What would you do? Re school staff member and colleague calling himself 'miss'

A man living in the sky is more believable than that you can change sex, which is impossible. Besides, the man living in the sky doesn't want to enter women's safe spaces, take part in their sports or lie to children about his sex.

Being gender critical is a protected belief for which you cannot be sacked. Child safeguarding is important, too, and making children use language they know is wrong about a man who thinks he is a woman is highly dangerous. Schools are not supposed to do this. The young man needs to stay a young man at work - with luck and counselling he will get over his problem.

Use his surname. Perfectly acceptable for a man. He needs some heavy counselling btw and allowing him to transition by being kind is, in the end, not kind at all as he is heading towards sexual malfunction, sterility and a life-time on drugs. Poor young man needs help to escape this trap.

Surely the difficulty with insisting that people use female Pronouns for male bodied people, in school, is that it is using children to validate the male bodied persons belief, over reality.

Show me where I said that.

@literalviolence so your argument is that being trans is somehow contagious, and might afflict children with “trans ideology” and an unhealthy lifestyle. Oh, that’s miles away from gay panic!

@Holeinamole if the title for teachers is Miss X and Mr Y, which would you use?

Another piss poor analogy. Trans people do not represent a safeguarding issue per se - like gay people. However, the gay rights movement was not campaigning to have men allowed into women's spaces or to promote extreme and life limiting surgery and medication as a non-evidence solution to a supposed problem. Those are the safeguarding concerns and they have absolutely nothing in common with the fight for gay rights.

You need to stop using the concept of 'correct pronouns' as if this is a neutral comment. Correct are sex based in mine, and most of the rest of the country's opinion. You don't get to just state something completely opposite to that and have it as a fact. Your arguments are impossible to follow when you dump this kind of hyperbole into the middle.

Also, your obsession with genitals is odd. The difference between a man and a woman is systemic and yet you are obsessed with talking about cocks. Odd.

That's just about the most irrelevant 'analogy' I've heard. Religious people don't require me to join their religion, if they did (which is the proper analogy here), yes I would 'go on a rant' as you so dismissively put it about being required to e.g. go to church every Sunday, do lent and tell everyone that I think the book of genesis is a factual record. If this person is 'miss' then there is no reason for actual women to be 'miss' so it completely invalidates the language we use. Pronouns and titles are not neutral and when one person tries to change them, given that they are a shared resource, of course it impacts others. This bloke can change his name, put on women's clothes, call himself a TW. All good. But commandeering the word 'miss' is not neutral and not respectful.

Dadjoke, take it from a veteran workplace pronoun avoider: nothing happens if you don’t use pronouns at work. Nobody owes anybody validation, and employers have better things to do than to catalogue who used what pronoun and when. It’s good to avoid insulting colleagues but it’s also important not to become paranoid. The OP will draw her own conclusions.

And surely, by ‘gender’ you mean ‘gender identity’ which is an invisible thing that exists is some people’s minds. Most trans-ID’d people express this inner feeling by wearing clothes etc. of the opposite sex.

But my point is precisely that such expression does not reliably signal gender identity and that usually it takes a speech act for the rest of the world to know. So until I say “I am a man.” I could just be a woman wearing masculine attire. And once I’ve uttered the magic words, at least in my world, I am simply a woman who says “I am a man.” But for the OP’s purposes, that speech act is important.

You are correct, using correct pronouns is not a safeguarding risk. However, using pronouns that do not reflect children's reality is very much a safeguarding risk.

Using the correct pronouns is not a safeguarding risk.

No, using the correct pronouns - so in this case, the pronouns he/him/his or the honorific Sir or the name Mr X- is not a safeguarding risk. It's good we all agree on this.

@pronounsbundlebundle LGBT people are not a safeguarding risk. Using the correct pronouns is not a safeguarding risk.

@Holeinamole you've confused gender expression with gender. Gender reassignment is defined in the EqA - you don't need me to tell you what it is.

