Schools can resist the trans wars We did it in the Nineties with Section 28

Progressively and softly, the Blob killed Section 28 in schools many years before it came off the statute books: squished it to death with a million mild and thoughtful classroom interactions, with thousands of conversations about Shakespeare’s lovers, hundreds of performances of YMCA at assembly and courageous comings out, public and private. I think the Blob should be proud. Besides, wool and fudge are good for young people: they can be relied on to bring the absolutism and the knives themselves.

All this matters because the memory of Section 28 is increasingly being invoked around a new moral panic: the treatment of transgender young people in schools. There are parallels. In 1996 I thought, for example, that I would never see such run-down classrooms or desperate staff rooms again. But after the pandemic, and 12 years of conservative austerity — and the venal demands of the academy trusts — roofs are falling in again and classes are bulging at the seams. There is a huge teacher recruitment problem and an absolute crisis in Special Educational Needs. Here again is a populist government finding itself unexpectedly unpopular and willing to exploit anything and anybody to take the attention away from its own failures.

Attorney General Suella Braverman’s pronouncements on transgender students in schools genuinely echoed Section 28 in their emptiness — pandering to transgender students is as far removed from real classroom practice as “promoting” homosexuality ever was — and also in their meanness. CAMHs, the young people’s mental health service, is in a state even the Government agrees is dire. Improving it would be the only real action the government could take to mitigate this crisis — but there are no plans to do so.

Braverman’s comments, coming at the end of partygate week, were clearly designed as a distraction. As Caroline Derbyshire, chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable commented, sounding sublimely Blob-like: “The story is an attempt to whip up an anti-woke culture war, and in schools we are not really interested in this kind of silliness.”

The trouble is, though, schools are. Teenagers have always been frantically interested in war and every kind of newness and anything a headteacher might call silly — that’s their job — but now teachers are, too. Braverman’s panic was not whipped up by the Right-wing press, but by people of the Blob. The advocates of banning books were not ancient Baronesses or Telegraph hacks but children’s librarians and teachers and people who write children’s books themselves. And it wasn’t a single picture book, either: according to Twitter, on any given day, “harm” in hyperbolic quantities can be found in hundreds of volumes. The mere presence in a school of someone with an unusual view may be called “actual violence”. In 1987, only the Daily Mail would monster teachers; now they publicly wish death on each other. Then, playground bullies echoed the homophobic language of comedians and tabloids; now, they use the language of the culture war.

Section 28 was most effectively defeated by being quietly ignored behind closed classroom doors. Now the doors have been opened by social media and schools and teachers are at risk, as Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Lecturers put it “of being criticised whatever decisions they make and policies they adopt” on transgender young people.

The young people themselves are at even more extreme risk: they need quiet, privacy, calm, time, and professional help and all these things are being denied them. They also need an adult consensus around them, preferably a woolly, blobby one with plenty of fudge available. But the adults can’t come to a consensus. We can’t even allow each other the words to start the discussion. We have to say everything is a war.