Gender row at girls school a test of parents’ rights
SANTA Sabina College furore over gender fluidity and the teaching of Islam is a microcosm of a wider battle for our culture, writes Miranda Devine.
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THE “gender fluidity” crisis engulfing an elite Catholic girls school in Sydney is a microcosm of the identity politics phenomenon that started as a fringe mutation of Marxism in universities after the fall of communism and is rapidly spreading across Western societies.
We’ve seen schools succumb to radical gender theory which disputes the biological reality of two sexes, university debating clubs which discriminate against “cis-gendered*” white males, Qantas asking staff not to address passengers as “Mum and Dad” or “husband and wife”, and medical associations describing expectant mothers as “pregnant people”.
Everywhere, oppressive new speech codes have arisen as a way of undermining traditional family values and dividing us into competing identity groups according to race, “gender” and sexuality.
Most Australians regard the new speech codes as a joke, but the ideology they represent is a deadly serious incursion into our families and freedoms.
Occasionally we see pockets of resistance. Take Santa Sabina College, in Strathfield, which has been in uproar since principal Maree Herrett linked the concept of “gender fluidity” with the introduction of trousers into the uniform last month, while endorsing a book about gender theory which promotes polyamory and disputes the concept of binary sexes.
Amid allegations that the school also has been promoting Islam to students, parents have demanded Dr Herrett’s resignation.
The school board has hired a public relations firm to manage the crisis, as Dr Herrett last week called an assembly to declare that she was a victim of bullying.
After that assembly, six former Santa Sabina staff approached me separately to describe what they say was a “toxic” atmosphere of “bullying”, “spying”, “backstabbing” and low morale at the school, which one likened “Lord of the Flies”.
They describe volatile scenes of shouting, swearing and pens being thrown at staff. Some staff suffered anxiety and depression, with little help from their union.
“It’s a very very harsh place,” said one former staff member.
One source of friction in the staffroom, often raised at parent-teacher meetings, was that, “Islam was totally promoted in the classroom,” says one former teacher. “Girls were told they had to write their HSC essay on Islam… Yes, you teach the major religious traditions [in Year 12] but there was a definite preference for Islam.”
This teacher felt “uncomfortable” students were forced to wear a head scarf on mosque excursions even though mosque management had said it was not compulsory.
Friction among staff affected student learning.
Four former staff members have confirmed an incident on October 12, 2016, when Dr Herrett ordered the school’s entire email system be shut down for two days, on the eve of the HSC, to retrieve an embarrassing email that she accidentally had sent “reply all” to all staff.
The email system was shut down within ten minutes of the email arriving in teachers’ inboxes. This was the day before Higher School Certificate exams began, with English papers on October 13 and 14.
Year 12 students descended on the IT Help Desk in tears, unable to access vital emails they needed for the exams.
“Seniors were really stressed and crying,” says one former employee, who claims students were told their emails were inaccessible because the school’s computer system had been “hacked”.
Dr Herrett’s “reply all” email to human resources director Juliann Lee was sent late at night from New York, where she was on a Professional Development course, and was received by teachers in the middle of a staff meeting.
Screenshots of the email have been provided to this newspaper and refer to employment details of a teacher who has left the school.
In another debacle earlier that year, not of Dr Herrett’s doing, Year 12 reports were sent out by email but addressed to the wrong student. “All the senior students were freaking out”.
Again, IT staff disabled email accounts to laboriously delete each wrongly addressed email.
The Denbigh school administration software which went haywire had recently been installed at a cost of $600,000 under Dr Herrett’s instruction, after she had used it at MLC Burwood, where she was head of senior school until 2012.
She left MLC, along with the heads of the middle and junior schools, during a period of turmoil after a new principal was appointed in 2011.
The following year, Dr Herrett completed her PhD in gender education at Sydney University. Her academic supervisor was transgender Marxist theorist Raewyn Connell.
It was Connell’s book, “Gender Reckonings” which Herrett endorsed on February 25: “Gender is a social process, a dynamic of change quite different from biological evolution,” she tweeted. “Buy the book!”
For many parents at Santa Sabina, while they knew little of the staff turmoil, this public endorsement of gender theory was the last straw. It crystallised misgivings they had about the direction of the school, which they regard as attacking their Catholic faith, and the autonomy of their families.
* A cis-gender person identifies with the sex they born.