Check your unquestionings
Schools following Scottish Government gender guidance could be next in line for a Sandie Peggie-style legal case, John Swinney has been warned. For Women Scotland described First Minister John Swinney’s stance on single-sex spaces as “very cowardly” as the group used a Scottish Labour fringe event to call on councillors to reject national guidance.
The Scottish Labour conference rejected a motion calling for the Scottish Government to have single-sex spaces for boys and girls based on biology. It said current Scottish Government guidance “relies on the necessity of unquestioning affirmation” of transgender identity from a school pupil.
The wording is interesting because it’s so obviously nuts. How can unquestioning affirmation of anything a school pupil says be a necessity? Schools don’t exist to affirm without question what children say, they exist to teach them how to choose which things to say, and why, and how, and on what occasions, and whether or not with apologies or caution or skepticism.
Unquestioning affirmation is not necessarily a good thing. It’s dumb and destructive to teach children that it is. Schools of all institutions should be sharply aware of that fact.
Schools have rules, and they teach basics about how to treat each other, and it’s ok for that to be not up for debate, at least not when the rules are being broken. Other than that, though, questions are a core part of teaching.
Anyway gender ideology, of course, is just about the last thing anyone should accept without question.
If this was actually the reasoning of the conference, then it is stunning in its willful dodging of the issue. Yes, this is the current state of Scottish law. But a political party should either be stating outright its support of the law, or voicing its dissent. Simply saying “the law is the law” while neither defending (the indefensible) nor pushing for a new approach is a way of washing their hands of the matter; Pontius Pilate would’ve been proud.