‘Protect the Kids’: or, Why Bridget Phillipson is Harming Children

Weaponising rhetoric around women and children is nothing new. As I've noted on this blog before, the populist democracy of ancient Athens was perfectly capable of using it to have public intellectuals executed and making smears the basis of a lawfare case to drive a political rival out of the public square was par for the course. (That prosecution, Aeschines' Against Timarkhos, not uncoincidentally also happens to be the basis of modern accounts of Greek homosexuality.) In more recent times, Gore Vidal was wont to observe that ‘save our kids’ translates as ‘get the fags’. In the current political environment, both ‘protect the kids’ and ‘protect women’ have become shibboleths of political debate, and they are cover for a reactionary, far-right agenda. As Women against the Far Right, among many others, have pointed out, ‘protect women’ rhetoric aimed at trans women and immigrants is deeply rooted in misogyny and anti-feminist politics. I am not going to repeat their analysis here. I am, rather, going to look again at ‘protect the kids’ rhetoric, often aimed at precisely the same targets. As a trans woman, that is, of course, insulting and degrading; more hatefully, it victimizes trans kids as a wedge for assaulting trans rights and trans healthcare in general. But that is not my focus here. Rather, my concern is in the first instance as a parent and an educator. Just as ‘protect women’ rhetoric is misogynistic and harms all women, so too ‘protect the kids’ rhetoric harms all children.

It is deeply unfortunate that the Secretary of State for Education has swallowed this nonsense wholesale. And while neither her remit nor that of the equally reactionary Secretary of State for Health and Social Care runs in Scotland for most purposes, their policy and utterances have a chilling effect on discourse up here too. Not only do we see this influence on the wavering positions affected by Scottish Labour, as they swivel to follow the policy reversals of Starmer and company, but also on a SNP that has lost its backbone on social policy since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon. I will return to the politics and personalities at the end of this post.

Banning the Books

A recent social media item of concern, at least in the circles in which I move, was prompted by a librarian in a school in Greater Manchester, who claimed that her institution, until recently priding itself on its inclusiveness, had reversed direction and instructed them to remove a slew of books from the School library. The list appeared to have originated either directly or indirectly (via a LLM) from the kind of censorship lists doing the rounds in places such as Florida, which have notoriously pursued a purge of material in state-run institutions.

Some of the items were, frankly, baffling. Although Terry Pratchett's oeuvre is (despite a bizarre attempt by transphobes to claim him as one of theirs) triggering to the far right, the book singled out, Soul Music, is one of the least confrontational and satirical, when compared with, say, the multi-volume dissection of racism, speciesism and inherited privilege (Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Truth, Thud, etc), the critique of capitalism and defence of public service (Going Postal, Making Money) and the trans- and queer-friendly extravaganza that is Monstrous Regiment. I can only think that it is on the list because of Death, who I suppose is troubling to fundamentalist Christians.

But let us embrace the idea of protecting the kids. Should our children know about death? Should they reflect on its physical and metaphysical implications? Or should they be protected from it? As a parent and an educator, my answer to this is assuredly that they should and indeed must know about it. It is part of growing up that death is with us, whether at the end of a full and rewarding life, or brutally cut short by political choices, and most points in between. For young people at secondary school, this cannot be in question.

This is a choice that we have recently had to address as a family. I have, in the past decade, lost both grandads, and, just before Christmas, my own dad. I went to the funerals of the former on my own, without the rest of the family, because the children were young, and had not developed much of a relationship with either of their great-grandads. With their grandad, it was different, and we attended as a family. We expected them to play a full role in proceedings, not out of duty but as part of personal and collective grieving. At no time, however, have we pretended that death is not a reality, but have been there to discuss it with them in age-appropriate ways.

The suspicion is, as I have hinted above, that Soul Music is on the banned list not because of the trauma that might be inflicted on young minds, but because a skeletal, black-robed, scythe-wielding Death runs counter to a literal reading of the Christian bible. It is, then, not a measure of protecting children in terms of their psychological, social or personal development, but their ideological development (in this case religious ideology). Nor, indeed, is it to protect them from adopting the wackier aspects of medieval iconography or from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, or even from the eschatology of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, but rather to impose and compel a narrow type of Christian doctrine. In that sense, it is not really about development at all. And,for full disclosure, we have inflicted both the original Bill and Ted films on the offspring, but not, I think, The Seventh Seal.

