A teacher has been banned from the profession after telling Year 11 pupils that gay and transgender people are 'mentally ill'. William Garwood made the remarks at a Catholic academy in West Yorkshire during a history lesson. The Teaching Regulation Agency found his comments discriminatory and especially harmful to school-aged children. He cannot reapply until June 2032.

What actually happened in that classroom

Picture a Year 11 history class at St Mary's Menston Catholic Voluntary Academy in October 2023. A pupil asks William Garwood whether there are any just wars. He says yes, and from there the lesson unravels into something that has no business being in any classroom. He told the class, according to the Teaching Regulation Agency panel, that he was "happy" Vladimir Putin was killing "satanic Nazis" in Ukraine. He said the world was run by billionaires who created "evil Ukrainians". And he told those teenagers, some of whom may well have been gay or trans, that gay and transgender people are "mentally ill".

There were also remarks, which the panel accepted on the balance of probabilities, to the effect that "billionaires are the cause of transgenders and they print it in the media and influence people". These are not fringe views whispered in a pub. They were delivered by a teacher, in a lesson, to a room full of fifteen and sixteen year olds who had nowhere to go and no way to answer back.

What the panel found, and why the framing matters

The TRA panel was careful in its language. The remarks were "clearly inappropriate and wholly unrelated" to the curriculum. They involved "a significant and highly subjective value judgment". And the panel noted something worth staying with: they described the comments about gay and transgender people as "especially problematic given their potential impact on school-aged children".

That phrase is doing real work. It is not simply saying the comments were offensive. It is saying that children are a specific category of listener, and that what an adult in authority says to them about who they are lands differently. I have heard from so many trans and gay people over the years about the moment a teacher, a religious leader, or a parent said something that planted a seed of shame. Those seeds take years to dig out. Some people never fully do.

Garwood argued before the panel that he was entitled to his religious belief as a Muslim and to the philosophical belief of anti-Nazism under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010. The panel did not accept that framing. And it was right not to. The Equality Act protects the holding of a belief. It has never been a licence to tell a classroom of children that some of them are mentally ill.

When professional conduct becomes a battleground

What I notice about this case, and the reason it deserves more than a single read, is how Garwood's defence was structured. The invocation of religious belief and of a protected philosophical position is a recognisable strategy. We have seen it elsewhere: teachers, public officials, and healthcare workers arguing that their right to hold a view extends to the right to express it in professional settings, to the people least able to push back.

The TRA process exists precisely because professional conduct frameworks have to hold a line. But those frameworks are also, increasingly, the terrain on which gender-critical positions are tested and contested. A High Court challenge involving a teacher who described being LGBTQ+ as a sin has already reached the courts. Each case shapes what the next one can argue.

The question worth asking is not only whether the outcome in any given case was correct. It is also who is protected by these processes, and who is exposed. The children in Garwood's history class were not parties to any legal argument. They just had to sit there and listen. The professional conduct framework exists, in the end, for them.

What trans and gay children actually hear

When a teacher says gay and transgender people are mentally ill, the children in the room do not hear an opinion. They hear a diagnosis. They hear it from someone whose job it is to know things, someone whose words carry the weight of the institution behind them. A fifteen year old who is quietly wondering whether they might be trans does not have the distance to file it away as one view among many. They absorb it.

I think about what Pupil A, named in the panel's findings, must have made of that lesson. Brave enough, or perhaps just unable to help themselves, to recall it clearly enough that a TRA panel could act on it. That matters. Reporting something like that at fifteen, in a Catholic school, about a teacher, takes courage.

The ban running until June 2032 is not, by itself, the point. The point is that a professional body looked at what happened in that room and said: this is not teaching, it is harm, and schools are for something else entirely. They are for every child who walks through the door, including the ones who are gay, or trans, or Ukrainian, or simply trying to learn about just wars and not expecting to be told their existence is a product of billionaire manipulation.

That is the statement the ban makes. And I am glad it was made.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.