In court, you must swear to tell the truth. Failing to do so is considered a serious offence and harmful to determining justice.
Why then is it tolerated for teachers, who are entrusted with the solemn duty of educating our next generation, to not tell the truth? That is, the biological truth…
This is the education system today.
Institutions coerce teachers into addressing children as something much of the world, throughout history, considers they are not: boys as girls, girls as boys, or children as something else altogether.
Sometime since 1948, Orwell’s warnings have morphed into the prophetic.
The policies
From the New South Wales State Education Department policy:
‘The Department’s Code of Conduct and the individual school’s discipline and welfare policy should be utilised where staff or students deliberately or repeatedly use names or pronouns other than the one identified by the student concerned.’
Some of the additional pages for this topic return a 404 error on the website. ‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’ Sorry for the inconvenience? In my view, this conjures up the message from God to his creation in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The inference being that life wasn’t intended to be as complicated as it turned out and that mankind has a way of creating confusion from elegant simplicity.
Not to be outdone, the Victorian government, in its policy on School Operations, states:
‘Schools must work with students affirming their gender identity to prepare and implement a student support plan.’
Included in this consideration is the line ‘the referencing of and recording of student’s affirmed name, gender identity, and pronouns (he, she, they, and so on)’.
The Legal History
The steps that have brought us to our current predicament are quite convoluted, but I have attempted to summarise them below:
The creation of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984.
Gender Identity Act (Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013). This took the word ‘sex’ out of the Sex Discrimination Act.
Specifically, Subsection 4(1) which repealed the biological definition of a man and woman and inserted:
…gender identity means the gender‑related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender‑related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth.
The arbiter of this legislation has become the Sex Discrimination Commission under the Human Rights Commission.
The Birth, Death and Marriages Act (now allows for change of registered sex).
The Human Rights Commission’s insistence on a conciliation process in each case.
High-profile federal court cases discussing the legal bounds of sex-protected spaces and exclusions.
There have been cases regarding alleged discrimination in which the definitions of gender identity and biological sex have been tested. Cases going back 30 years have established that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable. In other words, it has been decided that the legal definition of sex trumps reality defined by biology.
This is where we are today.
Human Rights Commission
Trans@School was produced by the Queensland Human Rights Commission and published in 2020. They created two documents; one aimed at schools and the other at students. In these documents they refer to:
‘Affirming gender means affirming the gender that matches a person’s gender identity. For example, if a person was assigned male at birth and identifies as female, the person affirms their gender as female.’
The documents go on to instruct children on how to successfully change their gender identity and how the school should support them in this process, even if parents disagree – affirmation must come first.
Schools
School principals have been left with Hobson’s choice.
If they don’t insist on teachers submitting to the pronoun police, they face the Sword of Damocles from of the Education Department, Human Rights Commission, or aggressive activists or politicians.
It they do insist, many parents would consider them being complicit in subverting biological reality or contravening conscience or religious practice or exemption.
They may also face litigation for disciplining teaching staff not prepared to follow the Human Rights’ Commission mantra, as in the case of at least one teacher who, at mediation, achieved a favourable settlement including a retraction of their dismissal, a letter of recommendation, an acknowledgment of service, and a substantial monetary payment.
To add to the complexity, this is ‘at a time when international media and the overwhelming evidence of harm of what this can lead to’. (‘UK Safety fear put Australian gender clinics on notice’.)
Indeed, there is a real legal risk to schools relating not only to students, but to teachers who seek to use pronouns that may not align with the religious ethos of the school.
Christianity, Religion, and the Enlightenment
Enlightenment values rely on two core ideas: truth through the scientific method, and individual liberty.
Christianity, and like-minded religions, expand on this by asserting that the measure of worshipping something is the significance you give it. Worshipping God means putting His will above your feelings. So, what does God say about feelings that your sex is not aligned with your biology?
It is important to know that, historically, this is not a new phenomenon and appears wrapped up in the question of ‘mind over matter’ or the aim is to transcend our corrupt physical bodies into something spiritual and pure.
To boil the argument down to its essential elements, we read in Genesis 1:27
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Two sexes were created and created in God’s image, not in each other’s image or imagination, but God’s.
Okay, but is it such a big deal if we ignore this bit? Well yes, the first commandment written is, ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ Don’t put government, institutions, or even yourself before God. This is followed by, ‘You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the Earth beneath.’ Our image is created in God, it is His image and we are not to alter it to satisfy our own desires. Thirdly, ‘You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.’ Christians and institutions that claim Christ as Lord represent Him. Putting God second in descriptions or decisions breaks these commandments and makes Him, and us, liars.
Reality
The reality is, we should all have serious concerns about the weaponisation of our institutions against the private beliefs held by members of the public. We should also feel sympathy for anyone going through the trauma and confusion of who they are, even more so when dealing with young people.
Yet emotions are heightened in teenagers as they develop from childhood to adulthood. Allowing kids to make such dramatic decisions does not provide care and protection for them when they are most vulnerable. Many teachers over the years have used the words, ‘Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish a barrel.’
And it is no wonder the kids are confused. Even the Health Secretary did not appear to know what a woman was when asked by Senator Antic. He replied, ‘I think there are a variety of definitions.’ Who would have thought that the 1990 action-comedy Kindergarten Cop would turn into an instructional video? ‘Boys have Penises, Girls have Vaginas!’ declares a child from the floor of a primary classroom. The nation’s former chief health leader must have missed that lesson.
Barrister Louise Clegg said recently that it has been a failure on behalf of conservatives not to prosecute the cause of freedoms, choosing, instead, to cede the space to progressives. She went on to offer the sage advice that owning the language on a daily basis emboldens our legal fraternity to produce decisions more in line with traditional thought. It appears that Justice, like politics, are downstream of culture.
Solzhenitsyn offers this: ‘The easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.’ This may well be the treatment required to help heal the cultural wounds in Australian society and embolden teachers to teach what is true.
Jason Strecker has nearly two decades of experience in education and is a director at Australians for Science and Freedom (scienceandfreedom.org). He can be contacted at jason.strecker@scienceandfreedom.org or on X @JasonStrecker.
