A teacher has been banned from the profession after telling a Year 11 history class that gay and transgender people are 'mentally ill'. William Garwood, who was teaching at St Mary's Menston Catholic Voluntary Academy in West Yorkshire, was found by the Teaching Regulation Agency to have acted far outside acceptable teaching practice. He cannot apply to have the ban lifted until June 2032.

What happened in that classroom

It started with a reasonable question. A pupil asked whether there were any just wars, and what followed bore no relationship to the history curriculum at all. According to a pupil's account given to the Teaching Regulation Agency panel, Garwood told the class he was "happy" that Vladimir Putin was killing "satanic Nazis" in Ukraine, described the world as being run by billionaires who had created "evil Ukrainians", and told the class that "gay and transgender people are mentally ill". He also said, the panel found on the balance of probabilities, that "billionaires are the cause of transgenders and they print it in the media and influence people".

Garwood is 60. He was teaching children who were probably fifteen or sixteen. The panel described the remarks as "clearly inappropriate and wholly unrelated" to the lesson content, delivered without balance or any exploration of alternative perspectives. That is the clinical version. What it meant in practice is that a classroom full of teenagers was told, by an adult in a position of authority, that some of them, or their friends, or their siblings, are mentally ill simply for existing.

What children hear when adults say this

People tell me a great deal about what school felt like. I have heard it from trans adults reflecting on adolescence, from parents whose children came home shaken after something a teacher said, from young people still in the middle of it. What comes through, again and again, is that a teacher's words carry a different weight to almost anyone else's. They are not heard as one person's view. They are heard as the truth of the world, delivered from the front of a room where the child has no choice but to sit.

So when a teacher says that gay and trans people are mentally ill, a teenager who is working out who they are does not file that away as a debatable claim. They absorb it. Some of them will have carried Garwood's words, or words like his, for years before anyone thought to call them wrong in the same official register that made them feel so definitive in the first place.

The panel acknowledged this, describing the comments about homosexuality and transgender people as "especially problematic given their potential impact on school-aged children". I am glad they said it. I wish it went without saying.

The religious belief argument

Garwood told the panel he was entitled to his religious belief as a Muslim and to a philosophical belief in anti-Nazism under the Equality Act 2010. The law does protect religious belief, and it protects it properly. What it does not do is give anyone, teacher or otherwise, a right to deliver that belief as fact to a captive audience of teenagers in a history lesson about just war. The protection is for the belief itself, not for the broadcasting of it as curriculum content without balance, evidence, or relevance.

Being trans is not a pathology. It has not been classified as a mental illness by the World Health Organisation since 2019. The claim that gay and trans people are mentally ill is not a sincerely held religious perspective that the law requires schools to platform: it is a factually wrong statement about other human beings, delivered to children who had no means of refuting it in the moment.

Why the ban matters beyond Garwood

The ban is not the point in itself. What matters is the statement it makes about what schools are for. A school is not a space where children sit and receive one adult's unfiltered worldview. It is a place where young people are supposed to encounter ideas with honesty, rigour, and care for the people in the room. Some of those people will be gay. Some will be trans. Some will be working out who they are in a world that is already loud with opinion about them, and the last place that should add to that noise, carelessly and cruelly, is the classroom.

There are gay and trans teenagers in every school in this country. They are not a political abstraction. They are sitting in rows, taking notes, asking questions, trying to do their homework. They deserve to be taught by people who understand that their existence is not a debate topic, not a symptom, and not a punchline.

The Teaching Regulation Agency found Garwood's conduct "significantly outside the bounds of acceptable teaching practice". That is the right finding. I hope every young person who was in that Year 11 classroom, whoever they are and however they understood themselves, hears that verdict clearly: what they were told was wrong, it is not what the world knows about them, and they were right to feel that it was not.

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 advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.