search

In April, the Crown Prosecution Service pulled its LGBT hate crime guidance for schools following a legal challenge by a 14-year-old girl.

The guidance warned schools they could face legal action if they do not allow transgender pupils to use the toilets and changing rooms of their choice. It also claimed that children could be guilty of a hate crime for ‘rejecting someone’, ‘not wanting to work with them’ or excluding them from a friendship group.

A transgender person has lost a legal case to be recorded as the father on the child’s birth certificate.

Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the High Court’s Family Division, said someone who gives birth to a child is a mother. Freddy McConnell, born female but now legally male, retained female reproductive organs and conceived via donated sperm and IVF. McConnell was not permitted to list the relationship to the child as ‘father’ on the birth certificate and so challenged the Government.

Transgender hate laws are being questioned by an ex-police officer via a new campaign called A Fair Cop, it was reported in May.

Harry Miller is spearheading the group after being visited at work by police in Humberside after retweeting a limerick about trans women. The force admitted there had been no crime committed. They had received training by Mermaids, the controversial group which teaches that there is a spectrum of genders.

While primary school pupils in Cambridge take part in celebratory ‘transition’ assemblies, Welsh ‘boys’ share dorms with girls, and Scottish 12-year-olds are being encouraged to have their birth certificates altered, women on Twitter were banned, in May, from stating biological facts about men and women.

The social networking giant, Twitter, censored tweets which state what the women say are ‘basic, incontrovertible biological facts’, claiming the content goes against its ‘hateful conduct’ policy. The group, Fair Play for Women, wrote an open letter to Martha Lane Fox, a peer who also sits on the board of Twitter, asking her to help stop their views being silenced. She is yet to respond to them. The letter speaks out against a ‘concerted attack on women’s free speech’.

Sex education which is ‘fully inclusive of all genders and sexualities’, and covers schoolchildren from the age of five, was announced by the Welsh Government in May.

Re-branded as Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE), the subject will be embedded within the curriculum – although the parental right of withdrawal is set to remain in Wales, but not in England.

A play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual has faced strong criticism, ahead of its launch at a publicly-funded LGBT festival in Northern Ireland, it was reported in mid-November.

The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven is part of the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast, and is advertised with the tagline: ‘Jesus is a transsexual woman. And it is now she walks the earth’.