THANK you for the helpful long letter from Robert Moffat (Campaigns of the past did not demand others give up rights, Jun 7).

My nine-year-old grandson returned from school last week. He announced that he had been taught “gender fluid”. So what was that? “It is when a boy can become a girl and a girl can become a boy. It can happen several times on the same day. But it doesn’t happen very often and there is no-one in our school who is like that. Only we mustn’t be mean to them.”

This is a shaky take on biology! While allowing for a young child’s take on the lesson, their teacher will be aware that she must be politically correct. Yet she must know that 3,000 years from now, when unearthed by archaeologists, our bones will still show our sex anatomically, accurately and unchanged.

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Our local SNP branch was recently addressed by a doctor with many years of experience in treating patients with genuine gender dysphoria. His concern is that gender dysphoria is being inculcated unnecessarily into the very young, and moreover that the international pharmaceutical companies are very interested in trying out hormone replacement therapies and the other chemical treatments for sex alteration.

There have to date been frequent cases of suicide among those who have undergone sex change and many who have decided to detransition. The proposals now before the Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee would make it easier to change legal sex.

The proposed Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill would:

1) Allow “self-declaration”, by removing any need for a medical diagnosis or for two years living as the opposite sex.

2) Merely require applicants to state that they have “lived in the required gender for three months”, followed by a three-month “reflection period”.

3) Lower the minimum age for changing legal sex from 18 to 16.

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Now anyone with any experience of bringing up or educating young people knows very well what a volatile age the years 16 to 18 are. But if the proposals of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill are accepted and passed into law, this will pose a serious threat to parental rights, freedom of discussion and the integrity of the family.

I hope that the equalities committee are not afraid of discussion. It is notable that some of the documents in their field refer to “our children”. That is, they are being seen as the children not of the parents but of the state.

The Scottish education authorities have already introduced sex education which seriously abuses the natural modesty of children. But now in Wales the Welsh government is insisting that its agenda for sex education in schools, and to be taught to children as young as three, must not be shown to parents as they are forbidden to interfere. Some of the agenda appears to be from Stonewall. I look back now at how very carefully we in the young SNP respected the principle in schools that no political bias should be paraded before the children there.

It is a fact that the general desire for Scottish and indeed Welsh independence is being used just as a piggy-back by the LGBTQ lobby. Mr Moffat points out that the mantra of Stonewall is “No debate”.

As parents and grandparents, we beg to differ.

Lesley J Findlay
Fort Augustus

WITH Boris Johnson considering scrapping the ethics adviser role, the only way the Tories can possibly retain any morality is by resigning en-masse. Which, of course, they will not do.

Marion Paterson
via thenational.scot