Was anyone else teaching or working with children in the decade 2000-2010?

I taught from 1978 to 1998 and I never came across this once - all kinds of secondary schools in the UK and abroad.

I was a teacher in inner London secondary schools during this period.

This did come up, once. A child joined us in Y7 who wished to be known by a different name and firmly felt that they were not the sex they were born. This was in a VERY liberal part of north London, and every effort was made to accommodate the child and make them feel confident and happy. We felt that this was the right thing to do, but there were lots and lots of fraught staffroom discussions; child used separate changing and toilet facilities without issue, but once boyfriend/girlfriend situations arose, it became very difficult, as we also had a duty of care to other children who entered into romantic relationships with the child with no knowledge that they were trans. It was tough for everyone.

The situation was very, very unusual and there was no guidance, even from that clinic. Nobody had a clue or had come across a person so young facing those issues before.

Fascinating discussion. Quite terrifying that there are all these teachers pointing out that this explosion in children believing they've been born in the wrong body has happened in less than a decade yet nobody in education is allowed to ask why / what's happening? We explore and question eating disorders, self harm, suicidal ideation, tourettes etc and consider aspects of social contagion - clusters of these actually inform our practice with children / teenagers in schools.

But children wanting to change sex - ssshhhh. The trans bullies (because that's what they are) are waiting to trash the reputation of any adult who dares to raise the issue of child safety /wellbeing.

Enraging and fucking dangerous.

This is very much my experience too, although I’ve been teaching since 1990. I’ve also worked with CAMHS extensively as a Senco. Their main work was based around eating disorders and self harm around the start of the century, with diagnosis of ADHD and ASD following. More recently, they are working more closely with children with significant mental health illnesses who also declare themselves trans. Sadly, many of the therapists affirm their declaration. Which surprises me as they didn’t affirm anorexic children who said they were overweight!
I find that the odd chat with individual colleagues starting with innocent questions - ‘I heard that a man was allowed to play rugby on a girls team, surely someone’s got that wrong?’ Gives me an idea as to what their opinions of the subject might be. Often, it turns into them having a quiet rant about the ‘madness’ of thinking someone can change their sex.

@locke360 I was genuinely interested in your personal experience of what questioning your gender meant to you when you were going through it. I don't have a gender identity and I have trouble understanding what it is so am slightly fascinated by those who explore it or question it.

I can't imagine questioning my gender because I don't feel I have one.

Perhaps it helped that my parents were somewhat hippyish and brought their children up identically, regardless of sex? We all had long hair and played with lego.

I do have a relationship with the concept of gender, the regressive stereotypes that wider society, away from my family, has forced upon me. It is a difficult, painful relationship. I don't identify with any of it though, that would make me feel quite disgusted with myself. In fact it is really important for me that I, and my children, are not defined by regressive pink and blue boxes at all.

How did you learn you had a gender? I'm much older than you and there was no such thing as gender identity when I was growing up. I'm interested to find out how 10-15 years ago someone would find out about gender identity. Was sexuality involved in your distress? What I'm seeing is quite a few young lesbians who have taken the trans route and then desisted — Keira Bell is the most public one, but there are a number locally.

nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender_questioning#:~:text=Gender%20questioning%20is%20a%20gender,might%20be%20transgender%20or%20nonbinary.

I'm not going to elaborate further than this because the tone on these forums is generally not entirely friendly to this sort of thing, and it's also extremely personal.

I'm sure people can do their own research if they want to.

I don't think many young people were questioning their gender at a time when gender (as in, "I have a gender identity") wasn't a thing.
A few may have felt they should have been the opposite sex. Many more will have felt the stereotypes of their sex were oppressive for them. The latter are surely gender non-conforming rather than trans.

@locke360 could you say more about what questioning your gender entails?

What do you mean by 'questioning my gender'?

Just because they didn't talk about it, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

I was a young person during this period and I DID have several friends who were questioning their gender, throughout both high school and university. They wouldn't have talked to their teachers/ lecturers about it because they would not have understood.

I was also a primary school pupil just before this period, and I questioned my own gender during that time.

Had there been support in place for me I would have felt more confident to explore it properly. As it was, I would have been laughed out of the school, so I buried it all and was confused for a long time.

There would have been others like me.

Just because you couldn't see it doesn't mean that no one was having these feelings.

Not teaching but had children 2006, 08 and 12. Somewhere between 1 and 2 there was a creep towards things being more "for a girl, for a boy" and by the third it definitely was a sea of blue or pink.

