Badenoch intervenes over teacher who backed cat identity for kids

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Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has written to Ofsted to ask for a snap inspection of Rye College, the school where a teacher was recently recorded calling a pupil “despicable” for believing there are only two sexes. The teacher also reprimanded the pupil for refusing to endorse her classmate’s identification as a cat.

Mrs Badenoch wrote that, in her view, the teacher’s behaviour was in breach of the Equality Act as it failed to respect belief in biological reality, which is a protected belief, raising “issues about safeguarding at the school”.

By teaching as fact the “contested” belief that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with”, the teacher was also in breach of political impartiality requirements, Mrs Badenoch said, adding that the belief had “no scientific basis”.

The intervention came as two 14-year-old girls wrote an open letter to Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, telling her they are “too frightened” to tell their classmates that there are only two sexes.

The teenagers said that in school “dissenting voices are stifled” and “extreme ideologies are presented as fact”.

“There have been many cases of students being bullied and ostracised for disagreeing with gender ideology, where gender-critical pupils are punished by teachers, excluded by students, and abandoned by friends,” they added.

“What is going on at these schools?” asks the Times, as it reports on a school in Lincolnshire where a group of pupils identify as dogs, bark in lessons and roam around as a “wolf pack”.

The problem, of course, is not that teenagers get up to silly things. The problem is that some teachers are taking it very seriously indeed, and even calling pupils “despicable” when they refuse to do so as well.

And many pupils are also taking it very seriously. The epidemic of teen transgenderism is anything but frivolous.

At C4M we’re pleased to see the Government finally taking action over this issue, which has been simmering for some time. We urge it to be robust in reasserting the primacy of biological reality over subjective notions of ‘identity’, which are wreaking havoc amongst our young people.