Some people are never satisfied. This, one suspects, will be Labour’s response to any criticism of its newly published guidance on gender transition in schools.

According to one source, quoted in the Times, the Government is “taking the heat out of this issue”. It’s balanced, nuanced, and carefully worded. What’s more, Baroness Cass supports it — and, as we all know, anyone who agrees with the findings of the Cass Review isn’t allowed to disagree with her ever again. “They cannot pick and choose,” says the source, as if agreeing that the evidence base for gender medicine is woeful means you can’t also believe childhood transition is a travesty.

But the new guidance is more than a slightly problematic. For years, Labour politicians have sought to present the “trans debate” as an ugly battle between two equally extremist sides. The message they are now seeking to convey is that the adults are in the room, bringing much-needed light where once there was only heat.

If you squint a bit, the guidance for schools does indeed appear cautious and considered. “Gender questioning children” may use pronouns of the opposite sex, but only after consultation with parents. Teachers must be made aware of the risk of putting children on an “irrevocable pathway”, and clinical advice — whatever that means — must be taken into account. There is an expectation that support for full social transition will “be agreed very rarely”. In short, we’re not going to say that no child is born in the wrong body — that would be one of those nasty, polarised positions — just that not very many are.

It can be tempting to go along with this. Thanks to “no debate” and the appropriation of gay rights rhetoric, gender identity ideology became deeply embedded in multiple institutions without those in charge asking questions. Now, rather than admit that its basic premises are anti-scientific and rooted in the crassest stereotypes, many people would rather tiptoe back to some imaginary middle ground. They can see the harm being done, yet have decided that limiting rather than eradicating it is what sensible, non-extremist people do.

Writing in the Telegraph, Cass is clear that children “deserve better than being rushed towards life-altering decisions based on rigid ideas of what boys and girls should be like”. But when she complains about “the paradox we’ve seen based on extreme positions where gender has become its own political football”, what does she think gender is? Is it really extremist to note that gender transition is wholly based on “rigid ideas of what boys and girls should be like”? Or are we supposed to pretend that while some children happen to like opposite sex-coded things, others like this stuff so much they need to be put on a path to infertility, sexual dysfunction and lifetime medicalisation?

It should not be considered a step too far to exclude the very notion of being born in the wrong body from the classroom. There are positive, empathetic, life-affirming ways to teach children about gender non-conformity, ones which include the message that there’s nothing to grow out of and that you’re fine as you are. You don’t need to change your mind to match your sexed body, and you don’t need to change your sexed body to match your mind.

Instead, we have leaders who picture themselves at the Judgement of Solomon, presiding over two warring sides. To be fair, I picture them there, too. I just don’t see the King imparting wisdom. I see the mother who’d rather have a child torn in half than admit she was wrong.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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