There are moments in parenting that feel less like decisions and more like declarations. Choosing where your children go to school is one of them. For our family, private school was never just about academic rigour or smaller class sizes. It was about something more fundamental: the right to say no.
No to what, exactly?
No to the idea that a child’s biological sex is a question to be explored rather than a fact to be celebrated. No to the classroom practice of “preferred pronouns” as a mandatory social ritual. No to the creeping assumption that any parent who declines to participate in gender ideology is, by that very refusal, doing something cruel.
Who I Am, and Why It Matters
I am a Catholic. I believe that man and woman are not social constructs but complementary realities, woven into the fabric of creation. I believe that the body is not a mistake to be corrected, that children are not blank slates for ideological inscription, and that truth is not a spectrum. These are not fringe positions. They are positions held, in various forms, by billions of people across every civilisation in human history. The burden of proof does not lie with those who hold them.
What has changed is not the truth. What has changed is the social cost of saying it out loud.
The Pronoun Question
I want to be careful here, because the people caught up in this moment deserve charity, not contempt. A young person struggling with their identity is not my enemy. Confusion is human. Suffering is real. The appropriate response to someone in pain is not mockery.
But responding with charity does not mean affirming everything as true that is asserted as true. A doctor who tells a patient only what they wish to hear is not kind. A teacher who refuses to distinguish biological reality from ideological claim is not inclusive. He is simply abandoning his post.
The demand that everyone use whatever pronoun a person requests is not, at its core, about manners. Manners I can accommodate. The demand is that you publicly affirm a particular philosophical claim about the nature of the self, the body, and reality itself. That is a very different thing. And the social infrastructure that has grown up around this demand — the HR policies, the school curricula, the social media pile-ons for dissenters — has the character not of persuasion but of compulsion.
That, by any honest definition, is the structure of ideology.
For a rigorous analysis of how gender identity theory has moved from academic margins to institutional mandate, this piece in the New Atlantis remains the most thorough examination of the scientific evidence — or lack thereof — behind many of the central claims.
What Private School Buys You
We are fortunate. I say that plainly, because it matters. We can afford the choice. Not every family can, and that is a genuine injustice that sits alongside the ideological one.
But what that choice buys us is not, primarily, prestige or connections or a better university result. What it buys us is the space to raise our children in coherent alignment with what we actually believe. The school we chose shares a set of fundamental commitments: human dignity, intellectual rigour, and the permanent over the fashionable.
In that environment, my children are not going to be asked to affirm, as a condition of social belonging, propositions that contradict both biology and our faith. They will be taught to think clearly, argue honestly, and treat every person they meet with genuine respect. They will not be taught that kindness requires intellectual surrender.
The question of parental rights in education is not a narrow one. As the Alliance Defending Freedom has documented extensively, the legal battles over what can be taught to children without parental consent are intensifying across the Western world. Parents who wish to retain authority over their children’s formation are increasingly having to fight for it.
Teaching Them to Hold the Line
My children will, in the years to come, encounter the full weight of the cultural pressure that defines our moment. They will be told, in various contexts and with varying degrees of subtlety, that the civilised position is to comply. That only bigots resist. That their parents’ views are embarrassing relics.
I want them to be equipped for that encounter. Not with hostility, but with clarity. With the quiet confidence that comes from knowing why you believe what you believe, and from understanding that social pressure and moral truth are not the same thing.
There is a word for the disposition I am trying to cultivate in them. The ancient Romans called it pietas: a loyal, ordered love of what is real and good, passed down through generations, resistant to fashion. It is not the same as rigidity. A person with pietas can engage generously with the world, including with people who disagree with him profoundly. He simply will not be untethered from reality in order to do so.
A Note on Unkindness
The one thing I will insist upon, and insist upon firmly, is this: my children will never be unkind to an individual person on the basis of this disagreement. Never.
The distinction between rejecting an ideology and mistreating a person is not a subtle one, but it must be taught and repeated, because the culture will try to collapse it. You can think gender ideology is intellectually incoherent, spiritually confused, and institutionally coercive — as I do — and still treat every human being you meet with full dignity and warmth. In fact, the Christian tradition would insist that you must.
That is not a contradiction. That is the whole point.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is explicit on this: every human person possesses an inherent dignity that demands respectful treatment. That principle does not move. What moves is the claim that respect requires epistemic capitulation. It does not.
The Long View
History is not kind to ideologies that require compulsion to survive. The demand that everyone speak in a particular way, affirm particular claims, and treat dissenters as moral failures has a poor track record. It tends to produce, eventually, a sharp and clarifying reaction.
I am not raising my children for the current moment. I am raising them for their whole lives. For the world as it is, and for the world that will come after the current enthusiasm has run its course.
That means raising them in truth, even when truth is uncomfortable. It means raising them with the courage to say, gently and without flinching:
*No. That is not what I believe. And I will not say that it is.*
That, in the end, is the gift of a good education. Not a certificate. Not a network. Not even knowledge, though knowledge matters.
The gift is a spine.
Andere reden. Wir setzen es um.
