#Anna Loutfi

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

UK Govt to be sued over trans ideology being taught in primary schools | Dr Anna Loutfi

Andrew Doyle: Dr Anna Loufti and The Bad Law project are suing the government for trying to teach children as young as five divisive issues. Families of some of the children have come together to file a class-action lawsuit against the UK government and the Department of Education. They're calling for Personal Social Health and Economic education, known as PSHE, to be abolished in schools and for parents to have the right to withdraw their children from the lessons dealing with sex health and relationships. I'm delighted to say that Equality and Human Rights Barrister Dr Anna Loutfi joins me now

Can I ask you firstly about what's going on in schools, because I've seen some materials from various parents in terms of sex education, some of it has been quite shocking actually, but I think still people deny that there is any kind of problem here.

Dr. Anna Loutfi: Yeah I think when you introduced us now the topic you talked about and the department for Education teaching children in schools, that is not the issue. What's the issue is that we have rogue actors who are posing as charities, what we call the third sector, these organizations, they are completely unregulated, they produce the materials, sometimes they produce the materials outside of the national jurisdiction.

So we'll find for example certain local education authorities using materials that have been taken from the United States, and there is no oversight on the content of these materials and what we are finding is that advocacy groups are choosing their own pick and mix ideas of what children should or shouldn't know, there's no oversight, parents are not really invited to be part of that discussion and what we do see is that some of these materials clearly engage both the civil law and the criminal law in terms of their suitability for children at certain age groups.

Doyle: So there's the the element of the the sexual explicit aspect I mean I have a friend who's a parent of a boy of six, she showed me some of the materials and she said when she tried to have her son removed, they told her you can't, the government says this is compulsory. So although it is an outside agent providing the materials the school seems to believe that the government is making them do it do you think that's possible?

Loutfi: Yes, 100%. I've seen the materials myself. I think we've lost, thanks to the third sector which has now seized complete control of education in this area called PSHE, we have lost control of regulation in the same manner as we would lose control if there had been a military coup, and we had a hunter taking control of the schools. We're simply not allowed to have the conversation about what these materials are for, what the purpose of them is, but more importantly we have, as a nation speaking about the UK, we have lost any discernment about what age groups are suitable for certain kinds of materials. We simply have stopped having that conversation. All materials provided by the third sector two schools are considered to be appropriate because the third sector has appointed itself experts in the area. And therefore if something is considered age inappropriate by a parent or a teacher but the experts, the third sector says no no this is absolutely fine that becomes the end of the conversation. And any parent, any teacher and any young person who has qualms, as we saw in the school in East Sussex where two 13 year old girls raised questions about what they were being taught in PSHE, they're actually insulted and called bigots.

Doyle: Yes, so it's not just about the age inappropriate materials, there's also the ideological aspect to this. So children are being taught, and I've seen materials that prove this. In a number of schools children are being taught, often by outside agents, that there are over 100 genders or that we each have an innate sexed soul, a gendered soul. This is effectively a quasi-religious belief taught us fact. Now, a couple years ago Kemi Badenoch stood up in Parliament and said that the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools was against the law. Is the teaching of gender identity ideology as fact also against the law?

Loutfi: It is, and let's be very clear this isn't just about gender identity, although that is the issue that the parents that have come to me have raised. But let's be very clear: the Education Act 1996 is very explicit that the promotion of any idea that is contentious is unlawful. And by promotion, what the statute says is that you cannot present an idea that is contentious as if it is the only idea or the only version or the only world view available on that topic. There has to be a dispassionate, fair and non-partisan presentation of the facts. That would apply to a whole range of issues.

Doyle: So a teacher could say, there are many people who believe in such a thing as gender identity, there are a minority of the country but there are people who believe that, most people don't believe that, but let's have a discussion about that. That would be okay?

Loutfi: That would be lawful.

Doyle: That would be lawful.

Loutfi: But that isn't what is happening. Iin fact I can I can cite materials. My favorite example is the one of the Gender Galaxy which, when you talk about religious cults, we have a Gender Galaxy and one of the sets of materials that I saw where the Gender sun is circled by all of these different gender identities, little planets going around and it's a huge glorious galaxy with all of these exciting planets. And in the background, in the distance, there's this sad little sun called the Sex Assigned at Birth Galaxy and there are two little tiny sad planets going around that sun in the background, and they are male and female.