The stories are similar with other favourite books that feature on the far right banned lists. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird, which was de rigeur when I was at school, 40+ years ago, is frequently for the chop, and its confrontation of US racism is evidently the not-so-subtle reason. Or the collected works of John Steinbeck, for his accounts of class and poverty. Personally, I much preferred The Grapes of Wrath, but I was amused to see that our eldest was frog-marched through Of Mice and Men at exactly the same age as I was, for all the ostensible differences between our two schools. I will also say that the woke Scottish education system produced a much stronger reader of that book than the traditional and self-consciously academic school that I went to, although I suppose the book did act as a kind of gateway drug for me.

And we could go on. Florida at least has the courage of its own nonsense by censoring Shakespeare, which is consistent with Heritage Foundation America, but difficult to imagine in heritage Britain. Let's go further. Classical Greek literature features inter alia sex, death, adultery, rape, incest, prostitution, mass murder, genocide , epidemics and plagues, conspiracy and revolution, not to mention that the study of the culture involves pictures of naked men (a lot) and women (sometimes). As I recall, as we were being flogged through the grammar (only metaphorically in the liberal 1980s), reading some of this stuff in translation was an end-of-term treat, until we actually got round to reading it in the original. No doubt to the horror of those keen on protecting kids, that was all before the age of 16, let alone 18.

The logic behind these bans is crude. At its most simplistic, anything that is not the Christian bible is out of court (although of course there are a lot of those classical aberrations to be seen in the Old Testament in particular). Slightly less simplistic, but equally implausible, is a mimetic theory of reading: if you read something, you go out and do it. A great deal of the moral panics around film and television and computer games follows this logic. Dear reader, I do not think I have committed many of the terrible things to be seen in classical literature, although I confess to having had sex and to have seen a naked man and indeed a naked woman. For the record, I knew I was trans even before I read Euripides' Bacchae, so you can't pin it on that, either.

You may say that banning Shakespeare and classical Greek literature is absurd. But indeed, Texas A&M University has banned many classical texts, notably by Plato.

A more subtle approach is to claim to be protecting children from psychological trauma. This is less a feature of the American far right than it is of British reactionaries dressing up restrictions in the language of care. As I have suggested in relation to death, to protect young people from reality is patronising, disrespectful and, frankly, stupid. To be sure, some of the material in, say, Greek tragedy is over-the-top and stylised, and, equally, the distancing afforded by the mode of performance and location in the mythological past affords a degree of safety, but it also allows for its audience (or readers) the opportunity to explore such traumatic events which may be outside their direct experience. As a teenager in the depths of Essex in the 1980s, I did not have direct experience of racism in the American South (although that is not to say that there was not racism to be seen) nor did I have experience of the Great Depression and the travails of migrants in the American West (which is not to say that there was no poverty), but such books provided a way of exploring such issues which, looking back, were really important for my personal and political development.

For my part, I found the study of twentieth-century history, and in particular of Weimar and Nazi Germany, infinitely more traumatic than exploring other realities through fiction. The GCSE curriculum at the time (this was its first year) was keen on empathy, and one of the exercises was trying to write as if I was a Jewish German of the same age reading and seeing anti-semitic propaganda. Even now, that troubles me. I will say that trans kids today will have a damn sight more to work with when faced with such an exercise.

This being the 1980s, the idea of providing support for children and young people who might find such things traumatic was nowhere to be found. Socially, it was still the stiff upper lip, and my school didn't go in for any of that nonsense. I am pleased to say that the school our children attend is orders of magnitude different. And as our children are fond of pointing out to us, the only danger they face in raising issues with us is that we will talk with them ad nauseam, given the chance.

