Be firm on ‘trans’ pupils, Braverman urges

SCHOOLS are under no legal obligation to accommodate children who say they want to change gender, the Attorney General has claimed.

In a stark intervention, Suella Braverman declared last night that teachers do not need to address a child by a new pronoun or allow them to wear the school uniform of a different gender.

She called on teachers to avoid taking an “unquestioning approach” by accepting what a child says and instead adopt a “much firmer line”.

It comes as Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, draws up guidance for schools on how to support children with gender dysphoria, to which Ms Braverman has contributed. The Attorney General pointed out in an interview with The Times that under-18s cannot get a gender recognition certificate or legally change sex.

“A male child who says in a school that they are a trans girl, that they want to be female, is legally still a boy or a male – and schools have a right to treat them as such under the law,” she said.

“If they say they’re non-binary, they still remain legally, and physically, the sex they were born to. The school doesn’t have to say... we’ll take what this child says and we’ll change our systems and service to accommodate this child. It doesn’t have to do that.”

Ms Braverman also praised JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author who has campaigned to protect single-sex spaces, describing her as a “heroine” and “very brave, very courageous”.

Ms Braverman highlighted research indicating that some parts of the country had “worryingly high” levels of children presenting as transgender, telling the paper it was likely to be related “to the way teachers and local education authorities are approaching this subject”.

She said: “There is something to be said for young people seeing what their peers are doing and being influenced by that.”

‘The school doesn’t have to say, we’ll take what this child says and we’ll change our systems and service’