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In September, the Ministry of Justice apologised for failings in the prison review system that allowed a transgender sex offender to be transferred to a women’s prison where he raped and sexually assaulted female prisoners.

Frances Crook, the Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said that prisoners with a penis who have male hormones should not be transferred.

The Word on the Wash convention took place at King’s Lynn Academy in mid-Sep-tember.

An appropriate quote from Anne Frank on the wall of the school hall – ‘How wonderful it is that no-one need waste a single moment before starting to change the world’ – fitted with some of the talks the delegates heard as part of the conference entitled ‘Living with hope in a changing world’.

NHS England is to be taken to court by the UK’s equality watchdog for failing to offer fertility services to transgender patients, it was reported in early September.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a high-profile judicial review action, a legal manoeuvre that is likely to prove controversial at a time when the NHS is struggling to balance budgets and provide core services. Surgery to alter sex organs generally results in infertility.

en staff

Date posted: 1 Nov 2018

The unanimous decision by the five justices of the Supreme Court on 10 October was greeted as a victory for free speech.

They ruled that Ashers, the Belfast bakery, was not obliged to make a cake emblazoned with the message ‘support gay marriage’. If anyone needed clarification that this case was about a message and not about discriminating against a person, Daniel McArthur of Ashers ended his statement outside the court saying Mr Lee ‘will always be welcome in one of our shops’.

A series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests revealed in June that councils in Scotland have widely backed guidelines produced by organisations campaigning for the rights of transgender people, but have not considered how the new approach will affect children – particularly girls.

None of the councils involved, nor the children’s commissioner, nor Education Scotland have carried out an equality impact assessment to ensure that the rights and well-being of other pupils are unaffected.

Christian television channel Revelation TV was fined €6,000 in June for homophobic remarks made on one of its breakfast shows last year.

The channel, which broadcasts to the UK but is based in Spain, was given the penalty by the Spanish National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC). The conversation in question was about trans-gender children, following a Christian family removing their child from school because one of his classmates identified as transgender.

en staff

Date posted: 1 Sep 2018

The government opened a consultation in July, closing on 19 October, on changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which seeks to allow people to self-identify as transgender without having to make any formal declaration.

Many groups including Christians, feminists and lesbians, are greatly concerned about the dramatic effect upon society the legal changes would bring. They believe that women’s rights achieved over many decades will be rolled back. Women who have tried to meet together to discuss the impact of trans issues have experienced violence and found venues in which to meet almost impossible to come by (en July 2018).

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’.

Parents at a Croydon primary school called for the headteacher to resign on 4 July after a ‘Proud to be me’ Pride parade was organised as part of the school curriculum in June, which parents planned to protest.

The parade was part of a series of events celebrating Pride Month which included children thinking about things of which they were proud, including what made their families special. Children were encouraged to wear ‘bright clothes’ to school for the event. Lessons on LGBT issues had been included in the teaching series.

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.

‘The Christian Union should be banned from having a freshers’ stand.’

This was the unilateral announcement last October (2017) of two rogue members of Oxford’s Balliol College Junior Common Room Committee. This was to make the Balliol freshers’ fair a ‘safe, secular space’. This decision was subsequently overturned by an irate student body, but the incident caught the attention of the national media.

Schools will apparently be issued with guidelines on transgender pupils in March.

They are being drafted by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (ECHR) and are likely to suggest that pupils should be allowed to change gender ‘at any time’, and that parents and pupils should refer to children by their ‘preferred pronoun’. It is reported that cross-dressing should be allowed and that a pupil’s chosen gender may be kept confidential from the child’s parents.