And this is the real danger with the books that are and will be banned: not that children and young people will slavishly imitate or that they will be psychologically traumatised, but that they will think about and discuss other people's experiences and also experiences which directly touch them themselves. Empathy, open-mindedness and engagement with the world as it is are anathema to the imposition of narrow and dogmatic beliefs, which is why they are so hated by the far right.

To return briefly to my classical parallels, the argument about education and development, whether it should be about the presentation of moral exemplars or the encouragement of reflection and thought is one that was often discussed in ancient Athens: the debate between tragedians in Aristophanes' comedy, Frogs, in part turns on this very point.

To be clear, the ban in question was not directly implemented or mandated by Labour or the Secretary of State for Education. Neither, however, has had anything to say about book bans, either in this case nor in relation to the wider attacks on books being conducted under the radar across the UK by letter-writing campaigns to pressure teachers and librarians, nor the comical attempts by Reform-led Kent County Council to initiate a programme of bans in their domain. Why has Labour been silent? I suggest that there are two reasons. First, the impetus to ban books is coming from Reform and their fascist outriders, and Labour under Keir Starmer has clearly decided that its only tactical imperative is to win back the voters who switched from them to Boris Johnson and are now flirting with Farage. Second, the bans have typically used trans and queer representation as a wedge: either out of fear of the media or from ideological transphobia, Labour will not do anything to suggest that they might be supportive of trans people. Above all, though, it is because of another, underlying conviction, the peculiar attitude towards children and young people that is at once both infantilising and fearful of them. The incoherence and lack of trust that results can be seen across the current government's policy.

Why Don't You ...?

For sure, Labour's fear and mistrust of children and young people is something often to be seen among adults, and leads to two contradictory positions being held simultaneously. They are so vulnerable that they will automatically imitate what they read, experience or interact with, or they will be impelled by independent thought to be outside the control of authority (parents, clerics, teachers, politicians). If I were theologically minded, I might attribute this to the doctrine of original sin, but since adherents of bans are prone to waffling about the innocence of children, I can only ascribe their mistrust of them to the possibility that they do not, ultimately, like children very much. Such an explanation fits perfectly with what we see with the ongoing attempts to restrict children's access to computers, to the internet and to social media in particular.

First of all, let me emphasise that moral panics over children's access to media of one sort or another are nothing new. When I was growing up, when we did not even have 9am to 5pm television (let alone 24hr television), one of the few concessions was a couple of extra hours during the school holidays, and a considerable part of that was taken up by Why Don't You?, a programme dedicated to trying to stop children watching television. As the theme tune said, ‘Sitting at home, watching TV, | Turn it off, it's no good to me’ and the injunction to go out and do something less boring instead. The kids involvd were incredibly clean-cut, and I think dungarees and craft featured heavily. How quaint.

Aside from this, film and TV, and latterly computer games, have become in turn the source of anxieties. Hence the age ratings for cinema, video and games; hence, too, the 9pm TV watershed. These have, however, always been elastic: the invention of the 12 and 12A ratings have been more about commercial necessity than moral imperative (but does the 15 make any sense either?). While in-person cinema has limited enforcement (satirised in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), those for video and computer games are entirely at the discretion of parents, which (as I have discovered) is not always forthcoming. The watershed has been no barrier to teenage pregnancy, drug addiction,HIV and all sorts of criminality (all Eastenders in the 1980s), while viewers of Grange Hill will have gained the impression that smack was readily available to teenagers in all good playgrounds near you. John Craven's Newsround kept us informed of the horrors in the world. Even at primary school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we were aware of massacres in the Middle East and the energy crisis (both topics in my class newspaper project and discussions) and the threat of global thermonuclear war.Plus ça change. I suppose that one difference was that a child-friendly movie could pretend that a teen hacker would be able to stop a computer program from initiating hostilities by playing noughts and crosses (TicTacToe) with it. It is a shame we can't adopt similar solutions for the current madmen in charge of the Pentagon and White House.

