Are younger teens and pre-teens rejecting gender woo?

My teens are scathingly sceptical of life in general and that includes the gender stuff. They'll use neutral (although not opposite) pronouns for a quiet life but do think it's all a bit of a fantasy.

I think this is more of a worldview issue with them though. These kids have been decoding messages and media from multiple sources since they were very small and they are perfectly capable of making up their own minds about things. They're actually more sceptical than I am! I mean they'll perceive motives that I haven't thought of. Very savvy generation in my view. They combine the gen X " whatever nevermind" of their parents with the quick meme sassy internet backchat. I think they're awesome!

I haven't had any in-depth discussions with my teen cousins on this, but I do know that they laugh along when family are talking about being trans Korean or trans squid or something and definitely don't get upset with anyone. They don't have pronouns on their accounts either.

Also, I work in schools, and while I can't really get involved, students do have debates about this in the classroom. There's usually someone saying there's only 2 genders and someone else saying 'you can't say that' but not having a reason why. If they ask me what I think, I have to remain neutral, or move discussion back to maths or whatever. But there are certainly teens that are not on board with it all. Some just because it's a fun way for cocky young lads to wind a room up.... but still!

Oh this is giving me hope!

As a teacher, I have to deal with transitioning students, seemingly increasingly, year on year. In particular it saddens me to see young girls buy into rigid gender stereotypes by feeling that the way to deal with differences, or feelings about sexuality, is by changing their pronouns and names. DP (also a concerned teacher) and I are keeping a very close eye on his 13 year old niece, who along with her friends appears to be blindly and vocally buying into gender-woo.

I always treat a young person that says they're transitioning with kindness, fairness and compassion. However we both believe very strongly in avoiding too much affirmation - yet can't talk about this issue in school, except in front of a select few colleagues.

It's good to hear that some peers are taking a critical view, as this doesn't necessarily tally with what we as teachers have seen. Despite teaching a subject where this issue should be open for discussion, GC students are silent (though perhaps not always amongst peers) and it's made worse by the fact that such views are frowned upon by many well-meaning staff who believe that being GC means you can't be inclusive.

I hope that we, the adults in the room, can be more vocal about how to safeguard our young people in this area, and so it's encouraging to read that some preteens and young teens are also seeing the issue in a critically minded, analytical way.

@IvyTwines2
Yes no surprise that our Arts Educated nephew is fully on board the Gender Woo train and so 'liberal' that he won't even listen to an alternative view.... The groupthink is so strong that he'd probably be terrified to challenge it anyway. One of these days I am going to have the sex/gender conversation with him when we are alone to see where we get to.

I am glad to see a tide turning though. We are London - parts of which are Woo central (not on a par with Brighton obvs) - and I work in TV & Film (also Wootastic) and i would say that the most engaged are the 20-25 group who are nearly 100 percent on board with pronouns, shared changing rooms and all manner of bollocky shite. Older colleagues = 50/50 Younger (mostly friends kids) = 50/50

In the 80s tou just changed your outfits. One day you’d dress like boy George, maybe bananarama, try out a safari look, or Toni Basil... all homemade because we didn’t have cheap throwaway clothing.

NB We didn’t actually believe we were a 1950s cheerleader, or a big game Hunter... it was FUN.

My DD is in her 20s. She peaked at university because of a fellow student. Their identity changed daily, sometimes multiple times a day and woe betide anyone who didn't get their pronouns right. People were expected to just know how they identified at any given time. It was all about the drama.

I definitely think there are demographic differences with this. The people I would guess are most likely to go along with it are young, white middle-class girls. Boys, working-class young people, probably black and Asian people, are more likely to be sceptical. Perhaps a lot won't admit to it publicly, but they will express their reservations privately.

I also think we might reach a tipping point. Say one child in a class of 30 comes out as trans, their friends might be accepting. When it's 8 or 10 the rest of them sense a trend and realise it's getting a bit ridiculous.

But there were also vocational colleges for teaching, business admin etc.

Far from expanding opportunities for the less advantaged, the expansion of HE has overwhelmingly been colonised by the nice-but-dim kids of the sharp-elbowed middle classes.

True. I’m not sure what the stats were when I was first a student but it certainly wasn’t every man, woman and dog. For this I also blame American ‘frat house’ films...

Yep

We now have lots of midwits who think their celever than the average bear

"I blame social media, reality tv and drag shows in tv..."

