(LifeSiteNews) — As a growing number of institutions shift to gender-neutral bathrooms to comply with the diktats of gender ideology, the U.K.’s attorney general Suella Braverman has announced that schools which only offer unisex bathrooms are breaking the law.
Braverman is the U.K. government’s chief legal advisor, and she is speaking out against schools transitioning away from sex-segregated bathroom facilities. Writing for the Telegraph, Braverman stated that: “There is also a separate duty to provide single-sex toilets in schools, breach of which would be unlawful. The legislative background therefore means that biological male children are generally not permitted to use the female toilets in schools.”
After years of chaos and confusion, Braverman presented the U.K. government’s advice for schools on dealing with the thorny transgender issue in a speech for the think tank Policy Exchange. Trans activists are going to be enraged by many of the government’s conclusions. Braverman stated that schools can “refuse to allow a biologically and legally male child, who identifies as transgender, from using girls’ toilets.”
This contradicts the current practice of allowing trans-identified students to use whichever facility they choose, whenever they choose.
But far more significant than that is Braverman’s open attack on the now standard practice of schools assisting students in “transitioning” without their parents’ knowledge, which she referred to as “transitioning children behind their parents’ backs,” and stated that teachers should not refer to children by new, “preferred pronouns” unless specifically advised to by a medical professional. Those who “socially transition” without the knowledge and consent of their parents, she stated, may be in breach of their “duty of care” and could face lawsuits.
“Many schools and teachers believe—incorrectly—that they are under an absolute legal obligation to treat children who are gender questioning according to the preference of the child,” Braverman stated.
I want to make it clear that it is possible, within the law, for schools to refuse to use the preferred opposite-sex pronouns of a child. When it comes to gender-questioning children, we should always have compassion. At the same time, our compassion should never blind us to the harm it is possible to do to children by misplaced affirmation.
For too long, Braverman continued, the important debate over the implications of gender ideology has been silenced. “True diversity and equality are at risk when we divide everyone into separate groups and then silence views which may challenge those group identities. This is not what democracy is about and it is not what the law requires.”
This may simply seem like common sense, but Braverman’s statements here are a complete repudiation of current practices as delineated and called for by transgender activists. Trans activists have been extraordinarily successful in persuading educators to adopt an affirmative stance to any hint of gender confusion as well as convincing schools that socially transitioning students without the knowledge of their parents is essential to student safety.
For the attorney general of the United Kingdom to not only push back against this implicit smearing of parents but to actually warn educators that their actions may well be illegal and could open them to lawsuits is going to have a huge impact.
This announcement will be sure to result in a vicious backlash. Trans activists in the U.K. have faced a series of losses recently, from Maya Forstater’s free speech victory in court to the shuttering of the Tavistock Clinic. To get pushed back within the very institutions they have been utilizing to effect widespread indoctrination is going to unleash their fury like little we’ve seen so far. Braverman, of course, must surely know this—and that makes her statements even more encouraging.