The women fighting to keep trans activism out of the classroom

One morning last June, outside a primary school in Devon, three women stood unobtrusively at the school gates handing out leaflets.

They were there at the request of a parent who was worried that an outside organisation had been invited in to teach the children – some as young as six – about “inclusiveness”.

On the surface, this appeared harmless. But this parent had safeguarding concerns about this particular LGBTQ+ supportive group – Pop’n’Olly – whose materials include teaching children about the “gender unicorn” and that a child can be born “male”, “female” or “another sex”.

The three local women – Cathy Mudge, a retired midwife, Gilli Blick, a retired solicitor and grandmother, and Jenny Dingsdale, a mother of two children aged 11 and nine – decided to take some gentle direct action.

“We had already written to the school and to Devon council asking them to reconsider, but they had refused, so on the day before Pop’n’Olly were due to go in, we stood at the gates and simply let parents know what was going on,” says Mudge.

“Of course, we had parents calling us ‘transphobic’ and ‘witches’. The police had been informed about us, but they were satisfied that we were there peacefully. But we also had parents quietly come up to us and whisper, ‘Thank you’ or ‘I agree with you’.

“The Pop’n’Olly event went ahead, but we did an FOI afterwards and discovered that the school recorded the highest number of unattendance that day – parents had kept their children off school. So, for us, that showed we’d made some difference.”

It is just one of a number of small but significant successes that the grassroots group – which calls itself Protect & Teach – has achieved since it was set up in 2024.

Its aim is to protect children from gender ideology that is “sweeping unchecked through educational establishments, children’s services, clubs, associations, and even books and entertainment”.

Today, it has dozens of members nationwide whose backgrounds range from education to healthcare, law and even beekeeping.

Staffed entirely by volunteers, Protect & Teach is completely self-funded, yet between them, they have spent thousands of hours poring through school policies, checking safeguarding documents and ensuring organisations stick to the law.

“We meet weekly online to discuss projects, and sometimes a parent who has contacted us will come to a meeting to talk about how we can help them,” says Blick, who worked in civil litigation for 14 years.

“We’ve had hundreds of parents get in touch, and sadly, some are in a really bad way – perhaps their child has had a close call with changing gender or has even started transitioning – but the parents always seem relieved that we will listen, advise and act quickly.

“I help people draft letters to deal with situations, such as removing explicit books from libraries and having policies corrected. We’ve confronted schools about their policies enabling teachers to identify as trans. We’ve seen schools suddenly change their minds. It may be coincidental, but I like to think our letter helped make up their mind.”

From its painstaking research, Protect & Teach has found that many schools have misrepresented the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 by replacing “sex” with “sexual identity” or “gender”. This can result in safeguarding failures to protect children.

“When we did research, we found that 73 per cent of schools in Devon had flawed policies, and 61 per cent in Cornwall,” says Jennifer Gourley, who has a 30-year teaching career behind her.

“Over 75 per cent of Church of England schools have problematic policies. They were among the worst we looked at. Their anti-bullying policy focused entirely on transgender identity – not the bullying of the fat kid, the skinny kid or the ginger kid, but all of it was about trans identities.”

One of the worst cases Protect & Teach has come across involves a secondary school that socially transitioned a young female pupil behind her mother’s back.

“It can happen if a mother and father are separated, or there’s coercive control, and there’s maybe one parent who knows what’s going on. In this case, the father knew, but it was two years before this mother found out her 12-year-old daughter was being transitioned at school,” says Mudge.

“The mother only found out when she went to a parents’ evening, and the teachers were all referring to her daughter as ‘he’ and ‘him’ – one called her ‘they’. In a meeting later, she says she had four teachers and her ex-husband pressuring her to agree to a name change for her daughter on the school register. She reluctantly agreed, but says she now wishes she hadn’t.

“When the girl was 14, the school went on a camping trip, and the teachers asked the mother if her daughter wanted to share with the boys. Of course, she said no and asked what kind of safeguarding assessment had been done, but got no answer. The girl ended up in a tent on her own, where she was scared. That girl is now on testosterone, and the mother says she can never forgive the school. That’s how bad the situation was.”

Protect & Teach believes it’s the proliferation of LGBTQ+ organisations infiltrating schools that has led to the rise in children identifying as a different sex.

Over the last three years, they have encountered more than 100 of these agencies, which – nationwide – teach gender identity theory (that boys can become girls and vice versa). They include Pop’n’Olly, Just Like Us, Space Youth Project and The Intercom Trust.

“The Intercom Trust is one in our area,” says Mudge. “They started here in 2012 – even before Stonewall started pushing this ideology – and wrote a guide for transgender children in schools, which talked about gender dysphoria in children as young as two years old.

“The authors were two policemen with no teaching qualifications or involvement with children as far as we know, but they wrote this guide, and it became a baseline for other TQ+ [transgender queer] groups around the country to write their guides.

“They had started off as an adult LGB [lesbian, gay and bisexual] group in 1997. So many of these groups start off as adult groups, covering subjects like domestic violence, housing and drugs. But they can make so much money from children, so they go into schools and set up LGBTQ+ clubs at lunchtime.

“And of course, with lunchtime clubs, parents don’t need to know anything about it. They don’t have to keep a register, just a list of who is attending in case there is a fire alarm. But they can destroy that afterwards. They don’t have to ask a parent’s permission either.

“In a high school, you might see an autistic kid or a bullied kid who just wants a safe space at break, joining this club. Yet we have no idea what they’re discussing. They don’t keep minutes. And if it’s all pupils, that means you can have 18-year-olds discussing sexuality or whatever with an 11-year-old. It’s a complete safeguarding failure.

“This is what happened to the young girl who was transitioned behind her mother’s back. Mum thought her tomboy daughter had finally found a lunchtime club she enjoyed, but instead, they were telling her she was actually a boy.”

The women from Protect & Teach have visited a number of schools to discuss their concerns, with varying degrees of success.

“At one school, we noticed that all the toilets were unisex and there were 12-inch gaps under the doors, so it was very easy for a boy to look underneath or shove his phone under the door and see a girl sitting on the toilet,” says Mudge.

“The headteacher claimed he’d taken the main doors off the bathrooms so he could prevent vaping, but it was crazy that girls were being exposed like this. We know that some teachers are TQ [transgender queer] activists, but others are simply ignorant of the law and the protected characteristics which are there to protect everyone.”

Critics of groups such as Protect & Teach claim that they want to return to the days of Section 28, when any promotion of homosexuality was banned. The grassroots group say nothing could be further from the truth.

“A huge part of why we’re doing this is out of concern for LGB [lesbian, gay and bisexual] kids to be kids. The accusations of homophobia thrown from the other side are lazy and a projection,” says Dingsdale.

“Two separate and contradictory protected characteristics – sex and gender reassignment – should not be lumped together.”

Pop’n’Olly said: “We are incredibly proud of the work we do at Pop’n’Olly, which supports schools, parents and carers in teaching about diversity and inclusion across primary ages. 

“Our work is trusted and supported by many thousands of teachers, educators, parents and carers, designed and delivered by education experts, in line with all current legislation and informed by research.”

The Intercom Trust was approached for comment.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]