I would also blame Tony Blair and the idea that 50% ought to be in higher education.

When I was 15 we all had to do two weeks Work Experience. Mine was on a stud farm. You can't escape the blunt reality of mammalian biology on a farm, or pretend that sex is some kind of irrelevant spectrum when you've seen shagging and birth. Horse shagging isn't subtle.

This thread has actually cheered me right up - so encouraging, thanks everyone for sharing. I've been feeling incredibly down about the state of affairs recently and it's lovely to think the young uns might be seeing things in the sunlight

My bil is really woke defenced the gender woo woo he is a artist

Got rejected for funding only looking for LGBT afrtists lol 😂 he was well pissed one can always be woke until realities bite

I went to art school way back when. Students were generally quirky, imaginative and creative. Mostly pretty laid back.

Pre-lockdown I went back to do a short course and saw a change in the general student ‘type’. Every day was a loud dramatic explosion in the canteen with at least one prima Donna flouncing out, scattering chairs as they went, young men in very extravagant dresses and skirts and full slap eyeballing people in an aggressive manner (and when you looked ‘AND WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?????’.

And quite a few international students who kept their heads down and looked like they had landed on Mars.

No fun, these kids, no spark. Just antagonism and looking for a fight. I blame social media, reality tv and drag shows in tv...

This is encouraging. My DD age 10 was astonished when I recently explained about men identifying as women and vice versa. I really hope she doesn't get captured by the trans brigade in her teens.

We currently live abroad in a culturally conservative country though she is at an international school. It will be interesting to see how her school deals with these issues as she gets older - it sounds like the UK schools are well and truly captured, which doesn't make me want to return to the UK.

I suppose because DS was brought up with gay aunt, cousin, uncle etc there was nothing really to raise eyebrows at.

Doesn’t every generation think that they invented sex?

My b/g dts 13 are tired of it all. They accept the LGBT stuff but are fed up with all the pronouns and extensive alphabet. They believe people are more than a label (or a letter of the alphabet).

Dd1’s non binary friend has told dd she can’t like Harry Potter because jk is anti trans. Dh did a huge speech about extremists using the trans world to push women down and the importance of fact checking claims. He gave dd jk Rowling’s article explaining what she said. I’m proud dd wants to talk to us and listen but also that dh has come to the anti feminism opinion with very minimal conversation from me. My only comment has previously been how I worry a “cis woman” is now such a narrow stereotype that very few people will identify as such when we’re more than happy to be women with a broad spectrum.

DD (16) and DS (14) aren't buying into the woo at all, thankfully. They'd politely use a different pronoun if someone asked, but they'd be eye rolling behind their backs. `Trying to get DS up and out early on a Monday is often met with 'Mum I can't get move fast, I'm identifying as a sloth today'.

Interestingly their cousin (who is at a very well known Arts school) is VERY much going along with gender woo and ever-changing-pronouns but even he couldn't get on board with Laurel Hubbard.

My teenage cousins are fully into the genderwoo unfortunately.

Also, I agree with previous posters that it is often the extremely vulnerable kids who get really sucked into this ideology to the point of causing real harm. The trans boys / men I have met have all had really grim backgrounds. Not just working class / poverty -- really awful histories of sexual abuse for example. These are the young people who are at risk of grooming by sexual predators and experiencing further abuse and self-harm. They are the ones who are being harmed by the cheerleading of this ideology and who will be left on their own to pick up the fragments of their lives when the cheerleading moves on to the next cause celebre.

This is heartening - I really am hoping that by the time my DD gets to be a teen this will be starting to be unfashionable.

Interestingly I find that even though some youth social media (eg tumblr) is very woke, there’s a fair amount of pushback.

Tumblr in particular has a thriving young radfem/GC feminist scene, possibly because it’s a site, like this one, where people use pseudonymous usernames and change them regularly, so they feel freer to go against the mainstream ideology. Tends to be that where you get the woke idiocy, there’ll still be a fair number of feisty, angry, clever teens and early-20s young women pushing back against it openly in very articulate comments, etc., and circulating their own extremely well informed articles and links on GC feminism.

They would get on really well with the users on this board! I sometimes want to recommend that they hop over here 😂

Mine think it’s bollocks. 15yo in particular seems to think it’s hideously outdated and for old people, by which she means those around 22.