Edinburgh school criticised for false claims about trans murder rates

Pupils in an Edinburgh school have been taught unsubstantiated claims that trans people are regularly murdered.

The school uses materials from LGBT Youth Scotland, which has recently come under fire after a co-author of one of its guides was convicted of child sex offences.

No trans person has ever been known to have been killed in Scotland. In 2018, a Channel 4 news fact check found that trans people were less likely to be murdered than the average person.

‘Deceptive’

A parent of a child at the school stated: “The statistics being presented to children are a deceptive mess, with no context or anything to back them up”.

The parent added: “Scottish schools and the government now seem obsessed with normalising the idea you can be born in the wrong body, which I think is really destabilising for many children.”

Fiona McAnena, from the charity Sex Matters, said: “It’s hard to fathom how anyone involved in developing educational material can be so irresponsible”.

She continued: “It seems designed to sideline women and girls, and position every other group in society as more in need of sympathy.”

School uniforms

The Scottish Government were criticised for the release of new school uniform guidance this month which warns that not allowing gender confused children to wear uniforms of the opposite sex “may constitute discrimination under the Equality Act 2010”.

Chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Chris McGovern, said: “Education is among the greatest failures of the SNP – and the enforcement of more brainwashing, woke ideology is unlikely to improve matters.”

Scottish Tory education spokesman Liam Kerr commented: “Scotland’s pupils, parents and teachers would be better served if the SNP focused as forensically on tackling the attainment gap, funding shortfalls and classroom violence as they are on what pupils should wear”.