Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

But you're the Ministry of Truth! How can you not see that? It's you!

What I'm suggesting is that when someone says, "This is my personal experience, this is who I am, please refer to me respectfully", you can accommodate that without language or society somehow collapsing.

You're the one insisting, "No! Language MUST be used in this particular way because it's the TRUTH, and any departure from my preferred use of words is a LIE!"

You're the one insisting on an absolute, unquestionable interpretation of language and Truth, while I'm arguing for flexibility, context and respect for individual differences.

How can you possibly think I'm the fundamentalist here?

Because you are. You’re the one demanding women expand the definition of woman to include males. And getting upset when women say no. If women no longer means an adult human female, what is the word for an adult human female that excludes males?

But there is material reality. If you just do what people want you soon hit a wall. If 5 kids all say the grass is a different colour how do you accommodate all their wishes? You can't.

All you can do is say what you see. And humans, as mammals, are good at spotting biological sex. Everyone should be free to say what they see, especially when what they see is empirically provable reality.

And to be clear forcing people to deny reality because 'be nice to me, bend to my will or I'll be upset/ you're a bigot' is coercive control.

But that's precisely the absolutism I'm challenging.

You're assuming that acknowledging a trans woman as a woman in a particular social context necessarily means abolishing the concept of an adult human female. Why?

Language can accommodate different meanings and uses depending on context. Recognising someone's gender in an everyday interaction doesn't prevent you from referring specifically to biological sex when that's relevant.

You're presenting this as an all-or-nothing choice, when it simply doesn't have to be one.

But there’s a fundamental difference here. One person is asking others to respect how they wish to be referred to — the words used to describe their very person. The other is insisting on referring to that person in a way they don’t want.

You’re bizarrely framing the first as coercion, while ignoring that the second involves imposing your own preferences about language on someone else!

So am I correct in thinking that in your view, all requests by someone to refer to them in a certain way should be respected, regardless of the preferences of the speaker? Does this 'respect' extend to demands that a rape victim should refer to her attacker as 'she' and talk about 'her penis' when giving evidence in court?

I don't think it's at all bizarre to talk about this as coercion and I'm amazed that anyone would state as much on a feminist forum.

And I hope you're not going to come out with some nonsense that the demands don't apply to criminals, because if the rapist has pleaded not guilty he is still innocent until proven guilty under our legal system, so the same language rules apply to him during his trial as those applying to the 5 year old child being discussed in this thread.

The extraordinary inversion of who’s imposing on whom, and your apparent inability to recognise it, is quite astounding

Have a little think about what you've said here. Who is really doing the imposing here?

You're now describing a request to be referred to respectfully as "coercive control", simply because it conflicts with your own beliefs about language. Nobody is asking you to deny reality. They're asking you to recognise that language can accommodate different people and circumstances.
The fact that you regard your preferred use of words as the only possible expression of reality doesn't make it so. That's your own assumption, not an objective truth.

So when someone uses the word woman, how do they know they are referring to an adult human female and not a male claiming trans identity? There is a thread on here where the police have issued an appeal for a missing woman, but it is a male. How eotks thw public know the 6ft male is actually the woman the police are looking for?

No, that's quite obviously not what I'm saying. My entire argument has been that language should be sensitive to context and individual circumstances, rather than governed by rigid, universal rules.

The needs and circumstances of a rape victim giving evidence in court are clearly very different from those of a five-year-old child asking to be referred to in a particular way. Why on earth would you assume the same considerations must apply identically to both?

You're the one insisting on an absolute rule about how people must be described, regardless of the circumstances. I'm arguing that we should consider the people involved, their needs and the context

Well yes, because words have meanings….

Do you ever sleep, Lacksie? Or is it a 24/7 service you offer?

If we can't describe things accurately with language, and acknowledge that there are certain fundamental truths in the world then society would indeed collapse. Have you not been paying any attention to all the court cases and lawsuits and struggles for women to maintain their rights? Have you not seen the fallout from having conceded slightly on pronouns and letting this damaging rhetoric that it's possible to change sex take hold?
Or have you noticed and just don't care. I very much suspect the latter. And if you don't think it's child abuse to lie to a child about something so basic as whether they are a boy or a girl there is no point having a conversation with you.

The needs and circumstances of a rape victim giving evidence in court are clearly very different from those of a five-year-old child asking to be referred to in a particular way. Why on earth would you assume the same considerations must apply identically to both?

I think what you meant to say here was:

"The needs and circumstances of a man accused of rape giving evidence in court are clearly very different from those of a five-year-old child asking to be referred to in a particular way. Why on earth would you assume the same considerations must apply identically to both?"

You can't just say that some people must have their demands for certain language fulfilled, but others can't. If you've decided that some people are worthy of respect but others aren't, how do you make this decision? Where do you draw the line?

I'm arguing that we should consider the people involved, their needs and the context

So am I. You're nearly there. Just as the rape victim in court needs to be considered, so does the OP's daughter, and the effect on her of being told that a child she knows to be a boy is actually a girl.

'I'm arguing that we should consider the people involved, their needs and the context'

And if we take the particular example in this thread, what about the other kids who are being forced to accept a child as the opposite sex? Do their needs matter?

Say you don't lie to your DD about serious issues and that no body is 'born in the wrong body'.

When she was 4 my niece was a dog for months, but only at home, she wasn't told that she was born in the wrong body and would need surgery to be a dog.

