My work insisting I refer to a 9 year old as they/them

Caster Semenya is a male with a DSD (46 ARD). His testosterone level was normal for a male. He in no way demonstrates a deviation from the sex binary.

Athlete Caister Semaya assigned female at birth but had undecended testes. Had to take testosterone suppressing drugs to complete in women’s sport. Honestly I’m not trying to be tricksy or smart arsed here . It’s probably not even relevant to thread but I don’t think people are as binary as we might think. Only my opinion!

Very niche IVF treatments are a product of modern medical science, pretty certain for the 300,000 years of human breeding that came before modern times, it took just the 2 usual ones, a male and a female, to accomplish it.
Pedantic quibbles just serve to complicate a simple conversation.

sex hormones fluctuate enormously

Yet never quite enough to grown the gonads of the opposite sex...

And since the genetic material needed for this extraordinary act of conception was required to come from both male and female donors it proves the point that as human beings we are indeed a binary species.

Every single person ever born is one sex or the other. That includes even the most complex DSDs.

And obviously sex hormones fluctuating does not in any way change someone's sex, and the vast majority of people with DSDs have an obvious and easily diagnosed sex too.

I'll allow that a tiny minority of DSD conditions may result in an individual for whom sex is difficult to determine. One thing that diagnoses it for sure though is being able to produce viable gametes of one type or the other.

I think that PP might be referring to situations where mitochondrial DNA is donated, to avoid certain inherited diseases. The rest of the post is the usual ignorance about biological science.

Cross post with much better explanation above😁

Maggie I think the pp is referring to a very niche IVF treatment where the mitochondrial DNA is replaced by that from a female donor. It was billed in the tabloid headlines as a three parent baby but really a bit of a stretch, it's something like 0.1% of DNA that came from the donor to avoid passing on particular conditions.

I would love to see your evidence for the more than 2 parents abd also this mysterious third sex

One big question is what the expectation is around the other children in the school? As I understand it the school can reasonably insist that other children use her new name but they can't insist that the children call her "they/them" nor that the other children treat her differently from the other girls. If they sanction a child, or accuse a child of bullying, for using she/her instead of they/them, then the school could get in trouble.

Did the head teacher say anything about that?

I am sure you’re aware that it is possible to have more than two parents (mitochondria) and that that people may be intersex or indeed that sex hormones fluctuate enormously. I am being pedantic as indicated by my FWIW . Ok?

I am certainly very surprised that a 9yo has decided to be non-binary. What we don’t know here is what has happened behind the scenes. I hope it is not simply a case of the parents contacting the school and saying “Alexandra is now non-binary and wants to be called Alex and use the pronouns they/them”.
I would assume that the parents have had a proper meeting with the safeguarding lead. It not, that is concerning.

Have you asked about how the decision came about and why the child wants to be non-binary? Has the school considered the implications for this child’s development and the impact on others?

I think if the head has instructed you to use they/tbem, you are treading on dangerous ground to refuse to do it because it is against your personal opinion.

You need to find out whether the school has handled this properly and if not state your concerns based on safeguarding and not following DfE procedures.

The parents being alternative or new age and your colleagues thinking it is BS is irrelevant.

😂😂

Ever so useful in pregnancy and maternity care.
"Now then people, which one of you might have a wee foetus in your tummy? Any ideas?"

😅

There is a lot to be said for not bothering to distinguish sex at every opportunity

id be happier if everyone was a they - one less trigger for unconscious bias

I am happy to be told how I could have better phrased it. And I certainly accept that to keep the post to a manageable length, each word used isn't be defined, as it would be in an evidence-based paper. However, I can't quite see what, in a basic sense, is wrong about it. And it is really important to fully understand the basics before going on to the 'buts' and 'what ifs'.

I’d like to know that too.

It seems totally accurate to me

Which bit isn’t true?

I don’t think that’s technically true. FWIW

Indeed.
And all 8 billion of us are either male or female. There will be huge differences between different individual males and between different individual females.
But every person who has ever been born has been created from a male and a female gamete and born of a female.
We are all, at population level, absolutely ordinary, and pretending to a child that she is 'non-binary' when she is, like all the other 8 billion people on the planet, perfectly normal and ordinary, is such a silly, adult-led, navel-gazing nonsense.

👏 on finding the rabbit hole

Like women are expected to be service humans for men.

Whenever we're discussing so-called 'trans or nonbinary children', I think it's worth remembering where the idea of the trans child came from.

30 or 40 years ago, some people researching the experiences of (male) transsexuals found that they often had poor mental health. It was thought that this was because they didn't 'pass' as female due to having gone through puberty leaving them with such male traits as a deep voice, facial hair and strongly masculinised features. Then someone had the idea that if they could identify which children would grow up to be transsexuals as adults they could block puberty in those children which might mean that they would pass better as female as adults.

And so the trans child was born.

This had the added advantage for adult male transsexuals that people could now be led to believe that transsexualism is a natural and normal state for people of all ages (including small children) and nothing to do with adult fetishes.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that trans children were invented for these reasons, and not because there is anything innate which makes a child trans.