The messaging is really clear, but it uses pseudo-scientific astronomical imagery to present the idea that in the universe, there is the exciting Galaxy that is all these choices of gender identities and then there's the boring male and female Assigned at Birth. I mean if you are a young person and you would like to be cool or you'd like to be interesting or you'd like to be different, this is a clear pathway for you to have an identity that signals you out as interesting. And unfortunately we know as James, my dear friend James who was just on now, as he pointed out, we know that this links children into pathways, social and medical, which are irreversible, and which do result in mutilated bodies.

Doyle: To what extent are the likes of Stonewall and Mermaids responsible for this? Those are two groups that do believe in gender identity ideology, they are effectively religious groups now. But I remember seeing a leaked presentation for Mermaids which was a training presentation in which they showed a spectrum of male and female according to Barbie on one end of the spectrum and G.I. Joe on the other. Basically reinforcing what I would say are 1950s stereotypes of what it means to be male and female to young people. Is that the problem?

Loutfi: Yes, I mean Stonewall and Mermaids are two actors, there are many other charities as well. We need to understand as a country the relationship that they have with the Department for Education, why the Department for Education is consulting such people, and not consulting people with a different view.

But there is another issue here. And that is the Equality Act 2010 has a list of protected characteristics on the basis of which you cannot discriminate. One of those characteristics is gender reassignment. As a lawyer the only way I can know what gender reassignment actually means in law, is if I go to something called the Gender Recognition Act 2004 which makes it clear that that is a procedure that is available only to persons of 18 and over. So therefore, the question is why have Mermaids and Stonewall decided to redesign the law according to their fantasy world where gender reassignment is a process that is something that anybody at any age, even in the womb, can engage in and anybody who questions that is a bigot? And you're not allowed to raise very basic safeguarding concerns about what might happen to somebody under the age of 18 who starts the process of interfering with their biology.

Doyle: People are going to be astonished by this, because Stonewall has been accused in the past of representing the law as they would like it to be.

Loutfi: That's exactly what they've done.

Doyle: How can that be the case, in that, why hasn't the government called them up on it, and why are they so embedded, I mean certainly in like the SNP, in the Welsh government, they seem to be very much embedded. I mean, the Welsh government is pushing forward all sorts of these kinds of PSHE programs which teach gender ideology as though it is fact?

Loutfi: Well because we live in a society which is not only anti-intellectual, which means that sound bites rule, but we live in a society that is also driven by repetition of slogans and mantras. If you say something often enough it becomes reality. As a lawyer it doesn't matter to me what people say, it's what the law puts into black and white and I'm finding that even lawyers, even government ministers, are disregarding the black letter of the law, and they are simply repeating mantras that you hear on social media. "Trans women are women," "gender identity is a protected characteristic," these are not legally based arguments. They are mantras, they are advertising slogans, and they are adopted by powerful corporations in order to promote ways of life and products that profit them.

Doyle: Of course activists would say, but you know, at school with young people it's very important to teach them that if children are struggling with their gender, or if children are gay or or from a minority group, that they do need protecting and they need to be shown that we live in an inclusive world what would you say to that?

Loutfi: I would say that we struggle with a lot of things, but we cannot as a society adopt a position where we say anything that you struggle with, society will embrace your desire to be something other than you are. Because if that is true, many young people struggle with suicide ideation, so therefore we should affirm suicide in young people. Wherever somebody wishes to self-harm, anorexics who wish to starve themselves to death, or people who wish to cut their arms with razor blades, are expressing an inner struggle and an idealistic notion of escape from their reality. It is not the business of schools to facilitate that self-harm and we have to be, as a country and a culture and as a moral society, discerning about what we embrace, what we encourage, and what we don't. The fact that a child is struggling is not, in and of itself, justification for the entire society to facilitate a pathway to self-destruction.

Doyle: So it looks like from your perspective the law is the way through this?

Loutfi: Absolutely.

Doyle: Just challenging it in the courts, clarifying the law, all of that.

Loutfi: And the law is clear, we don't even, it's very clear. I believe in the rule of law. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues in the legal profession seem to have abandoned that idea and find it quite old-fashioned. But I believe in the rule of law and I believe that the Gender Recognition Act is very clear, that gender reassignment is a process that is available for people of 18 or over. And anybody promoting the idea that there's something other that the law says, that there's something called gender identity and you can have it at age three, age five, age seven, age nine, is a liar. And the question we should be asking is why are they lying? And I would say the old-fashioned profit motive is one particular avenue that we could go down, but there may be others as well and I find that it's very sinister indeed.

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A tour de force from Dr. Loutfi.

[globalzombie]

Steven Edington interviews barrister Anna Loutfi about free speech, law, culture & history. 27 October 2023.