or the last 14 years, with a total of £466,000, until this week, when it abruptly terminated funding. Why? Because this month Andrew Easton, a co-author of the LGBTYS’s 2010 guidance for schools, was convicted of sharing indecent images of children as young as newborns and attempting to groom online what he thought was a 13-year-old boy but was in fact a police officer. For Children in Need this was the final straw.
In 2022 two men said they were groomed at LGBTYS around the time Rennie was chief executive. Sam Cowie, now 28, was 15 and in foster care when he was given cigarettes and alcohol by staff, then taken underage with a fake ID to clubs where he was assaulted and raped by older men. The second claims he was groomed by Rennie and one of his sex ring associates: the culture of the charity, he says, was “like a social network to connect older men with teenagers”. In response, LGBTYS suspended a staff member and has referred itself to the police.
After these revelations, at a tense board meeting in May, Children in Need’s chair of trustees, Rosie Millard, proposed LGBTYS’s funding be suspended, pending an inquiry. But then came Easton’s conviction, with the BBC charity at risk of serious reputational damage. Senior figures argued it should quietly pay the last two tranches of money in LGBTYS’s grant, rather than risk the wrath of activists by publicly defunding it. But Millard prevailed and Children in Need finally cut ties.
Sums it up, really. Continue, rather than "risk the wrath of activists". The institutional cowardice that allows this kind of outrage to continue.
But even before these two recent scandals, LGBTYS raised numerous red flags. Its stated charitable purpose is to work with young people aged over 13, yet its “champions scheme” operates in 40 Scottish primary schools. Its 2017 schools guidance, funded by the Scottish government, stated that a child must be allowed to choose whichever changing room matched their gender identity. A girl upset at undressing with a male should wait until after the “trans young person is done”. Likewise on overnight trips, schools should permit a male pupil to sleep in female dorms, with no need to inform parents. This guidance, after opposition from women’s groups, was removed.
LGBTYS has also campaigned for the prescription of puberty blocking drugs (banned after the Cass review), advised girls online to bind their breasts, referred children to the trans charity Mermaids (which is now under investigation by the English Charity Commission) and demanded schools not inform parents if a child socially transitions. Extreme ideas that few Children in Need fundraisers would support.
Keeping secrets from parents, compromising children’s privacy, discussing sexuality with very young children, swerving official scrutiny even after being led by a child-rapist: LGBT charities have lately been granted a free pass on safeguarding protocols afforded to no other organisations. And many gay men are horrified. They abhor drag queen story hours where men in dresses twerk at toddlers, child drag artists performing in gay bars or little children colouring in Pride flags.
The oldest and gravest homophobic slur, the justification for Section 28, was that gay men can’t be trusted around children. This myth was rightly demolished, yet since then a collective guilt has tipped the scales the other way. Anyone who raises safeguarding concerns about LGBT groups or individuals risks being called a bigot.
Well yes, but it's the T that's surely made the difference. Men with autogynephilia, sexual kinks, flooding into the LGB movement…
