My son can tell...

If you watch that Marie Curious video with Dr Barker pretending to be a women it's truly nauseating.

It's so insulting - it's immediately obvious he's a man. It's gaslighting, coercive control and this is in a programme ostensibly to encourage girls to do science. Why would they bother when this is the abuse they received? Compelled belief that a man is a woman when the fact you can't change sex is pretty basic biological science.

It's so wrong and Oxford University is failing safeguarding very badly here. I wonder if the girls involved with this have to share toilets with this big man? This is against the rules for schools - it's breaking the law for schoolchildren which are single sex toilets over the age of 8.

And why is Barker's self identity more important than the girls perception that he's a man? Which is a safeguarding instinct.

Oh right, because if you're XX your opinion doesn't matter - the exact opposite of what Marie Curious claims to be about - gaslighting Orwellian bullshit.

Remember the girl duped by Amy/ Andrew Miller in Scotland and the judges comments. It's not surprising she got into that car, is it when schoolgirls receive this sort of "education"?

@allthevitamins I can't really add to the wonderful comments from most of the previous posters, but thougt that I'd share this with you.

I listened to an episode of The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry: The Mystery of the Teenage Brain with my DS who was I think 11, or just turned 12 at the time.

Here is some of the blurb:
"‘Why are teens prone to risky behaviour?’ asks Dr Mark Gallaway, ‘especially when with their friends?’
13 year old Emma wonders why she’s chatty at school but antisocial when she gets home.
And exasperated mum Michelle wants to know why her teens struggle to get out of bed in the morning.
Swirling hormones and growing bodies have a lot to answer for but, as Professor of Psychology from the University of Cambridge Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains, there’s also a profound transformation going on in the brain.
Dr Adam Rutherford and Dr Hannah Fry discover how the adolescent brain is maturing and rewiring at the cellular level and why evolution might have primed teens to prefer their peers over their parents.
Frances Jensen, Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, tells us how all these brain changes can impact social relationships."

I then used this as a spring board to discuss with him things like peer-pressure, that the part of the brain that manages social interaction develops before the frontal lobe, which manages logic and executive function, all of this led on to discussions about fads, trends, social contagion, online-influences, marketing and more, including GI.

My son can tell too.. he can spot a bloke pretending to be a woman a mile off.

The Emperor has no clothes and has convinced all the adults who think they're so clever that he's wearing clothes so that he can flash all our children.

Safeguarding structures are under a deliberate attack and what with that and lack of funding in schools, parents really are the last line of safeguarding defence.

I would advise everyone read Gavin de Becker's Protecting the Gift: keeping children and teenagers safe. Spoiler alert - sex matters and instinct, intuition matters. We should be teaching our children to listen to how they feel when they feel fear, not tell them it's bigoted and they should suppress it. Teaching our children to trust their instincts and their senses is so important when it comes to safeguarding (it's not enough, but it's required) and we should not be prioritising the wants of strangers over the duty to tell our children the truth.

It's not even telling them the truth - they KNOW the truth already, they know the myriad differences between adult males and adult females. They can immediately see, just as dogs can smell the difference. It's about not denying the truth and lying to kids, and making them scared to speak their truth in order to appease a few narcissitic men.

Dr Clara Barker is putting himself forward as a 'role model' in a science outreach project specifically for girls aged 11-14.

Fucking massive great red clanging safeguarding red flags.

Watch the video about 'meet some of our role models'.

Clara Barker was never a girl. He's using young female children for - at best - validation. Without the consent of them or their parents. For a SCIENCE programme when it's a scientific fact that sex is binary, that he's male and that he's never been a young female. He could just be involved in an outreach programme for boys and girls - some of them no doubt gender questioning. But no, he's targeting girls specifically by being involved here.

Safeguarding alerts galore.

https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/engage/schools/secondary-schools/marie-curious

The conventions of politeness in every day society are based on reciprocity. We will be polite to each other. You can't demand politeness from me if your clothing and fake breasts mock me and you demand of me to disbelieve my eyes.

Rudeness is not good obviously - personally I can't abide it - and of course we shouldn't go round shouting 'fatty' at fat people or whatever. That's completely different from, say, a person with anorexia saying they shouldn't eat and that statement having to be agreed with. Or a person who's a male saying he's a female and having to be agreed with.

"I'd rather be rude than a fucking liar".

