As education standards in Australia continue to decline by world standards, teachers’ unions invariably use it as an opportunity to demand even more money than ever – despite the fact that Australia has been investing more and more money and getting worse and worse results for over a decade.
On the other hand, teachers’ unions, not just in Australia, but across the English-speaking world, have strenuously resisted what we know works in teaching kids to read and do maths – phonics and rote-learning basics, for instance – in favour of trendy academic theories like “whole language”. They’ve also overloaded curricula with left-wing garbage like environmentalism and “indigenous perspectives”.
Worse, though, is schools’ determination to get into not just kids’ heads, but their pants. Schools are one of the main transmission vectors for the epidemic of transgenderism that’s wrecking the minds and bodies of a generation. From “Drag Queen Story Hour” to “Mates and Dates” schools are willingly complicit in the creepy sexualisation of children, in what seems less like education than grooming.
Delegates at last week’s [UK] National Education Union conference were more interested in another subject: developing a new – and presumably beefed-up – definition of transphobia.
‘Transphobic news stories are a continued and escalating blight on trans and nonbinary members’ lives, with severe consequences on mental health,’ said motion 22.
This is a lie, of course: but don’t expect anything so honest as a frank admission that “transphobia” is a myth. This year’s “Trans Day of Remembrance” was only slightly embarrassed by the revelation that they couldn’t find a single person killed for being transgender. The staggering rates of mental illness and suicide in the transgender community are a tragic co-morbidity of the mental illness of men thinking they’re women, and vice-versa, not an imaginary “transphobia”.
“Transphobia”, like “Islamophobia” and every other left-wing ‘phobia’, is a convenient lie: a rhetorical fiction designed to bludgeon their opponents into silence.
Somewhat ironically, perhaps, the most immediate victims of this tranny inquisition will be the majority of the teachers’ union’s members.
Women make up over three quarters of NEU’s 440,000 members and it is women who have faced accusations of transphobia when they have defended the integrity of their spaces. Will they be pushed out of this important debate?
If any of them dare raise their voices against the bearded ladies taking over their change rooms, they will shouted down as “TERFs” and almost certainly get a chilling visit from the plod – and even end up in prison.
Thankfully, some teachers are prepared to speak out agains this emerging gender orthodoxy. Gerald Clark from Camden moved an amendment to remove the clause ‘above and beyond legal compliance’. Clark worries that these words could mean teachers find themselves in hot water for not upholding union rules despite acting within the law. ‘Another concern is that it could be used to stifle debate and cause conflict between different groups,’ he told me.
Another teacher, Steve White, from Waltham Forest, also voiced similar concerns. He described the motion as ‘dangerous and divisive’ and warned that it could lead to members being expelled from the union for wrong-think. As a responsible teacher, he worried about the impact of gender ideology on children who are being led to believe they can choose their sex if they are unhappy with the sex that was ‘assigned to them at birth’. Would he, or members like him, face union discipline for voicing those concerns?
Debate is something the trans lobby always seems keen to avoid though: Clark’s sensible amendment was voted down[…]
Will female members of the union be able to discuss their sex-based rights, let alone defend them? It would be a brave female teacher who is willing to test the rules.
Spectator
Perhaps teachers ought to find the courage to dump a union which clearly values woke orthodoxy above its own members’ basic human rights.
Even more importantly: parents need to start withdrawing their children from schools which peddle this dangerous garbage.
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