To want to nip this in the bud ( LGBTQ views , child )

I do have compassion for them, as I do for children I have taught who became killers. Compassion didn’t stop them being imprisoned.

You said that the brain of a child is developing at that age, but the fact remains that the age of criminal responsibility is 10.

Sure. But they are totally irrelevant to this child.

of course it's possible to have compassion even for children who became killers.

you took the words right out of my mouth Tandora, so depressingly predictable. No need to enforce views on biological sex here, not relevant.

Feelings might not be a choice, but how / whether one acts on them is.

What makes you so sure that a view you don't agree with must be coming from "outside influences", rather than from his own mind? He is at the age now where people start to think for themselves. You seem to be struggling with the idea that he's going to form his own views on things and sometimes have different views to yours - now, and for the rest of his life. If you can't adjust to that, you're in for a rough time in the teen years. ("Not his place" to decide what he believes? Is that what your parents told you when your values didn't match theirs? Did you believe them?)

Even if it is a matter of "influences", the fact is that as soon as a child goes to school and spends time with people who are not you, and has conversations with other kids, and learns to read, and so on, they're subject to a million different influences on every subject there is. You can't simply instruct him to believe what he's told by you and the LGBT assemblies and not what he gets from his father (and anyone who's gender critical, and anyone who subscribes to the position on sexuality of all the world's major religions, etc). Again, he will absorb it all, and he'll think for himself.

Look on the bright side, though - he'll probably reverse his beliefs on everything many times over before he's an adult, as teens usually do.

Let me get the right, as an experienced teacher who helps young offenders you’re saying horrifically killing and torturing a 2 year old child is exactly the same as an 11 year old saying that people choose to be gay? WOW JFC

What @TalkingintheDark said much more eloquently than me!

This isn't specifically for you @CaptainFuture, but who decides to add more letters and plus signs to LGBTQ........?

Is it a panel of important people? Peter Tatchell? Lewisham council? And how are the updates publicised? Is there a website that releases the info on a monthly basis?

"This month it has been decreed that peadophiles will be included and represented by another + sign"

Does anyone know?

It could be a heterosexual police officer. The law is the law. Are you still OK with the boys who killed Jamie Bulger because their brains were only developing at the time?

I think Will and Harper is toxic misogyny just as much as Andrew Tate and the Manosphere. Two sides of the same coin.

Gender identity ideology is deeply harmful to women and girls - as well as to gay people (as in actual homosexuals), and gender non conforming children.

The idea women should have empathy for men who are trying to take away all our rights to single-sex anything would be laughable if it weren’t so genuinely dangerous.

Yeah, I’m sure of course that would happen. Very ethical for a gay police officer to explain the legislation on hate speech to an 11 year old. I’m sure a POC would also do the same 🤣 just like I’m sure you’re a “teacher” but okay, say whatever you need to justify your point 🤣

Nothing the OP has said her son has said would fall under hate speech or be worthy of police time spent on it.

I agree with the last paragraph, and the OP is risking falling into the same trap. If she is unable to differentiate her approach between sexuality (LGB) and identity (TQ+), and tries to insist on the TRA approach to trans issues, she's going to pretty much undermine everything she tries to teach her son. If he knows she's lying/ talking rubbish about one thing, why should he trust anything she tells him?

They wouldn’t be locked up - it’s more likely a gay police officer would have a word with them and explain the legislation on hate speech.

That’s a really good point and it also sounds like OPs son is not quite ready to have discussions about sexuality pushed on him by his school. 11 is still really young for boys and while some are more aware of or interested in such things, many are not.

The school also utterly undermines itself if it is teaching things he knows to be untrue, like people can change sex it that ‘gender’ is more important then sex.

Ive seen “Will and Harper”. What exactly did you think I should take from it? A selfish AGP expecting everyone to pander, and a comedian virtue signalling.

And how many of them were convicted for having the opinion that being gay is a choice? As an experienced teacher you should understand that biologically speaking a 11 year old child’s brain has not fully developed at that age. Whilst your brain has. Surely an experienced teacher will understand that? And a teacher will also understand the importance of freedom of expression, which a core human right. But very concerning as a teacher you think an 11 year old should be locked up for having an opinion. Yikes.

Oh god why is it transphobia to state - correctly - that there are two genders?
This world is going bloody mad.

The OP’s son isn’t being homophobic though. She expressly says that he’d still be friends with someone who turned out to be gay. That’s basic tolerance. It obviously isn’t homophobia.

The error is when you’ve raised your own standards to tolerance-plus, and you start thinking not-meeting that standard is homophobia. It’s a basic progressive mistake, and once you see it you start to see it everywhere – people start behaving as if it’s an outrage that things aren’t moving in their preferred direction all the time.

The young aren’t having that at all, afaict. Boys anyway. They’re fairly live-and-let-live because they have to be, but they’re not at all on board with that idea of progress. Pushing those ideas on your son is only going to make you look out-of-date.

I’m sure Ritchie Herron and Keira Bell, both ‘diagnosed’ as really definitely trans and reassured that surgery and hormones was absolutely the right thing for them don’t find it quite as funny. But thanks for reiterating your contempt for victims of the ideology.

Except that it wasn’t the right solution. In Ritchie’s case, I think he realised as soon as he woke up from the penis removal operation. He is now permanently disfigured and incontinent.

This! Brilliant response

Please feel free to report my post if you find it deeply concerning. I hope you showed the same compassion to the killers of Jamie Bulger - their brains were only developing at the time.

OP -

Focus on the gay stuff. Sit with him and talk it through. Ask how he thinks gay people live, if they have jobs, go shopping, have pets, do all the ordinary boring stuff YOU do as a straight woman.

Get him to REALLY think about if gay man is any different at all to anyone else or if it's just as boring a part of their existence as anyone else's (ie a heterosexual person). He needs to understand that a gay man is exactly the same as anyone else except for who he falls in love with. That someone's sexuality is really rather boring & doesn't affect him at all.

The danger in finding things for him to watch/read where a character is gay is there's a habit of making it their whole personality & inadvertently 'othering' them. Maybe other pp could recommend stuff?

As an experienced teacher who has seen several former students go to young offenders’ institutions or prison because they were unaware or didn’t think the law would affect them, and having taught children in young offenders’ institutions, I don’t find my views at all concerning. That’s why we have the assemblies.