New government guidance is urgently needed.

Put yourself in the place of a ten year old kid. Non-binary? Gender-fluid? ‘Identifying as neither male or female’, ‘biological gender at birth’, ‘the gender spectrum between male and female’ - what pernicious nonsense it all is. Humans are born male and female. Beyond that we are free to explore our own uniqueness, shaped by the vast reaches of family, culture, history, and biology. We should not teach kids to orientate themselves around a simplistic, vacuous, restrictive, regressive, ‘gender spectrum’.

Then Jigsaw introduces kids to the story of Roberta Cowell:

The whole thing is dumbed-down and disingenuous. 

How does someone ‘feel like a female’? As Allison Bailey has said ‘I believe that a man who professes to identify as a woman does not identify as a woman, because he has no frame of reference from which to do so. What he in fact identifies with are the social concepts and stereotypes that have been misogynistically applied to women.’

How does Jigsaw know the reason behind Cowell’s depression? Notice how leaving his wife and daughters is so casually brushed aside? Cowell didn’t ‘change his male body into a female one’ - this is lying to school kids. How does Jigsaw know Roberta ‘felt much happier’? Why does Jigsaw leave out the details set out below?

The Independent newspaper wrote an obituary to Roberta Cowell. Cowell died alone in a cluttered sheltered-housing flat at the the age of 93. He walked out on his wife and two daughters, aged six and four. They never saw nor heard from him again. 

“Now 71 and 69, they were shocked to learn of their father's death. "I have never sobbed like that," says Diana when we meet. "I didn't realise that pain was still there. What our father did has always had a great bearing on my life. The way I used to cope was by flying into fantasy." Anne, her elder sister, took a more detached approach. "I felt that if someone hurt me in life, I didn't want to have anything to do with them," she says. "It was easier to shut them out."”

On learning of Cowell’s ‘sex change’: “While Anne, being older, was told what had happened at the time, Diana did not find out until later. "Nobody told me about the sex change," she recalls. "I read about it in a newspaper. They were trying to protect me. But it was the biggest shock of my life. I must have been 12 or 13. The worst thing was that suddenly, I knew this was reality. Your father's not coming back to you. Ever. And that's why it hurt so much."”

The real cause of Cowell’s depression? Who knows? Maybe some of the following:

“What we do know is that Cowell had a traumatic war. Despite being deemed unfit to fly by the RAF in 1935, because of recurring motion sickness, Cowell was determined to become a fighter pilot and spent the first two years of the war in a series of frustrating training and engineering posts, including a stint in Iceland. When, eventually, she was transferred to the RAF, she was still suffering acute sickness.

Cowell flew Tiger Moths, Spitfires and Miles Masters, and knew that every day could be her last. "Narrow escapes were a daily event," she writes. "Several of my closest friends were killed, and I regarded it as just a matter of time as far as I was concerned…. 

In November 1944, her plane took a direct hit over Germany, and Cowell survived a crash landing, was taken into captivity, and ended up in Stalag Luft I. The conditions were appalling, food limited and clothing in short supply. At one point, there was so little food that prisoners were forced to eat the camp cats – raw.”

Jigsaw tells kids “Roberta carried on driving in motor sports events and had a very successful career until she died in 2011… What an incredible life!” 

What nonsense. Here’s what Cowell’s obituary said: ‘Financial problems caused her to race less, and in the 1970s, Betty, as she was then known, tried to write another book to generate funds. In her last interview, in 1972, she condemned other trans people, and criticised the "permissive society", warning others not to follow in her footsteps. But the book was never published, and she withdrew from public life.” 

Full sympathy with Roberta Cowell - what a life indeed. But let us be clear: Jigsaw is misrepresenting Cowell’s life for political ends which involve children. I am not at all sure that Cowell would approve. Cowell’s life should not be used for Jigsaw’s propaganda. It’s disrespectful to misrepresent someone’s life for your own political ends.

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Of course we should teach school children that everyone should be treated with respect. But we shouldn’t tell school children that you can be a man, but a woman inside, because you can’t. We shouldn’t teach children that they should try to locate themselves on an unbelievably vacuous and regressive ‘gender spectrum’. We shouldn’t encourage bodily disassociation with casual phrases like that you can feel male ‘but were born with a female body’, as if our bodies are throw-away containers constraining our true selves. Are drugs and surgery and life-long medication really routes to happiness?  Ask the question: who actually benefits from all this?

With all kinds of providers bent on producing materials which introduce gender ideology to school children, the onus is currently on parents to be on the look-out. We need to challenge schools to show us what is being taught to our children. In response, often schools will say that RSE or PSHE materials have been purchased from private providers and cannot be shared. Then we are stumped.

The government cannot let the situation continue. New guidance is needed - and urgently.