(LifeSiteNews) — For several months, we’ve seen Canada’s progressive leaders demonize Canadian parents concerned about schools “transitioning” their children behind their backs with the worst sort of rhetoric, enabled by the vast majority of this country’s press corps. In that context, this headline in the Guardian – a very left-wing publication – seems significant: “Involve parents before pupils ‘socially transition’ at school, says NHS England.”
The NHS, by the way, is the National Health Service – not some lobby group. For context, this would be equivalent to Health Canada recommendations here. Here’s what they had to say:
Schools should not allow gender-questioning children to “socially transition” without their parents’ involvement, according to NHS training and guidance on how staff should respond to pupils exploring their gender identity. The new online module published by NHS England represents the first national guidance on how to support children with gender-related questions or distress in education settings…
The course states: “Recently, there has been a rise in young people asking to make a social transition at school or college without the knowledge or involvement of their parents or carers.” It defines social transition as allowing a child to adopt a new gender and might involve a school agreeing to refer to the child using a different name and pronoun, or authorising the use of different toilets and facilities.
The training module advises: “Supporting a social transition without the involvement of parents or carers can create complex difficulties within families and is not recommended. Secrets between parents or carers and their children are problematic and are likely to create further issues in the future.” It adds: “The priorities of parents and carers should be held as central, so that decision-making is collaborative.”
I quote that in full rather than summarizing in order to highlight the fact that this is a progressive press outlet covering an issue that Canadian media has been covering daily for months in a completely sane way. The U.K.’s National Health Service is literally recommending that schools adopt the precise course of action that premiers across Canada are opting for – and which politicians from Justin Trudeau to Jagmeet Singh are denouncing as a far-right attempt to push “trans kids” to commit suicide. Is the NHS, too, a “far-right” organ? Or have we in Canada perhaps completely lost the plot?
Indeed, the NHS has gone even further than the much-maligned Canadian premiers, noting that “social transition” is an “active intervention” rather than a “neutral act” and that “there are lots of unanswered questions from research in relation to the benefits and potential consequences of social transition on mental health and wellbeing.” That position, if expressed publicly in Canada, would immediately invite the opprobrium of a battery of activists posing as experts, union officials, politicians, and academics. Yet in other countries, that is the official governing advice from the top medical bodies. Anyone who accuses the NHS of being a “far-right” organ of some sort, by the way, is delusional.
In fact, the U.K.’s equalities watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has now reversed its previous guidance which stated that declining to call a gender-confused child by his or her new chosen name or pronouns was “direct” discrimination, and has also stated that U.K. schools are legally obligated to provide separate changing facilities for girls and boys based not on “gender identity,” but by “sex at birth,” which is trans-speak for your biological sex. These rollbacks are based on longstanding investigations into the care and treatment of gender dysphoric children (the Cass Review being the most significant), and have received – for obvious reasons – virtually no serious coverage in the Canadian press, which is instead parroting the lines provided to them by transgender activists and publishing editorials accusing concerned parents of being a danger to their own children.
There are several reasons for the differences in media coverage. The U.K. media landscape is competitive and combative, and even outlets that generally default to progressive positions are willing to question aspects of the transgender movement – the BBC broke many of the Tavistock scandals that resulted in the gender clinic being shut down, and this year’s blockbuster bestseller Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children was written by Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist. Another reason, surely, is that Canada’s government-subsidized media adheres to orthodoxy both due to longstanding herd instinct as well as the niggling knowledge that it might be bad business to bite the hand that feeds them. And so, instead, they take taxpayer dollars from the cash-strapped public in order to publish vile smears of that same public.
