My 14 year old daughter has been sharing school changing rooms, including swimming, with a male. The school never told me, or her. What would you do?

I think if this happened at my school I would have been asking my mum for a note to get out of swimming. I was bullied by boys in primary school to the point that I had to move school then I went to an all girls secondary. I didn’t have much body confidence at 14 and really disliked changing in front of other girls as it was. Let alone a boy being in there. Lesbians never gave me a moment’s worry and it wouldn’t have bothered me more to change in front of them than any other girl. I didn’t want to change in front of anyone. But a boy in there would have freaked me out. Girls are going through a lot at 14. Their bodies are changing, they can feel very self conscious and need a safe space. I would have much preferred cubical spaces.

Yes. It's always revealing to read the changing room aspects of most of these guidelines. Suggesting that certain children must leave lessons early, use changing rooms before /after others, change in different places etc.
You know that they've been written by those steeped in trans ideology / queer theory and never by anyone with a knowledge of basic principles of safeguarding children, managing groups, curriculum entitlement, health and safety in schools.

That's why we're in this mess - because we've allowed adults (some of them deeply unsuitable in safeguarding terms) to weigh in on the school curriculum, pastoral care and the organisation of schools. The fact that educators have been too frightened for their careers (just as in the NHS, civil service, law etc) to challenge what is evidently unsuitable and sometimes downright dangerous says a lot about the immense power these queer theorists have been able to lever for themselves.

To the PP who accused the OP of saying "men are the problem", as though this was wrong. I have to let you know that men ARE the problem. As the OP, a caring and intelligent dad, knows.

Also, the "but lesbians" angle is just homophobic nonsense. All women who have ever changed in a communal changing area have most likely changed in front of lesbians. And we don't care a jot.

PS there is no such thing as a "trans child".

a trans woman who had had the full operations might be different,

I disagree with this. Debbie Hayton is an example of such a person. He is a teacher who has 'had the operations'. He's still male and describes himself as an autogynephile. He has no place in a women's or girls' changing room or toilet.

There is no need for special arrangements. If he is biologically male he must get changed with the males. End of.

I'm sure people who make these suggestions have never been in a school.

And it assumes that there's spare changing facilities - that don't have other children's clothes in. And that said child can miss at least 20 minutes of their their lessons every time they've PE. Multiply that by however many gender confused children there are in a class / year group & it's completely unworkable.

@WiddlinDiddlin

A problem with one child needing to be alone for 5-10 min to change is that it needs 3 adults
1 supervising the rest of the class
2 supervising each other and the child.

And it just needs repeating that violent men don't have to be "attracted" to a person, or to their sex in general, in order to rape them

@JustAskingThisQ

someone could sneak a picture of someone they are attracted to while they are naked.

Thats a nice fluffy "but lesbians!" point.

When what you are describing is the production and posession of child sex abuse images on a school premises.

It is rather hard for a school to teach a child how that act is unacceptable due to safeguarding, consent (not possible), boundries, personal dignity etc. while at the same time forcing girls to undress beside a boy.

context of school changing rooms which are at least semi supervised.

What would be your guess on the correlation between a teacher being willing risk a complaint of sexual misconduct and that teacher being an actual sex offender?

You can actually work out 1 and 2 the likelyhood of assaults physical and/or sexual yourself by using publically available data

Note being male appears to be a high risk factor

TOTAL Prison Population x Orientation
4% of 1.6% women
97% of 1.6% men

4% of 96% women
97% of 96% men

You can go look for the government data on offences and do detailed maths to work out the sex of the sexual offenders and estimate the sexual orientation

The figures:

At mid-2022, there were
34,492,000 females and
33,105,000 males in the population of the UK.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2022#:~:text=At%20mid%2D2022%2C%20there%20were,of%20males%20since%20mid%2D2011.

Orientations
96.6 Heterosexual
1.6 Gay or Lesbian
1.7 Bisexual
0.38 Other orientations
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/sexualorientationenglandandwales/census2021

In the latest quarter, 97% of prisoners who declared a sexual orientation reported that they were heterosexual

Data check and ball park the Orienations are the sameish

Males comprised 96% of the prison population
Whole prison population
3,315 female prisoners
81,057 male prisoners

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmpps-offender-equalities-annual-report-2022-to-2023/hmpps-offender-equalities-annual-report-2022-23#:~:text=Prison%20Population,-Males%20comprised%2096&text=Proportionally%20males%20make%20up%2096,(78%2C802%20to%2081%2C057%20prisoners).

And if you want to try do the maths on tranagender population you can start with the link above too.

Cass Review:
cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

It seems to me that this Brighton and Hove Toolkit is in direct contravention of the Case Review, which states very clearly that social transition is a medical intervention. Teachers are not qualified to make medical diagnosis or suggest suitable treatment pathways, so in the absence of an official diagnosis or gender dysphoria from a suitably qualified NHS doctor and unequivocal evidence that the doctor has recommended social transition, schools should not be doing this.

You are also correct about safeguarding and, in your shoes, I would be sending a legal letter threatening action if they did not ensure that girls has single sex spaces for changing.

Well, quite. How would the teacher get away from their previous lesson, in order to reinforce a boy's view that he's one of The Most Special and More Valued?

Never mind why he should have such gilded treatment. Or not.

Do teachers not have enough to do without this nonsense?

Yes @MrsOvertonsWindow in both cases SSA supported it was teenage girls, supported by their parents, who were appalled at what was happening to the their rights and were prepared to take action. In both cases the CPS and OCC backed down and withdrew. Many councils followed suit after the Oxfordshire case but Brighton would not budge. We've always said we'd support and parent or child who wanted to take similar action and always felt Brighton needed challenging most of all.

You sound like a great dad, OP. What a shame your daughter’s mother is not so aware of the dangers to her child.
The Brighton trans awareness guidelines are misogynistic, regressive crap.

Thank you. It's worth remembering that countless schools have prioritised safeguarding and children's rights to an age appropriate education and successfully swerved allowing adult transactivists to influence them.

This. I work at a secondary school and am aware that DfE guidance is not to accommodate gender fluidity among children, and not to use different names unless requested by parents. Our school would never allow male students to change with females - that's utter madness.

While we would of course provide pastoral support to such children, they are still children and don't get to dictate school rules. You are right to be concerned about your daughter having to share changing rooms with a boy, (and he is a boy, a trans woman who had had the full operations might be different, but that won't be the case in a school child).

Oh, sorry, I see now you weren't questioning the accuracy of his analysis of the problem but other matters which I won't spell out.

But I think my reply to you stands on its own, even though you probably don't disagree with it!

@Waitingfordoggo clearly

I didn't ask you about it, but ok. Clearly we don't agree about how the OP comes across. 🤷🏼‍♀️

You sound naive.

My child has a feeding tube. While it's not something scary to me or him. Other children have been freaked out by it. It makes more sense for it to be hidden.

@Waitingfordoggo that’s not how he comes across to me. Stop asking me about it if you don’t want me to repeat myself again.

I know the pool in question and there are 2 small changing rooms, one boys one girls and no cubicles. Kids are absolutely packed in whenever there is a swimming lesson. It was refurbed a few years ago. There obviously wasn’t money to extend the building and there is no room to extend the changing rooms or build a third changing room inside the existing building.