A 5 year old child being compelled to use wrong sex pronouns for a child whose sex she accurately recognizes is being abused and coercively controlled. This is extremely damaging.

Nothing is stopping the boy pretending to be a dinosaur, a truck or a girl. But other children exist too and adults forcing them to pretend they believe whatever one special, elevated, other child says is true (when it's not true) is abuse.

Ah, so you agree, then, that obsessing about using them in 'special' ways is silly and pointless? Mundane doesn't mean the same as 'doesn't matter' - it just means that fulfils a known, dull purpose.

The washer on your kitchen tap is essential and is needed to prevent your house flooding, but you don't spend time insisting that it should be square instead, or that everybody should be told to refer to it as a 'bracket'. Even actual professional plumbers don't spend any time thinking about them beyond "Oh, I need a new washer of X size" - then they buy one, fit it and forget about it.

Colour names are relatively boring too, but you don't get people looking at grass and agonising over whether they think it's really green, or whether it would make them feel happier, more confident and more authentic to describe it as blue; or going into a fruit and veg shop and confidently asking for 'a purple', expecting the shopkeeper to know what they mean, because the word 'orange' somehow upsets and invalidates them.

https://archive.ph/tMGe2

https://archive.ph/tkxGM

Some paragraphs from the second link: A bright, perceptive child, Zoe grew distressed and started making angry accusations. “In assembly, you told us lying is sinful,” she told her teacher, “But the teachers are lying to us about Bobby being a girl.”
The teacher replied, “Yes, Bobby has a penis and testicles but, on the inside, Bobby and her family truly believe she’s supposed to be a girl, so they don’t see it as lying.”
And Zoe looked long and hard at her teacher until, finally, she said: “But Bobby’s a boy. She’s a boy.”
--
The only reason I learnt about it is because Zoe’s grandmother, Sara, was so incensed she emailed me. “My dear little granddaughter is terribly emotionally and psychologically messed up,” Sara wrote. “She trusts no one at all because she sees the school and all the adults have lied to her; a boy cannot be a girl.”
----
Two of the girls in the original friendship group have left the school. Zoe is being home-schooled for now and, after months of being silent, withdrawn and depressed, has started to play with her toys again.

As for Bobby, what hideous pressure is that poor seven-year-old under, trying to live a lie while presenting as a girl to friends and teachers? Little wonder he is lashing out.
----
So it didn't work out well having an adult ideology imposed on any of these children did it? They've all suffered.

Thank goodness safeguarding is being restored.

The thing I understand least here is this.

Even if you think it is morally right for the other children in the class to sacrifice their own understanding of what is true and what is scientifically accurate on the altar of this ideology (obviously I don't agree, but as a starting point)

How is it right or fair on the child in question?

The teacher can force all the others to dance around pretending a boy can be a girl (or vice versa), but then reality hits when they get to eight and they have to use the correct sex toilets.

In the longer term, no one actually believes this child is the opposite sex. And that reality is going to hit, in multiple ways, throughout this child’s life.

How is it fair to put this child through this? That strikes me as immensely psychologically damaging.

Much better to tell the child from the start that humans can’t change sex, but there is no ‘right way’ to be male or female and they are perfect as they are.

If language is so flexible and accommodating then the meaning of “he” can “change” to include men and “trans women”, and “she” can flex far enough to refer to women and women who think they’re men.

Now everyone is happy.

That all the other children accept this child was born in the wrong body, yet my daughter is questioning ‘too much’

No-one is born in the wrong body. Some (in fact quite a lot for one reason or another) might not like their body, but it is theirs and is not the wrong one.

I would be very worried indeed about a small child of mine being subjected to this indoctrination. Your child just has to treat everyone kindly, which it sounds as though she is doing.

I would specifically request that no books or materials plugging an unscientific view be presented to your child; and that in their place there should be books about kindness to all.

The analogy with a person accused of rape is completely irrelevant to the situation we're discussing. The circumstances, competing interests and potential harms are entirely different. That's precisely why context matters, and why your insistence that the same considerations must apply identically in both situations makes no sense at all.

I do find it interesting that nobody ever seems to tell disabled people that they were born 'in the wrong body' - or to seek to deny the realities of it.

You may not be happy about the body you have - whether you wish it were an able-bodied one, one of the opposite sex, taller, shorter, prettier, a different colour or whatever... but if you were born in it, then, by definition, it was exactly the correct body for you - and you have to live with/in it, regardless of your feelings about it.

I've followed the court cases very closely, thank you. And I'm deeply concerned about the direction things are moving.

What I reject is your insistence that acknowledging someone's personal experience, or accommodating their wishes about how they're referred to, necessarily amounts to denying biological reality, undermining women's rights or lying to children.

These are entirely separate issues, and the fact that you keep conflating them doesn't make them equivalent.

It's perfectly possible to recognise the importance of biological sex in contexts where it's relevant, while also recognising that human experiences are diverse and that language can accommodate that complexity.

Your insistence that anything other than your preferred interpretation of language constitutes a lie is precisely the kind of absolutism I've been challenging throughout this discussion.

What I reject is your insistence that acknowledging someone's personal experience, or accommodating their wishes about how they're referred to, necessarily amounts to denying biological reality, undermining women's rights or lying to children.

Reject all you like. i am surprised anyone thinks they could possibly be different things. The connection between them is firm and inescapable, and looms large.