Yep. Given the actual harms caused to women and children and society - I am okay with being rude on this subject now. I am not going to be polite in the face of coercion. No more. Sometimes playing silly etiquette games while wrong is being committed is not the right thng to do; doing politeness in the face of injustice can actually be the opposite of moral.

This is not a drill, as a wise.woman once said.

Let’s consider those…
someone ugly is purely a subjective thing
all the others are purely temporal

so if someone is fat and they go around declaring that they are thin - I would be honest and say “actually no, you are overweight but let’s see if there is a way to become thinner…” fat and thin are on a scale and have moveable boundaries

but a man claiming to be woman never can be a woman - there is no overlap / no intermediary ‘nearly a woman’ position you can’t lose ‘essence of man’ and gain ‘essence of woman’ so it is totally different

Not a problem

Not hurting people's feelings has got us men in women's sport,
Women's language including in health, maternity and menopause being removed.
Adults watching silently while the most vulnerable of chidren (in care, autistic, mentally unwell and more) are specifically targeted and told that their bodies are flawed and that transitioning will fix them.
Babies being used for men to experiment feeding them male secretions

An endless torrent of male crimes attributed to women.
Every aspect of society being upended

Time to speak up.

Barker is a rude man, he forces himself where he's not wanted.

Yes, I think million quid a year Sharon "go low" White and her nonsense at John Lewis reinforces how absolutely stupid people become over this.

All sense leaves their minds when they meet someone like "Ruby" and decide that we all have to submit to him.

Fuck her and the rest of the fools.

Where do you draw the line at what you think people (or children can say) without being rude. What if the following is factual:

-That boy is fat
-That girl is ugly
-That family's house is tiny and looks old
-That man's jumper smells horrible
-That boy has a lot of spots

Do you think that's alright to say?

Of course not.

We teach children not to be rude and not to hurt people's feelings!

With pronouns, people should try to use the desired pronouns, but I do not think that it should be a big deal if they accidentally fuck up. It certainly is rude to refer to Dr Barker as he, when it's clear Dr Barker wants to be referred to as she. Do it by accident - OK. Do it on purpose - rude.

Me three. Am totally done with it and will be speaking out more and more IRL about the harms of this awful ideology.

Me too. It's the overreach that's done it for me. Targeting the most vulnerable of children, colonising women's sport, repeatedly breaching so many aspects of the social contract in every possible way. No boundaries, no respect for others or awareness of their vulnerabilities (espcially children).
No more.

Totally agree.

You know what, I'm actually past caring. I do not care what pronouns someone wants me to use. I do not care if I upset them by using the wrong ones. I do not care. I don't care if it's rude.

We need to live in a world where people can say mildly uncontroversial things like 'that is a man wearing a dress' without it bringing on some kind of Mexican standoff and a knock on the door from the polis. We need to have society function in a way that works for everyone.

This bollocks tiptoeing about and agonising over whether this man wants she/hers or they/theirs or xie/xirs or if we shouldn't say that we think its creepy when a man wears fishnets and a leather bustier? To what end? It's not creating a kinder more tolerant society, is it? It's just creating apprehension, fear, confusion, sniping, resentment, angery, abuse, threats, power struggles, arguments and waffle.

Yeah. I'm done.

They’re just going about their professional life. They’re not pushing any particular agenda; just existing. It comes across like a personal attack/targeted bullying and it’s uncalled for.

This person’s professional profile on their Oxford University website profile page contains one paragraph about their scientific work and two paragraphs about LGBT activism. So no, not just going about their profesdional life. Their professional life is one third scientist, two thirds trans activist.

Great posts @akkakk

I hope you don't mind, but I've just pasted some of your work onto this thread :

Schools Guidance Consultation closes 12 of March - can we collate ideas for responding? | Mumsnet

How the heck can our kids navigate this when as ordinary parents (me) we haven't got the tools or language to articulate it?

by all adults coming together to support each other, so that those who can articulate it provide the words which will help, so that those who think they stand alone realise that they are part of a wide and strong community... mumsnet happens to be one place where that is happening - there will be others as well...

@pickledandpuzzled agreed - the trouble is though that this is deliberately truth being obfuscated - because the clear truth doesn't gain the end goal - Emperor's New Clothes etc.

And that makes it very hard for the millions of parents / carers / other adults whose job is to play a role in raising children - their own or others at school / uniformed organisations / sports / etc.

All they want to do is get on and teach good values and truths to the children - really not helped by the agendas we see out there...