How Postmodern Thinking Captured Jersey’s Government, and Why I Joined WRN Jersey

Fifteen months ago, while seven months pregnant with my first child, I received a message from a woman I had never met. She had been following an online discussion I had been having with a local politician. That message ultimately led me to join WRN Jersey.

The subject of that discussion is one I have returned to many times over the last eighteen months, and one that I believe must continue to be raised. It concerns sex-based rights, safeguarding, and what I believe are unlawful policies that have been upheld by our government.

In 2021, policy guidance titled Transgender Guidance for Schools was produced by CYPES (Children, Young People, Education and Skills) in Jersey. Since then, the guidance has expanded significantly, with the latest version published in March 2025.

To summarise, this non-statutory guidance sets out how schools and educational settings in Jersey should support children who identify as transgender or non-binary, encouraging what it describes as a whole-school approach to inclusion.

My concern is that the guidance not only encourages the teaching and acceptance of the idea that a child can be anything other than the sex they were born, but also that a child has the authority to dictate which pronouns they are referred to by, which toilets they wish to use, the uniform they wear, and which changing facilities they have access to. If this is not, at the very least, a questionable set of decisions approved by the CYPES ministerial team and our former Minister for Children and Families, then the fact that it appears to sit in conflict with the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of biological sex under the Equality Act 2010 should be.

In my view, these policies raise profound questions about safeguarding, the rights of other children, and whether schools should be expected to affirm beliefs that conflict with biological reality. Whether Jersey’s guidance will ultimately withstand legal scrutiny remains to be seen, but I believe it reflects a broader ideological shift that deserves public debate.

To understand why guidance such as this exists, I think it is necessary to understand the philosophy that increasingly influences many institutions across the Western world: postmodernism.

Postmodernism is characterised by scepticism towards objective truth, universal reason and grand narratives. It proposes that reality is socially constructed by language, culture and power structures rather than existing independently of them. It is within this framework that ideas such as being “born in the wrong body”, or self-identification taking precedence over biological sex, become intellectually possible.

To explain why I hold such a critical view of this philosophy, I need to tell a more personal story.

In 2018, at the age of twenty-six, I admitted myself to Silkworth Lodge, an addiction treatment centre in St Helier, to begin treatment for alcoholism. I spent three months there receiving therapy and counselling for what had become a life-threatening illness.

I am grateful to say that my rehabilitation was successful, and I am now approaching eight years of sobriety. Looking back, I don’t believe I recovered simply because I stopped drinking. I recovered because I gradually learned to stop running from reality.

One of the most important lessons I took away with me was the difference between reality itself and the stories we tell ourselves in order to avoid discomfort.

For years, I found endless explanations for why my life had become unmanageable. It was because I was a woman, I had grown up in a single-parent household, I had experienced sexual abuse, Society was unequal, and life just happened to be treating me unfairly. While some of those things were undeniably true and had shaped me profoundly, they were not the reason nor the excuse for why I continued to drink.

The more I focused on external explanations for my unhappiness, the less responsibility I accepted for changing my own life. Recovery began only when I recognised that, however unfair my circumstances had been, I remained responsible for my own health and happiness in life.

That experience fundamentally changed how I see the world. It is also why I believe postmodern thinking can be so attractive. If our personal interpretation of reality becomes more important than reality itself, then shared reality begins to give way to individual truth. Increasingly, people are encouraged to define themselves according to their internal feelings and self perception and expect institutions to affirm those identities, even where they conflict with observable reality.

This is why I have concerns about transgender ideology as it is currently presented to children. In my view, it shares with postmodern philosophy the assumption that a self determined identity should take precedence over biological reality. I believe teaching children that reality is determined primarily by self-identification risks leaving them ill-equipped to navigate a world that ultimately does not bend to our feelings. We all have to learn, sooner or later, to live life on life’s terms.

I chose to drink to escape having to accept reality as it was, and I was always going to lose.

If we teach our children that their uncomfortable feelings can be fixed by adopting a false identity then they will lose too.

The woman who contacted me fifteen months ago was a member of WRN (Women’s Rights Network) Jersey. She had followed my online discussions and reached out to thank me for speaking publicly about issues that many people felt unable to discuss openly. She invited me to join WRN Jersey, and I accepted without hesitation.

WRN Jersey forms part of a wider international network that campaigns for sex-based rights, freedom of expression and the safeguarding of children. Whether people ultimately agree with WRN or not, these debates matter because they concern the kind of society we are creating for the next generation. I joined because I believe children deserve honesty, women deserve sex-based protections where they are necessary, and public policy should be rooted in objective reality rather than ideology.