The plan to teach children that gender resides on a “spectrum” has been abandoned, a report on Sunday has claimed.
A planned rework of Ireland’s Social, Personal, and Health Education (SPHE) curriculum that aimed to teach children that “gender identity” was on a “spectrum” has reportedly been abandoned by the government, a report on Tuesday has claimed.
It comes at a time when transgenderism both in Ireland and Europe has encountered increasing resistance from parents, politicians and society as a whole, with recent revelations surrounding Britain’s infamous Tavistock child gender identity clinic seemingly prompting a backlash against the ideology.
According to a report by the Sunday Times, the initial re-work of the SPHE syllabus was aimed to include a number of claims about an individual’s “so-called” gender identity, including that such an identity is not binary.
The original “learning outcome” for this course was to help children “appreciate that sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are core parts of human identity and that each is experienced along a spectrum”.
Such a suggestion, however, is said to have received significant backlash from parents, and therefore Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment has now reportedly decided to drop the changes.
Instead, pupils in Ireland are to be taught that there are a number of “factors and influences” that shape an individual’s identity, including “family, peers, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnic background, disabilities, religious beliefs/world view”.
Trans Kids: Ireland to Set Up New System to ‘Treat‘ Child ‘Gender Dysphoria‘ https://t.co/HDsqipANCl
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 27, 2023
A number of parents who were greatly concerned by the proposed changes appear to be celebrating the government reversal, with one mother telling The Times that she is pleased that the idea of gender being a spectrum will not be taught.
Sarah Holmes, a parent from County Wicklow, said that there was a danger that the curriculum as proposed could have caused “widespread confusion” for children and that the gender ideology adopted by the government has been “taken on in schools without any debate and without parental knowledge”.
However, while some are celebrating the changes as a victory, others have expressed doubt as to how meaningful the changes really are. The editor of conservative news publication Gript Media, John McGuirk, has warned that some teachers may still be able to teach their pupils that gender is a “spectrum” under the coming curriculum rework.
“This new wording, I would worry, does leave it up to teachers a little too much,” McGuirk wrote in an article examining the government U-turn. “There certainly does not seem to be an active prohibition on teachers telling students that their gender is a choice – all that is happening is that teaching this will no longer be a requirement of the curriculum.”
Nevertheless, the revelations that the Irish school system will not adopt the mandatory teaching of the “gender spectrum” does seem to mark somewhat of a shift in the social acceptance of transgenderism, with the level of scrutiny the ideology is facing across Europe appearing to be on the increase.
This could partly be down to the implosion of the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock, with the government announcing last year that it would be shuttering the clinic after a report deemed it as being unsafe for the children it was treating.
The UK government has also been forced to backtrack on allowing male inmates who identify as “transwomen” to be housed in female prisons, with the country implementing a near-complete ban on the practice for violent offenders from Monday.
Tavistock Trans Clinic Prescribed Puberty Blockers to Kids After One Meeting: Report https://t.co/6QVKiMevIr
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 31, 2022
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