Just days after Britain’s National Health Service banned puberty blocker prescriptions for under-18s, a report has revealed that schools in Wales are allowing children to change gender without telling their parents—the very definition of one step forward, two steps back.
The Family Education Trust research institute told The European Conservative it is “horrifying that so many schools in Wales have become completely ideologically captured and are ignoring parent’s wishes.” Others described the actions of these schools, which operate under the watch of the ruling Welsh Labour Party, as “a glimpse of the nightmare awaiting Britain under a national Labour government.”
A new report by Merched Cymru, which describes itself as a “grassroots organisation of women in Wales working to protect and promote the rights of women and girls,” has prompted serious concerns about the protection of children by educational leaders. The group sent Freedom of Information requests to a sample of secondary schools (for those aged 11-18) from every local authority in Wales and received a response from 68 (81% of those contacted). Of those 68 schools:
- All said that they would facilitate a gender transition;
- 22% allowed children to use toilets to match their new gender identity;
- 22% also allowed children to undress and change clothes in spaces provided for the opposite sex;
- 39% “obliged” children to use ‘preferred pronouns’ and 36% “stated, in many different ways, that children were under strong encouragement/pressure to do so”; and, perhaps most shockingly,
- Two-thirds said they would not necessarily inform parents of their own child’s social transition, “or would do so only if the child gave permission.”
It is clear within all this that too many schools believe they—or, indeed, children themselves—know more about the protection of pupils than the parents themselves. The authors of this report also noted that “in the main, schools clearly did not want to answer these questions.”
Responding to these findings, Lucy Marsh from the Family Education Trust told The European Conservative:
Children in Wales need to be protected against this harmful ideology. The only way to do this is to restore the full parental opt-out from Relationships and Sexuality Education as the Welsh education policy appears to be overly influenced by LGBT activist groups.
Parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit and not see their taxes being spent on using schools as a vehicle to indoctrinate and sexualise children.
The Welsh Labour government said the questions raised show that “this is an area that needs national guidance.” But similar guidance offered by Rishi Sunak’s government to English schools last year was dismissed by critics as being open to exploitation.
Welsh officials said a consultation will be held over the “coming months.”