The eldest did have a boy in her school who was very into Barbie's and Princess dresses. It stopped by the time he went off to secondary, his friendship group seems predominantly female but he seems happy with who is he. I shudder to think what would have happened nowadays. (DD and he went to different secondary schools, my info is what I can summarise from Facebook)

Teaching since 2002 and yes it did come up before the time you suggest. And I taught trans students longer ago than 6 years.

Hope that helps.

I taught from 1999 to 2006, full-time in a large secondary (1300+ kids.) Taught a core subject so saw a large number of kids. During that period I can only remember 1 kid who seemed to be conflicted about gender. I remember him because his situation was considered very unusual at the time.

Totally agree with you, OP. It doesn't add up to me...

Teaching since 2001. Same as others, nothing at all until around 6 years ago. It seems to be the new form of self-harm for teenage girls.

Yes. Teacher and then managed youth services for a local authority and a charity. 2005-present. Now back as a senior leader in secondary education.

2005-2017 - encountered one girl who wanted to be a boy, change name/pronouns, although don’t know if she went on to physically transition (hadn’t at 16).

2017-2022 - lost count of the number of ‘trans kids’ I’ve encountered professionally. Significant number have been on the autistic spectrum. Majority (all but a couple) extremely vulnerable young people with multiple disadvantages/issues.

@TempsPerdu
My Master’s dissertation related in part to the tomboy figure in children’s literature

How lovely! I'd be interested to read it!

Similar to everyone else really - qualified in 2006 and taught throughout the primary age range for six years. After I left full-time teaching I went on to complete a Master’s in a subject allied to education which incorporated aspects of child development, psychology, sociology and the history of childhood. Also a fair amount of critical theory.

No experience whatsoever of gender dysphoria in any of the primary classes I taught. There were always a few gender non-conforming pupils, in the sense of tomboyish, football playing girls and boys who favoured drawing and gentler play, but this seldom became an issue and never, in my experience, progressed to anything else.

What I did notice, though, was a growing unease among some parents about their children’s choices, generally parents of boys worrying that they were choosing ‘girly’ activities and refusing to engage in more boisterous play - e.g. I had several fathers of Year 1 boys asking me to ‘encourage’ their sons to play football outside during free time rather than drawing or reading alongside the girls. There was also a subset of female parents who actively restricted their girls to very stereotypical fairytale/Disney princess/role play-based play and we’re clearly hoping to nurture an über-girly ‘Mini Me’.

Working at primary level I was very aware at the time of the increasing segregation of toys by gender, and in particular the very rapid ‘pinkification’ of toys aimed at girls during the mid-late 2000s. This subsequently fed into my Master’s, where I remember scrutinising the changes in how toys like Lego were marketed (one resource we used was the ‘70s advert a pp linked to above), the ‘supermodel makeover’ of My Little Ponies and so on. I wrote a blog post on all this in about 2014, and in hindsight I think children’s cultural landscape was beginning to change rapidly at this point.

My Master’s dissertation related in part to the tomboy figure in children’s literature - I imagine it would look very different were I to rewrite it in the current climate, as half the literary characters I was writing about have since been transed.

Emos , goths etc never a mention of trans gender identity.

Not education related but was at in-laws yesterday and three year old niece is becoming newly aware of pronouns and the differences between males & females. She frequently makes mistakes and sometimes thinks it's funny to call men girls and women boys. All silly fun and typical 3 yo behaviour.

Through the lens of someone who believes in gender woo it becomes less of a giggle though doesn't it? A chuckling girl saying she is a boy gets taken at face value. Her silly attempts at calling her uncles girls become misgendering. And by the time she starts school she will no doubt already be beginning to become wary of saying what she sees with her own eyes. It's so frustrating and sad.

One boy I do know is now a woman.

No, he's not. Humans can't change sex.

My SIL retired in 2018 at the age of 59 after 37 unbroken years in primary education (head teacher for the final decade). She had no idea trans ideology existed until her final year, when a newly-qualified staff member identified one of the pupils as trans and asked her for the school's transgender policy. The child concerned was a six-year-old boy who liked playing with girls and dressing up, sometimes in pink sparkly items of clothing. SIL instinctively shut that down by asserting that the school didn't encourage sexual or gender stereotyping. She continues to be a volunteer at that school and has also become a governor for another local school in the hope that she can keep an eye on things and push back when necessary. I gave her Irreversible Damage when it came out and she has passed it to other teachers still at the chalkface.