Rishi Sunak’s War on Trans Children and Seeing the Return of Thatcher’s Britain to Schools as a Teacher

By Holly Wouldnot

One day after my first ever article was published on Heroica – in which I claimed that this Pride we should celebrate our progress since the elimination of Section 28 – Rishi Sunak has decided to wage war on trans youth. The leaked guidance, whether it ends up being codified or not, is harrowing.

In an attempt for you to understand my utter disgust at this new development, here is a summary of the shocking leaked guidance:

·       Teachers will be forced to out students to their parents/carers regardless of objections from the student themselves.

·       Trans students will be banned or segregated from collective sports in PE.

·       If parents/carers do not consent to their children being addressed by different pronouns, teachers will be forced to ignore the students’ wishes.

·       Teachers and other students can ignore the preferred pronouns of trans or questioning students if they choose to do so.

As a teacher who has just come down from the high of coming out and also celebrating twenty years without Section 28, this entire situation has enraged me. I teach students who gleefully look forward to coming to my lessons and talking to me precisely because I show them the bare minimum respect of calling them their chosen names.

These same students are too scared to look their parents in the eye as they are ‘dead named’ at parents’ evening. I teach students who wear pride badges on the inside of their blazers during the school day but won’t let most people see them, out of fear that this will get back to their parents. I teach students who stay at school clubs every single day, to spend time with people who will call them by their pronouns – something they don’t get at home.

If this new guidance means that I have to out these students to the homes that they are scared of, I won’t do it. I’m not alone in this either.

If one thing has been refreshing since June 19th, it’s the fact that I’ve heard people calling this guidance out. Not all people. But enough. Enough to genuinely be proud of who I work with. Yesterday, June 20th, I overheard something that touched my heart. One of the louder, balder men at the school was talking about the guidance. He didn’t understand the issue. ‘It’s to keep the parents in the know!’ bellowed down the hallway, the Tory apologetics streaming out of his mouth.

Unlike the normal silence, however, he was met with audible disapproval: people telling him that the students are more important than the parents, and that the parents don’t have the right to dictate how their children live their lives. For the first time in my three years as a teacher, people were legitimately defending the LGBTQIA+ youth.

I could see the ordeal from my classroom. Two younger, female teachers shouting down the vile bigotry. It was beautiful. I’ll take a flustered and defeated Tory any day of the week.

Unfortunately, I know that our outcry will do nothing. I can stand up and refuse to follow the guidance all I want; the school will just remove me and have someone more ‘agreeable’ do my job. I can defend the LGBTQIA+ youth until my last day; there’ll always be another person with the same views as that older male colleague of mine waiting to shout me down. But that doesn’t mean we don’t do anything.

In one of my favourite poems ever, A Litany for Survival, Audre Lorde says one of the most poignant phrases of the 20th century:

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

After teaching this poem to my very sweet SEN year 8 class today, I realised that all we really can do is speak. So this is me speaking, and I urge you to do the same. To anyone who’ll listen. Speak your mind; change their mind. It might be slow, it might be excruciating, but we can’t just roll over and agree to follow this sort of guidance. Even if it is inevitable, even if we are under the thumb of fascism in the United Kingdom, we have to keep pushing back.

I’ll leave you with this. This fear that we feel for our LGBTQIA+ siblings cannot go to waste. Use it. Let it fuel our fire. Turn it into a raging inferno that we can use to burn this oppressive state of ours to ashes and start again. Don’t just go quietly. They won’t stop here. They want to take everything from us.