Last week the government announced guidance to schools that they can no longer teach ideas such as there are 72 genders. To which you might wonder, why on earth are schools teaching there are 72 genders?

That’s certainly what I thought on the school-run home last year when my nine-year-old son announced, “Dad, did you know there are over  100 sexes?” He and my 11-year-old had just attended a special assembly, where amongst other things they’d discussed pansexuals. I say amongst other things, but I really have no clue the extent to which my children were indoctrinated that day in the highly contested beliefs of gender ideology.

Enquiries revealed that the session was run by KeshetUK, who according to their website “is an education and training charity with a mission to ensure that Jewish LGBT+ people and their families are included throughout Jewish life in the UK.” Brilliant. I want exactly that as well. But when my subsequent requests for the teaching materials weren’t met, I couldn’t help but continue to wonder what exactly it was my children were taught.

Were they told there are more than two sexes? Were they told they can change sex? Were they told that biological males have the right to be in female spaces, even competing in women’s sports? Or just as important, given the confusion and conflation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, were they specifically told that the answer to all of those is ‘no’?

That the facilitator was adamant the expression ‘lots of sexes’ wasn’t utilised, even though both my children insist it was, somewhat  justified my concerns. Anyone reading this with teens and pre-teen children might also relate, having these last years found ourselves at the fulcrum of where ideology meets reality.

My five children, aged 6-14, are all embedded in Jewish institutions. At camp, when Mordy was 11, an afternoon session was led by the teenage counsellors about the “hundreds of genders”, and “sex being a spectrum.” At his b’nai mitzvah class in March,  Artie was shown a video of a talk given by an Orthodox trans-woman, followed by two hours discussing all the different genders.

I was later assured KeshetUK had twice confirmed this video as appropriate to show to children in the class as young as ten, but the video’s narrative of being born in the wrong body, descriptions of constant mental anguish, alluding to transition preventing suicide, and its culmination of entering a female space with no consideration to the women present, raised red flags to me.

However, I’m not the expert. What’s apparent though, is when it comes to these matters in the Jewish community, KeshetUK is the only game in town. But trying to get some clarity from them has been a somewhat difficult process. They did tell me that “None of KeshetUK’s sessions to school children have a ‘list of the different genders’”, but subsequent clarifications of whether they teach or have ever taught children that there are more sexes or more genders than male and female remain unanswered at this time. Perhaps this is to be expected though when the grand poobah of LGBT+ charities, Stonewall, publicly implemented a policy of #nodebate.

It was this climate that led to lesbians who sexually rejected male bodies being called bigots. People like JK Rowling who stood up to the erasure of women’s language and opposed male-bodied rapists being housed with women, were subjected to rape and death threats. Less famous women lost their jobs and livelihoods due to the cowardice of bosses and the false legal advice provided by gender ideologically driven organisations.

Most disturbing though, is what’s developing into the greatest medical scandal of our age. The recently published Cass Review, an exhaustive four year report, examined why NHS cases of gender dysmorphia have in just over a decade increased a hundredfold.

Rather than this increase being because of “acceptance”, it instead identified a social contagion, spread via gender ideology and its proponents. This resulted in up to 9000 children pushed onto a path of medical intervention with experimental damaging drugs and surgery, when in many cases they were confused young people who would have otherwise grown into adult homosexuals. At the now closed Tavistock Clinic, staff even joked of “transing the gay away.”  I’m not sure how funny that is to the growing number of detransitioners, their bodies infertile and altered forever.

Along with higher rates of co-morbidities such as trauma and mental health issues, it’s the confirmation that those presenting with gender dysmorphia are up to six times more likely to be autistic, that is perhaps most relevant to the Jewish community.

It’s becoming ever clearer that parents and the institutions we trust with our children can no longer afford to stick our heads in the sand on this matter, leaving others to fill that space with no accountability. It’s time for some transparency. It’s time to do what we do best. It’s time to debate.