I write this as a teacher who has worked in Independent and Catholic Schools in both NSW and Victoria and have witnessed an increasing encroachment of activism paid for by schools, especially in regard Gender Education. By example, Complispace is a company that assists schools with regulatory compliance. With the recent update to the Child Safe Standards, they ran a number of webinars to help schools understand the implications. One of these webinars was around Gender Identity and Complispace employed a Queer Activist called Nevo who made the claim “correct pronoun use is a matter of suicide prevention.” This statement is an outright lie, and a manipulative one at that.
Last year, I sat through multiple whole school professional development days where similar manipulative statements were made around the harm we teachers could do if we don’t affirm gender dysphoric students. The thing is, teachers are busy. We need to be able to trust external PD (Professional Development) providers. We don’t have time to fact check.
After the PD days, many teachers quietly expressed concern …. But that is the point, they did so quietly. It feels far too risky to teachers question what we are being told.
