Two 14yo girls write to Gillian Keegan

How has it come to pass, that in 2023 the only champions of the female sex class are Kemi Badenoch and Miriam Cates, and Rosie Duffield and Jo Cherry? Four MPs out of six hundred and fifty.

In a land of utter fucking confusion, this is as confusing as it gets.

I met a 14 year old girl at one of the Let Women Speak events some months ago. I just happened to sit next to her in the pub afterwards.

It took me several minutes after she started a conversation with me to realise I was talking to a child. She was astoundingly eloquent, and if she wrote a letter it would look something like this one. She might, in fact, be one of the authors.

Yes, well said. Keegan is useless and doesn't seem to really care about safeguarding children, only her own career. Kemi or Miriam Cates need to be in the Edu sec job.

Good luck to the girls. Will Keegan even read it?
Tbh, I knew Sunak would be a damp squib on trans issues the moment he announced her as Edu Sec, one of the biggest TWAW advocates in Parliament.
He had a golden opportunity to set his stall out by putting Kemi into Edu, but he fumbled the ball.
Keegan would rather shred this letter than read it.
Just see her recent Times article to realise she's a dead loss.

Dd is at uni now, one of her friends studied biology A level, was accepted to medical school, and 100% believed that a TW literally grew female body parts due to the hormones he took.

I was in the car when this was said, and laughed as I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t, she was deadly serious, and me not believing that hormones literally changed sex was horrific and transphobic. I often wonder how she’s getting on in med school.

People dismissing this have a lot invested in denying the harm that's happening to children. A teacher threatening and bullying children who state accurately that there are only two sexes let alone hurling accusations of homophobia in order to silence two genuinely questioning 13 year olds is shameful.
Having to admit that the tactics used by transactivists world wide to silence others are now being used on children in schools to ensure their compliance with untruths and fake facts must be difficult.

Teaching children English is all about interrogating texts, understanding tone, style, inference, register etc and being able to replicate them. Of course able 14 year olds are able to write in this manner.

Although I think they did write it, perhaps with a bit of tweaking, it doesn't matter if they did or not.

The letter is relaying their experience. We can't possibly decide that an experience isn't worth listening to on the basis that the person having it can't articulate it.

We know the letter is sincere. We know it's portraying events that have actually happened. None of this is news.

And now it's coming straight from the mouths of two fourteen year olds.

Good on them for standing up.

Oh for God's sake - when I was 14 I was actually more lucid in writing than I am now. School pupils probably do way more formal writing than they ever will as adults.
I was even - gasp - numerate. Unlike today's pupils we had no access to Google etc al which these girls might have used for some research?

Anyway - brava!

I've no idea whether the girls had assistance or not but there's no reason at all why they couldn't have written it themselves. I could write like that at 14 and I imagine plenty of other people could as well. My teenage cousin would probably prefer to communicate almost entirely by emojis if her texts are anything to go by, but I've seen some of her schoolwork and it's not dissimilar to that essay in it's tone. Being able to adapt your writing style to different contexts is an immensely valuable skill.

As an aside, I was 14 in 2010 and once posted on MN on behalf of my nan (she hated using the internet) to ask for advice on a relevant topic. I was accused of being a troll (and a middle aged man) and my thread was deleted because "No 14 year old writes like that".
And I'm not at all bitter about it.

Being a secondary school teacher and tutor, I can well believe that 2 interested 14 year old girls could write this.

And, as mentioned by @ScrollingLeaves I'm a science teacher, and have had explicitly* teach my year 7 (11-12 year olds) that no, humans can't change sex, and even if you have surgery, it's only cosmetic and the parts aren't functioning. And no, when a boy/man starts taking oestrogen, he doesn't grow a womb and start having periods. And no, if a girl/woman has a bilateral mastectomy, and changes her mind, and gets implants, she can't then breastfeed her baby. Oh, and that DSDs are rare, many people affected by them prefer to not be called intersex, and that those people are male or female, with a developmental disorder, not examples of a third sex.These are all examples from one class, in one week, this year.

And it has been getting worse, for the last 5 years. Very occasionally asked about 15-5 years ago.

By explicitly*, I mean clearly, with scientific definitions, and biological facts, not graphically.

TrAs- kids know who they are even at 2.

Also TRAs- a 14 year old couldn't possibly have written that.

Which is it?

SpringIntoChaos · Today 09:20
My youngest could genuinely have researched written that at 14 (my eldest not so much!)

Can we please start giving our young women some credit! We do have some incredibly brilliant youngsters in our midsts!

People don’t seem to accept that there is a large discrepancy in abilities between average and very able children. It is the children who are like this at fourteen who may well go on to top university courses at eighteen.

He wasn't non-binary but he definitely identified as a bull, a swan, a shower of coins, an ant...

Definitely bepenised and rapey, though. I don't know how you sex a shower of coins, to be fair.

I think competent 14 yos could write this, and even if they did have help, does that matter? If I were writing something like that, I might well ask a friend to review it before sending, just as I've reviewed things for them.

@Wimpod
How To Suppress Women's Writing

Also FREE on Amazon Audible right now.

You're welcome! 😉🤓

My youngest could genuinely have researched written that at 14 (my eldest not so much!)

Can we please start giving our young women some credit! We do have some incredibly brilliant youngsters in our midsts!

How crushing for girls to now say that not only must they believe this utter garbage but that they are now not intelligent enough to write words to try and stop it?

Can we please just give kids a chance to rail against this and support them when they do? Rather than negging them like some weird pick up artist?

Likewise. It's not the vocabulary, it's the tone and style that doesn't sound right for 14.

Intelligent 14 year-olds are capable of adjusting tone, style and register to the task at hand. They also presumably had plenty of time to tweak it, with the entire internet at their disposal. It's not as if they will have written it in exam conditions!

*I'm not sure 😳

Oh FFS. Will the women of fwr please stop mentioning interesting sounding books all the time? 😬

My tbr pile/kindle contents are growing to monstrous size and on bit sure how I'm going to get through it all while also identifying as a responsible adult/parent🤣

Some teenagers are very well read and like words and debating and making their point. It really is a cheap shot to try and suggest the girls couldn't possibly have written it.

Ministers read all letters @Tallisker. Us civil servants draft the responses but the Minister reads all of them and puts their signature to them.

Otherwise the civil service could say anything. And yes private office are full of youngsters but they have to be liked by and supportive of their Minister. Unlikely that full on woke would go down well with the current crop!

My dd is 14 and could definitely write this. But usually these letters are written by the campaign. However I can see in the tweet posted up thread that one of the mums has said it was written by them so that’s pretty definitive to me! I do write a lot of these types of letters and I don’t think it means they’re not worthy- often it’s giving a voice to people who wouldn’t be heard otherwise , sometimes just because they’re too busy or in a too stressful situation so we don’t ask them to, but they always approve it and it’s based entirely on what they’ve said.

It’s a great letter regardless and it would be worth an edited version being sent to a paper.

Christ, and I was going to criticise the lack of differentiation between the narrative voices in Frankenstein but decided against it...

How misogynistic to think girls can’t write a decent letter

Indeed!

Yes, deceptive coercion at its worst.