I am not "threatening" OP. I'm suggesting that she needs to be careful. She might get away with avoiding pronouns altogether, but I am not sure if that's sustainable. My advice would be, use the title and pronouns.

And profoundly frightening that this is what is forced on children.

I think Dadjoke will have to accept that reasonable people have different answers to the question of what ‘correct’ pronouns are. This has been discussed as nauseam.

In this case, we would also have to establish conclusively that the assistant teacher has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

I am female but sometimes like to wear masculine clothing and I wear my hair short. Does this mean I have the PC of gender reassignment?

The OP has asked for practical advice. I think it’s OTT to threaten her with a lawsuit.

And the Anita Bryant video is totally off, sorry. Wrong country, wrong time period, wrong religion and off topic.

You're wrong.

Sex-based pronouns are standard English usage and have been for hundreds if not thousands of years, probably thousands. Pronouns are not an individual part of language they are sex class based in English.

Refusing to use wrong sex pronouns is refusing to go along with the belief in an inner gender identity essence that can never even be explained. What does 'feeling like a woman' if you're XY mean? How do you gatekeep against the Katie Dolatowskis and Andrew/ Amy Millers who want to work in schools - and I bet they would.

Especially if it's on safeguarding grounds in a school. At most I can see a requirement to use names and no pronouns or 'they' but using wrong sex pronouns - nopity nope - massive humungous safeguarding red flag.

I can't wait for the court case.

I didn't say transgender people are safeguarding issue, as I think you know. Asking children to deny what they know to be literally true, asking children to ignore their own discomfort because either makes an adult happy, absolutely is a safeguarding issue.

LOL no one has pronouns based on the genitals matching my view of their gender, because I don't believe anyone has a gender. Does that mean everyone has now become a Barbie/Ken doll?!

If you were working with someone, using their title and pronouns in emails and conversation, and you found out they were transgender don't worry, that never happens. We all know who is transgender, partly because humans are excellent at correctly sexing each other, and partly because they rarely shut up about it.

@CaramelMac the fact that GC people don't want to use them doesn't make them incorrect. It means that you will only use pronouns based on the genitals matching your view of their gender, just as the complainant in Mackereth used biblical quotations to support his views.

Just asking people what their pronouns are is more straightforward and less intrusive, and has no effect on your beliefs.

The question is, is it more discriminatory to insist that GC and highly religious people use the correct pronouns, or allow the misgendering of transgender colleagues based on their best guess of what genitals they have?

If you were working with someone, using their title and pronouns in emails and conversation, and you found out they were transgender, would you start misgendering them?

But the point is that they’re not the correct pronouns.

@pronounsbundlebundle You've got that back-to-front. Refusing to use the correct pronouns is like insisting on wearing a dangling cross or proseltyzing to patients if you are a nurse. There might be reasonable accommodation, but direct discrimination against transgender students and teachers is a very high bar against your unwillingness to address them by their chosen title and pronouns because of GC or religious beliefs. That's what Mackereth and Forstater were about.

Hi @PammieDooveOrangeJoof here's the link to KCSIE

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-in-education--2

The section describing what emotional abuse is starts on p10 and goes on to p 11.

In my opinion preventing children from using normal, natural English pronouns and sanctions if they don't do what the adults in the school are telling them to do (use wrong sex pronouns) meets this definition.

Isn't it direct discrimination against someone's GC beliefs (which precedent has established is protected in law) to compel them to use wrong sex pronouns as part of their conditions of employment? It's like forcing a non-Christian to wear a cross or something similar.

A trans employee is free to use the speech they want about themselves, I fail to see how it doesn't fail the EA 2010 to directly force someone who doesn't believe to comply with the GI beliefs.

I can see a case for requiring them to try to avoid pronouns altogether if the trans person's mental health is so fragile that using normal English might cause a crisis but this is hard, and that should be recognised. I'd be happy to do my best to avoid pronouns altogether as a reasonable adjustment for a very fragile colleague, but I don't have to wear a hijab for my Muslim colleagues and I see this as no different.