Despitesome notorious precursors of contemporary moral panics, such as the campaigns of Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association, the graded and permeable rating system at least tries to acknowledge the process of childhood development, and it has not historically prevented youngsters from engaging with the world or being aware of it. This is not to say that the nature of British censorship does not have its absurdities, nor its particular hang-ups, not least around sex and sexuality. Although blanket bans went out of fashion with the famous obscenity trials of the 1960s and early 1970s, Britain's prurient fascination with sex and sexuality has, for example, seen an airplay ban for Frankie Goes to Hollywood's ‘Relax’ (initiated allegedly by Radio 1 DJ Mike Read, later a supporter of UKIP) and an attempt by police to have work by the ever-popular Robert Mapplethorpe destroyed. The panic in both cases was, of course, (male) homosexuality. The banning of Monty Python's Life of Brian is something I have written about often. That said, even at the time, the more general curtain-twitching of Whitehouse was widely seen as a national joke; it should, perhaps,have been a warning that obituaries of her contained some attempts to re-evaluate those campaigns. And now we are looking down the barrel of a rigid cut-off of access to computers and to networks through a simplistic age ban.

It was not so long ago that we were being told that everyone needed to learn how to code. The Raspberry Pi was lauded as a transformative tool in furthering this agenda. Now we are trying to regulate children's access: age verification, not only of internet resources or interactive sites, but the very operating system itself is being canvassed or passed into law. The UK, with its laughable Online Safety Act, has been leading the way, with Australia's ban on social media, and California's age verification of the operating system following on behind. Brazil, too, has been getting in on the act.

Taking these in reverse, it has been revealed that the lobbying for California's age-verification at the level of the appliance itself is a product of lobbying by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc) to avoid having to police their own platforms or to implement age restrictions in their own products. For open-source systems where individuals are installing the computer system and not just renting an account, it is a nonsense, and of course entirely contrary to the pedagogic aspects: the Raspberry Pi being a case in point. Back in my own mis-spent youth, the computers we worked with were not multi-user, internet-connected devices, but ones such as the BBC Micro or (in my case) its baby sibling the Acorn Electron. We did not stretch to a modem, but all the same there was anxiety over the misuse of computers . It was the despair of my late dad that all we ever seemed to do with it was play games. Actually, it really wasn't the case, any more than my own offspring spend all their time on laptops and tablets being groomed by predators. Actually, in terms of misuse, learning 6502 assembly language was useful for breaking into games so I could transfer them from cassette to the Electron floppy drive, which ate a crucial four pages of memory to run. But I maintain that it was very educational.

As may be inferred from what I have written above about books, I am not a fan of limiting children and young people's access to content. One of the offspring told me the other day that Wikipedia was blocked at their school, and I was hopping mad. I don't have parental controls on their phones. The trade-off is that we talk to them incessantly, and they know that they can and should talk to us. On the whole, this has worked, to the extent that their fondness, variously, for videos recommending implausible recipes and for arguing with trolls in the comments to YouTube videos have become a standing joke in family conversations. Equally, they will cheerily point to my hypocrisy in my own excursions into a flamewar or two. And that is right.

Characteristically, the material that has most often been cited as a reason for bans is to do with sex, particularly porn. In some ways, porn has been the least of our anxieties as parents, because we have made a point of talking about sexism and toxic masculinity from an early age, together with some conspicuous examples from our family and friends of ill-advised sexual activity (choruses of ‘yes, we know’ and ‘please stop talking about it’ are not uncommon in the household). Given our own trajectories, LGBTQIA+ issues have been impossible to ignore. The upshot is that whether it is porn or mainstream cinema, the offspring can offer a mean critique, and have been willing and able from an early age to do so. The eldest gave a particularly memorable denunciation of Saturday Night Fever on first viewing, but then he has done something similar for most of Greek mythology too. Zeus, in his opinion, should have been locked up (fair). Which reminds me, Plato banned drama from his ideal city because of its effect on the audience, children in particular. But it is worth emphasising that porn was not absent from the 1970s and 1980s either, and in no less accessible form: leaving aside the mags and videos out of which owner of the right-wing Express and Star, Richard Desmond, made his fortune, mass-market tabloids, when they were really mass-market regularly included porn, including the heroically right-wing Sun. Billy [Bragg even wrote a song about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eVAFuntkIk).

