Vichy Tories. Britain desperately needs a right-wing party: to achieve that, the Tory roadkill must first be swept off the highway to a conservative future.

At present, the possibilities are limited. The only instrument to hand is Richard Tice’s Reform UK party, which at least has a coterie of experienced politicians, including Ann Widdecombe. At the moment, Reform stands at 10 per cent in the polls (12 per cent in Wales), ahead of the Liberal Democrats and Greens. That is significant in terms of timing. Those are the kind of figures a small challenger party might expect to record in the closing weeks of a general election campaign: to be at that level a year ahead of an election bodes extremely well for Reform.

The critical question is: will Nigel Farage, Reform’s president, return to active politics? Almost certainly, yes – because of the Tories’ refusal to deliver Brexit. That would present a formidable challenge. Ann Widdecombe is forecasting that Reform will hold the balance of power, but we need to be clear what she means by that. In the conventional sense, holding the balance of power implies a parliamentary presence, with sufficient seats to influence a majority.

Widdecombe is a seasoned politician, with a down-to-earth approach. She must know that, under first-past-the-post, there is little prospect of Reform holding the parliamentary balance of power. Nigel Farage has often reminisced ruefully about his past experience, with UKIP and the Brexit Party, of winning four million votes, but gaining just one parliamentary seat.

However, Reform almost certainly will hold the balance in another sense: it does not need to win a single parliamentary seat to annihilate the Conservative Party; it only has to take a sufficient percentage of Tory votes to cost Sunak’s pseudo-Conservatives a shedload of constituencies. The conditions have never been more propitious for the eradication of the Tories. There is a tsunami of loathing over broken promises preparing to overwhelm them and the availability of a genuine right-wing alternative would seal their fate.

“They have nowhere else to go,” the immemorial maxim of complacent Tory grandees every time they have indulged in a cynical betrayal of their supporters, no longer applies. If Reform can present itself as a principled alternative, promoting genuinely conservative policies, there could be a mass defection that would reduce the fragmented and forsworn Tory Party to a noisome fish-head in the dustbin of history.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life