Cutting Out Parents put Kids at Risk

Should organisations promoting gender affirming care be able to ignore the recommendations of a Royal Commission aimed at keeping kids safe?

A Royal Commission

Sadly we know all too well in Australia about the horrors of child sexual abuse and the damage it has done to countless children, many of whom are now adults. We also know of the horrific ways many different institutions, including the church to its shame, sought to protect the abuser and not the victim in its response to this crisis. It is a stain on many institutions in Australia and the impacts are far-reaching and incalculable.

To help our country learn from this horrible past and the institutional failures to respond in a way that helped victims and sought to protect children from further abuse we had a Royal Commission. The Royal Commission handed down its final report in December 2017 and along the way made some really important recommendations. Of particular note were the recommendations made about creating child-safe institutions. I’m familiar with these as they have informed our practice in my work for how we interact with children and how we try to never again make the mistakes our organisation made in the past.

What’s of particular interest to me, as it relates to the LGBTI+ issue, is element number three of a child-safe institution. Element three states, “Families and communities are informed and involved”. And it lists some ways this is supposed to work:

  1. Families have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of their child and participate in decisions affecting their child
  2. the institution engages in open, two- way communication with families and communities about its child safety approach and relevant information is accessible
  3. families and communities have a say in the institution’s policies and practices
  4. families and communities are informed about the institution’s operations and governance.

Essentially families are primarily responsible for their own children and institutions that engage with and work with children need to keep families informed. A further factsheet on this, which was signed off by all the Premiers and the Prime Minister in 2018 talks about how organisations need to be responsive to families and seek their feedback.

Gender-Affirming Failures

Whether you are a church, a school, or a LGBTI+ organisation you need to take the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse very seriously. I would argue if your organisation is all about sex or sexuality then it’s even more important you’re engaging with the family as per the recommendations. This is why it’s concerning that there are LGBTI+ organisations, and schools that use and support those organisations, which seem to not bring children and their parents together, but rather drive a wedge between children and their families.

Take for example TransFolk of WA which is a registered charity. As the Feminist News site, 4W outlines so clearly in their post this organsation runs a program to help young girls bind their chests even if they are only 14. They run this program which is knowingly delivering this device to minors in homes where the family may not wish the child to undertake this practice. They also send these binders to children without checking what sort of health or psychological care they might be receiving. Doesn’t sound a lot like a child-safe organisation to me. Certainly, not one that seeks to have “families and communities informed and involved,” as per the Royal Commission recommendations.

But they are not alone.

The Victorian Government has a completely unsafe LGBTIQ Student Support Policy which you can read here. It says, “Schools must work with students affirming their gender identity to prepare and implement a student support plan. The plan should be developed in consultation with the student and their parents or carers, where possible”. The implication is that perhaps parents should be cut out of the process if they won’t get on board with the social and potentially later medical transition of their child. But it gets much worse. Later on, under a heading called Parental Consent, it reads:

There may be circumstances in which students wish or need to undertake gender transition without the consent of their parent/s (or carer/s), and/or without consulting medical practitioners.

If no agreement can be reached between the student and the parent/s regarding the student’s gender identity, or if the parent/s will not consent to the contents of a student support plan, it will be necessary for the school to consider whether the student is a mature minor.

If a student is considered a mature minor they can make decisions for themselves without parental consent and should be affirmed in their gender identity at school without a family representative/carer participating in formulating the school management plan.

Basically, if you are a parent and you won’t get with the program of subjecting your child to a gender transformation, they’ll cut you off from the process. Once again undermining this key principle of child-safe organisations from the Royal Commission.

My Own Concerns in Tasmania

My experience as a parent has led me to be deeply concerned about Tasmanian programs too, and specifically what our future will look like if the Rockcliff Government pursues the Conversion Therapy Ban as per the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute report here. That report is contradictary and poorly written, obviously standards at Univeristy have dropped since I went there, but in a few places (eg. 5.5.28) it quite clearly indicates that if as a parent you want to help your child experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence to adhere to their biological sex you have done conversion therapy and should be punished by law. It seeks to drive a wedge between parent and child and legislate what is a highly questionable model of gender-affirming care.

But even without those laws, my experiences already as a parent have been concerning. Take “The Growing Up Program” run by Family Planning Tasmania. This program is a series of educational programs around sex, consent, and gender for children all throughout their school life. My experience of this program has been that they deliberately make it hard for parents to find out what is being taught. Often parents are only notified on the day, or night before this program is run in their child’s school. Then they will commonly only offer a parent information session the morning of the session, thus deliberately excluding most parents from being able to come and engage with the presenter. This is more worrying when, based on conversations I’ve had with parents of older kids than mine, this program seems to teach gender confusion to kids as they are hitting puberty. Now of course it’s very hard to get good hard evidence of this because once again they are hiding what they are teaching kids. They provide only vague details on their parental information sheets. How is any of that fulfilling the Royal Commission’s recommendation that “families and communities are informed and involved”? To do that all that they teach should be freely and easily available for parents to review to enable parents to have conversations with their kids. Not only that, but the Growing Up Program facilitators should run multiple parental information sessions prior to speaking to children in school so every parent has the chance to engage and ask questions and be informed completely about what is taught to their kids about sex, gender, consent, and puberty.

My experience has also led me to be deeply concerned about Working It Out Tasmania, another government-funded organisation. This organization came to my child’s Primary School and flooded my child’s school with a gender-affirming ideology. The end result of the school’s “professional development” session with them was I had to unenroll my child from my State Government school because the Principal held fast to Working It Out’s anti-parent pro-LGBTI+ INC. agenda. You can read all about that here. Working It Out also promoted and used Minus18, whose posters were all over my child’s school after their session. Minus18 is also a gender-affirming, pro-trans organisation and even has articles to help kids to bind their chests (with their doctor’s advice, not their parents).

Parents MUST NEVER be excluded

As soon as these organisations and the governments that fund and support them start excluding parents they have fallen short of the Royal Commission’s recommendations for how to be child-safe organisations. We must call this out and as parents and families we must fight back.

Thankfully there is some hope. Just today The Australian newspaper in its editorial sounded the alarm about gender-affirming care and the wedge being driven between children and parents stating,

“In one instance, school authorities had encouraged a young girl to use a boy’s name in the classroom and transition, without having any contact with parents about what was going on. This is clearly unacceptable.”

They are right. It is completely unacceptable. I suspect given the Victorian Government policy outlined earlier, there’s more than one instance of this occurring.

For now let’s hope the fact that this is starting to gain traction in the mainstream media is a sign the tide is turning against these unsafe practices, organisations, and terrible government policies. Let’s hope all organisations can recommit themselves to being ones where “families and communities are informed and involved.” Where the relationship between parent and child is held above all others. And if you’re the praying type let’s pray for our children to be protected from this dangerous ideology.

Source: Chris Bowditch substack

https://chrisbowditch.substack.com/p/cutting-out-parents-put-kids-at-risk?fbclid=IwY2xjawFQsJ1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUQb1HjJHW2sRKrWad3HALypGCeSh6SXxqWKKR6ofzNLSkGIf77wn38PpA_aem_CRwfmsJvnf-NFbDRqQhnGw&sfnsn=mo