There has never really been much interest in curbing sexism and misogyny, whether in commercial, cisheteronormative porn or elsewhere. The real target for many, if not most, campaigners for bans, whether of porn or anything else, is representation of queer and trans people. The underlying idea is again the crude mimetic theory: even to see two men being intimate will immediately lead to the kids making out in the boys' bathroom. As the eldest notes, with a shudder, given the usual state of the boys' toilets, they'd have to find some space among all the people vaping. A particular twist these days is that transphobes are simply obsessed with trans porn and have concoted elaborate theories about its role in supposedly creating hordes of trans people, women in particular. I have news for you: just as most commercial lesbian porn is consumed by straight men, so too trans porn is overwhelmingly consumed by cis men, feverishly and obsessively sweating over it. Yes, I am looking at you, Graham Linehan. Notoriously, too, among trans people, the supposed trans women in these videos are fake anyway: cis women with a prosthesis or misleading cutting (you can usually see the joins, in both senses). This may be too much information, but large breasts and large erections are simply not happening if you are on estradiol.

The mooted ban on social media suffers from many of these faults and more. I am not here to deny that social media can be addictive and toxic, and that electronic communication often lacks the kind of social cues that prevent miscommunication. The latter has been a staple of research on online communities (and online teaching) since the 1990s, and as a veteran of flamewars on newsgroups and mailing lists, the long form was not all that much better than the short form. Nor indeed is this to deny that there are dangerous content and contexts, including such topics as self-harm of different sorts. But the blanket restriction both misses that such phenomena are encountered in the offline world, and misdiagnoses the underlying problem. Indeed there have been panics about, e.g., eating disorders going back to my own childhood, without any benefit of the internet. Similarly, stranger danger, e.g. the ‘Never go with strangers’ campaigns of my primary school years, has been a phenomenon about as long as it has been recognised that most abusers are known to their victims and are often to be found in a position of authority or power over them. Those dangers are ones that children and young people need to know about in order to protect themselves (as well as from the creepy guy on the street). But the main social media platforms are problematic: for unrestricted online hate, promotion of extremism, and algorithms designed to provoke and rage. In addition, there are the well documented cases of tech oligarchs tweaking the algorithm to privilege certain political content or the dissemination of abuse material through the medium of grok. The problems, clearly, come down to zero regulation of the big social media companies, who have indeed systematically destroyed or limited such moderation policies as once existed, and the rage-baiting algorithms. So the government prefers to restrict children rather than billionaires, even when, like Elon Musk, they distribute abuse material and call for the overthrow of democracy. Who is the problem here?

Not all online communities are like that: traditional forums and mailing lists have moderation policies that (more or less) work, and my social media of choice, Mastodon, is both strong on moderation and codes of conduct, and works without any algorithm whatsoever: your feed is the people you know. That said,many stick to the commercial platforms, not for the rage-baiting, but because that is where they have found community and support. The proposed restrictions would cut that away at a stroke.

For some, that is the entire point: queer kids will find other queer kids, trans kids will find other trans kids, and they are desperately trying to keep young people ignorant and ill-informed. And heaven knows they need support in these times. Leaving aside open, public discussion, the ubiquitous WhatsApp group (and yes, I have signed everyone up with Signal) provides the kind of mutual support among peers that can, of course, go wrong, but nonetheless provides important peer support. All of that would be gone. The independence and autonomy of our young people, on this account, is something to be concerned about, even to fear.

Brains in Jars

One of the reasons I wanted to write this post is that I woke up on Sunday morning to hear Bridget Phillipson talking about young people's ‘developing brains’ as a reason for the mooted social media ban. This struck me as odd: I think of my children as developing people. And then I remembered why the Secretary of State for Education was using this terminology, and, I am afraid to say, it is clearly betraying the influence of transphobic talking points. One of the pseudoscientific claims pursued by transphobes is that brains do not stop developing until the age of 25 and (thus) that any decisions regarding gender identity cannot be made until that age. Of course, aside from being wrong (our brains are constantly changing), it makes a mockery of practically all law regarding the transition from childhood to adulthood, whether it is the age of consent, the age at which one may marry (itself differing in differnt parts of the UK), age at which one can vote, drive a car, join the armed forces, serve in armed conflict, be criminally responsible (again varying), and so on. While in most areas of healthcare, the question of competence before the age of 16 has, following Gillick and related cases, been one that takes account of the individual in discussion with medical practitioners, this has been flatly denied to young people who are trans by Phillipson's colleague, Wes Streeting, using similar transphobic pseudoscience and the bogus Cass Review.

