And so the contagion is spreading

Since reporting on the situation at the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, I’ve received a number of troubling emails from parents around the country who are reporting similar situations in their schools.

I’m not going to name them, as yet, though one Catholic secondary in London has invited parents along to a consultation evening next week in which parents will be presented with the school’s ‘LGBTQIA’ policy.

Just the wording of that is a worry. It suggests that the school has bought into the full ‘alphabet soup’ surrounding sexual and gender identity; whereas most institutions stop at the LGBT, the full acronym is LGBTQIAPK. (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual and Kink).

The fact that a Catholic school has seen fit to validate “Queer, Intersex and Asexual” and accommodate them into the school’s ethos and policies is a depressing indication that they are likely to have bought into this highly politicised agenda, hook line and sinker.

Another parent informed me of how their children had come from the Catholic school they attend with a letter proudly bearing the Stonewall logo (Stonewall being a lobby group who are diametrically opposed to the Church’s teachings on sexuality and unlikely to be sympathetic) and who had attended a workshop on diversity at the school last term, which did not appear to conform with either the Catholic or traditional Christian teaching on sex and marriage, according to the feedback from their children.

This parent is typical of many non-Catholic parents who nonetheless choose to send their children to Catholic schools.  They describe themselves as a non-Anglican Christian.

“I am not Catholic but have really appreciated my kids attending a school that until recently had stood firm on Catholic principles. So sad that so many Catholic schools are gong the way of CofE schools!!”

Again, I am not going to name and shame the school yet, because it may be that both schools in question may be open to dialogue, but it’s symptomatic of the way things seem to be going in Catholic schools and how many parents are feeling let down, but are also too scared to say or do anything.

You can’t blame them. Their options are limited. Complaining to the school is likely to get both you and your children labelled as bigots and singled out for negative treatment. It’s not hard to imagine a situation whereby children are deemed in need of extra attention in order to overcome their parents’ bigotry. Parents who speak out about gender-neutral bathrooms or the imposition of transgender ideology onto their children are likely to reinforce the school’s position that they are the righteous ones, teaching the next generation to overcome he intolerance and prejudice of ill-informed bigots like their parents.

Parents haven’t been on the latest diversity course run by special interest groups like Stonewall or Mermaids, therefore they are not qualified and too ignorant to judge which values ought to be taught to their children. They must learn to overcome their ‘senseless fear’ to use the words of the prayer in the Scared Heart’s newsletter and ‘irrational prejudice’ about sharing their intimate facilities with a person of the opposite sex. They must suspend their critical faculties which question whether girls can turn into boys and vice-versa and reach out to these marginalised communities who are gender non-conforming, have been watching far too much YouTube and want a way to feel different and special. They must not feel uncomfortable but understand that God has in His infinite wisdom somehow made a mistake in His Creation and allocated people the wrong bodies, which they must change in order to be free. It’s what Jesus would do!

The reason why the newsletter from Sacred Heart is quite so disturbing is that it effectively emotionally blackmails both parents and children into silence. It starts by citing the legal reasons for the school’s policy – reasons which are entirely spurious, the provisions of the Equalities Act when it comes to recognition of gender reassignment do not apply to under 18’s in educational establishments, for reasons of needing to balance the needs of all the vulnerable pupils, but then goes on to distort the words of Pope Francis who has been pretty vociferous about gender ideology, especially in schools, and finishes up in a passive aggressive prayer.

The message is clear. If you are a nice compassionate wholesome Christian (which is indeed what we all aspire to be) then you will simply accept that the right thing to do is upturn 2000 years of magisterial teaching about what it means to be male and female. You will trample roughshod over the rights of the majority in a misguided attempt to reach out to the minority and validate their confusion. An attempt which is likely to do long-term physical, psychological and spiritual damage.

At least in a secular school, you haven’t got to contend with blasphemy. But either way, as a parent, when your school decides that Dave is now Roxanne, can wear a dress, can boot your daughter off the netball team, use her loos and stare enviously at her naturally developing figure and covet the ‘privilege’ of her menstrual cycle, short of taking your child out of the school, there is nothing you can do, other than keep your head down, try to teach your kids the right values and hope that they come out of there with a reasonable clutch of exam results. Though there’s no point in encouraging your daughters to attend single-sex University colleges any more. They must share all of their spaces with men. If you teach your children to stand up to and oppose this balderdash, you know full well that your child could well end up in isolation and with a charge of homophobic or transphobic bullying on their record for hurting poor Roxanne’s feelings. Something needs to be done. At the very minimum Justine Greening’s Gender Recognition Act, which seeks an Orwellian re-writing of history and biology,  needs to be challenged.

From what I am seeing parents of all denominations and none, Catholics, feminists, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, humanists, people who feel vaguely spiritual, are all united against having this unscientific and highly politicised ideology and identity politics imposed upon their children, but are all too worried about losing their jobs, or their children being picked on by teachers, to say anything. Meanwhile, groups like Mermaids (who are nothing more than a glorified campaign group run by a woman who procured illegal off-script hormones for their child aged 12 then took him abroad aged 16 for a castration in Asia when the NHS wouldn’t sanction it) are dominating the agenda with emotional blackmail about how if you don’t accept your child’s feelings, then you are going to force them to commit suicide. It’s unsubstantiated cant. (For those wanting more insight and to research the issue further, the website transgender trend is an excellent resource and place to start).

What the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in England and Wales needs to do, along with the Catholic Education Service is provide a strong lead on this. They have a duty to parents and children to say that this non-Catholic, harmful and scientifically unproven political agenda, will not be taught in Catholic schools.

Otherwise we will see what we are seeing now. In the absence of any leadership, schools are toppling one-by-one like dominoes, just as happened with the adoption agencies and ceasing to be Catholic in any meaningful sense. What’s happening is that in the absence of any firm guidance from either the CES or diocese, schools are being left to grope their own way through this minefield and are calling in the self-professed experts of LGBT lobby groups, who only want to promote their own agenda.

To be fair, I don’t entirely blame the CES or schools. Ofsted is driving most of this and is the institution which needs standing up to. Their guidelines about the appropriate treatment of children who present as transgender are not worth the paper they are written on. Of course children experiencing confusion must be treated with dignity and compassion, but not at the expense of undermining basic Catholic teaching, or at the expense of everyone else’s freedom and dignity. It’s legitimate to question the explosion of children presenting as transgender, when just this weekend, the former headmaster of Harrow, noted that in 40 years of teaching experience in single-sex schools, transgenderism did not become an issue until 2015.

In the case of transgender children this is is their entire lives and future health which is at stake here, which is all being determined on account of some anxious and distressing confusion during puberty. In the case of all of our children, this is their souls which are at stake. Parents must begin to rise up and resist this misguided moralism, which is infinitely more damaging than any of the Catholic guilt imbued into pupils by the over-zealous religious nuns and monks in Catholic educational establishments of the past.

Otherwise, if Catholic schools are going to teach that male and female are interchangeable, that God somehow stuffed up in Creation and that we can reject our bodies as He made them and transform them into the stuff of our imagination; if Catholic schools are going to teach pupils that biology no longer exists, and that we can force other people to see us as we would like to be seen, rather than through the eyes of the Creator, if Catholic schools are going to sanction turning children into liars and are going to teach that we can override others’ free will and that all that matters is how we imagine ourselves to be, then there’s very little point in having Catholic schools at all. We might as well shut them all down, save ourselves the bother and the money. Or maybe that ’s the plan all along?