So far, so familiar to anyone who is keeping up with the anti-trans hate campaign. That, though, is not my point. Rather, as a parent and an educator, I see the malign influence of this idea now affecting all children and young people, including my own. It goes like this. Because young brains are still maturing, they are too easily affected by external stimuli of which we (whoever we are) disapprove. Therefore, children must only be given the stimuli of which we approve, or else we run the risk of the maturing brain being warped into something of which we disapprove. This might include, inter alia, being trans, queer, left-wing, atheist, or similar. In other words, this is a pseudoscientific reworking of the dogmatic Christian justification for banning books.

Of course, that is not how development works. Children and young people are not brains floating in glass jars, to be easily isolated from external stimuli or only to be exposed to carefully controlled stimuli under our direct supervision, and not to be released until they have reached an appropriate kind of maturation under laboratory conditions. They exist in a body and in the world. Development is a response to those physical and environmental experiences. Cognition, as it has become fashionable to say, is embodied. Identity too is embodied, not abstract, whether we are talking about sex/gender or sexuality. For trans people, the old cliché of being trapped in the wrong body is as unhelpful as the idea of gender as some pure thought. I am rarely fair to the psychiatric profession, but the interminable and intrusive questions about our experience are grasping, however clumsily, at that truth. The shift to an affirmation model is an acknowledgement that they are also as pointless as was the case with sexuality. But just as it is impossible to divorce the brain from the body, so it is impossible to divorce the person from the world. The developing person does so in terms of the world around them. As difficult as it is for some people to acknowledge this, queer and trans people are part of that world, as are old people, disabled people and people of many different backgrounds. Regrettably, the world also contains abusers, predators and bigots, whether that is on the street, in the school, online or in the White House. Learning that they exist and being prepared to deal with them is better than living in naive vulnerability. The responses to embodied experience, importantly, include reflection on those experiences, not only automatic or instinctual reaction. One of the most important things that one can do as a teacher and as a parent is to encourage the developing person to reflect: this expands their capacity as a learner but also increases confidence and self-awareness, in the real world and online.

From this point of view, regarding children as brains in jars is not only not protecting children, but is actively harming them. It makes them less self-aware, less confident, less able to take care of themselves. It starves their developing personality and impoverishes their capacity as learners. That is quite some consequence for swallowing the propaganda of a bunch of obsessive cranks.

Also on Sunday, Phillipson was quoted in The Observer as being puzzled as to why British children are some of the unhappiest in the world. Despite this bafflement, Phillipson is keen to offer a prescription: the familiar one of restricting screen time or access, and telling kids to go and play outside. Presumably, this will be on streets that are clogged with traffic, parks that have been sold off or rivers and seas that are full of shit. Or to be slapped with an ASBO or denounced as a teenage mob.

Let me essay a hypothesis. British children are the focus of mistrust, fear and anxiety. They are measured, categorised and tested over and over again. They are being told that their voices do not count. For some, indeed, they are being told that their very identities or those of their friends are invalid. They are looking forward to a mountain of debt, the deprivation of opportunities that were available to their parents, and the prospect of catastrophic climate change, which successive governments have shown little inclination to do much about. They are looking at the rise of fascism throughout the world, invasions, bombings and slaughter of civilians with apparent impunity, and quite possibly the development of a wider war. They are looking at a government that promised change and gave us more of the same, or aped the tropes of the far right. No, there is nothing to be unhappy about here. Both as a student and as a teacher, Pink Floyd's injunction to ‘leave those kids alone’ has always resonated, but perhaps a better response to the latest politician picking upon children is simply that other old chestnut: ‘Why don't you go out and do something less boring instead?’