Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

How we can include trans people within language without collapsing its meaning has been discussed at length on this thread.

You seem to be misusing language again

Substantive doesn’t describe what you have been posting. I have attempted numerous times now across different threads to engage with your points which amount to ‘because I say so’. It is very familiar.

However, your use of words has now become rather the issue at hand. Because you keep arguing that language is important while contradictorily arguing for the destabilisation of language. While then denying that you are arguing for the destabilisation of language.

Has it? Good. Please give me the 4 line clear answer then. Not the 6 paragraph waffle.

Why should one group of people get to change and destabilise established language to suit themselves?

to add: why do this group get such special treatment

Same old same old. There are parents on this thread who have serious problems with this pernicious ideology infiltrating their homes and schools, affecting their children. Yet we are being subjected to reams of the usual bollocks to distract from that.

I'm beginning to miss 'no debate'...

By the way, asking for confirmation of why you have used specific words and information is not ‘undermining’ you. This is a misrepresentation of people asking you to support your own words with further explanation that is useful.

What sort of trans experience do you think a 5 year old child has had? What do they understand about gender?

I haven't seen your explanation yet of what you think "being trans" means. If a 5 year old child can understand this well enough to genuinely identify as trans, the explanation must be quite simple.

So what does it mean to "be trans"?

This is the revealing answer. A total inability to appreciate the vulnerability of childhood. Everyone knows that children are developmentally unable to process / understand adult beliefs at the age of 5 - except transactivists who are dependent on that immaturity to push their niche beliefs to young children.

Re expertise - the only qualification for trans experts appears to be self interest. It's usually visible from appearance - evidently on social media that can be obscured. But to date, all the activist groups who've targeted children are all trans. They're pushing their world view and are supremely disinterested in children's wellbeing and safety.

All the flim flam in the world can't obscure the fact that this thread about a 5 year old has morphed into a cynical attempt to get posters to agree that 5 year olds can be born in the wrong body and a sex change is the positive option for them.

When people promote dangerous to children ideas, they need to be told NO.

I've tried to engage with your arguments, but you keep refusing to answer my questions.

What does it mean to "be trans"? How can a 5 year old child know they "are trans"?

What definition are you using for the word "girl"?

“Accepting a person's, including a child's, trans experience and recognising their gender is not a lie.”

”This is the circle we are going round in and why it is impossible to move the conversation forward.”

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Yes. Society will continue to go around in a circle while words continue to be misused by a group who want the words referring to human sex categories to include both sex categories at the same time.

While this demand continues, language will remain one of the blocks for discussion. As it was intended to by those who have attempted that very destabilisation via philosophical belief and theory.

If children are taught to believe that ‘girl’ is a word to describe male and female children, that is a safeguarding fail. Because it then means that they are no longer able to accurately describe or understand sex segregation when it is necessary for their protection.

But they know that child is a boy and will have to be treated as a boy in sone circumstances in the future. How are they going to explain to an 8 year old thst although they’ve told him he is a girl, he must go in boys facilities and play sports with the boys?

You haven't seen my explanation of what being trans means?? Are you reading anything I post or just firing out responses?

Five is certainly young, and transgender identification at that age is relatively uncommon. But it is entirely possible, and empirically documented, although how any particular child's identity may develop over time remains an open question.

Children begin developing their understanding of sex and gender very early. By around three or four, most children can identify themselves as a boy or a girl. Usually, this corresponds quite unremarkably with their birth sex, based on their physical characteristics, and what they are told by others around them.

For some children, however, their development of sex recognition, doesn't correspond with their anatomy/ what they have been told in the way we usually expect/ take for granted. A child may consistently and insistently understand themselves to be a girl rather than a boy, even while recognising their own physical anatomy and being repeatedly told by others that they have a penis and therefore are a boy.

That's what we're talking about when we describe a young child's transgender experience. It's not simply a matter of preferring particular clothes, toys or stereotypes. It's about how that child understands and recognises themselves in relation to sex.

That discrepancy between their own experience and what they're repeatedly told by others can be deeply confusing and distressing, particularly when their experience is dismissed or contradicted.

Gender isn't something entirely separate from sex. It's our social and psychological understanding and recognition of sex and perceived sexual differences. For most children, that understanding develops without any obvious conflict. For a minority, it doesn't.

None of this means we can predict with certainty how an individual five-year-old's experience will develop. But the fact that a child's understanding may evolve doesn't mean their present experience isn't genuine or meaningful.

Destabilising the language used in safeguarding principles and then policy is central to supporting gender identity.

If a child has to be taught that this boy is really a girl but that this boy cannot access girl’s provisions, it causes confusion. That means safeguarding is failing

@Lacksie As 'you' have redefined 'girl' to include some male sex children, what word are we suggested to use to cover all but only female sex children?

A child may consistently and insistently understand themselves to be a girl rather than a boy, even while recognising their own physical anatomy and being repeatedly told by others that they have a penis and therefore are a boy.

Can you explain how a boy can "understand" himself to be a girl? What is actually happening here?

If a 5 year old child can understand this, you should be able to explain it in terms which are easily understood by adults.

None of this means we can predict with certainty how an individual five-year-old's experience will develop. But the fact that a child's understanding may evolve doesn't mean their present experience isn't genuine or meaningful.

So the best course of action with this child is to treat this as a passing phase and leave them to reach adulthood before applying labels like transsexual to them.

'Sincerely' referring to a male child as a girl isn't a lie? So they are telling the truth and telling their child that girls have penises?

Wowsers.

Whether you think this is a lie or not (given that lying evidently means telling the truth to you) the fact remains this child WILL hear the truth in 4-5 years time. It's unavoidable. He WON'T be able to use the girls toilets, play in their sports team, or get changed with them when he goes swimming. And he will be confused, upset and untrusting of the adults who have failed to prepare him for this inescapable fact of life.

What an enormously cruel head fuck that will be for that little boy.
And completely avoidable.

If they're not lying, what definition is being used for the word "girl"?

And in addition, there is a risk that reassuring him he is a girl for all those years could result in the child himself rebelling against being told "no, you can't use the girls changing rooms now", he may very well think "but surely my parents, the people I trust most in the world tell me I'm a girl, so the girls changing rooms is where I should be"

I guess this could be an example of the entitlement we speak of starting very early indeed.

You haven't seen my explanation of what being trans means?? Are you reading anything I post or just firing out responses?

And @Lacksie , I don't believe you (or anyone else) has ever provided a coherent explanation of what "being trans" means. All we ever get is the sort of waffle you've just posted.

I don't believe there can be a coherent explanation of what is quite clearly an error of understanding (in children), a delusion, or (in some adults) a paraphilia.

The answer is that we don't yet fully understand how gender identity develops in the brain. What we do know is that children develop a sense of themselves as boys or girls from a very early age, and that for a minority of children, this doesn't correspond with their anatomy/ birth sex.

That is the experience I'm describing. A child may recognise their physical anatomy and understand what others are telling them - that they are a boy -, yet their experience tells them otherwise. And it can become deeply distressing and disorienting when their experience is denied and dismissed, because whatever others may think or believe about it, that experience is real to the child. They're the one living it.

I understand why people might find this counterintuitive, but as I've explained previously, it's entirely compatible with what we know from neuroscience about how the brain works.

We're still developing our scientific understanding of the brain, but what we do know is that our perception and experience of our bodies and ourselves are constructed through complex neural processes. They aren't simply passive, automatic reflections of our physical anatomy.

In other words, a person can accurately recognise their physical anatomy while simultaneously experiencing a discrepancy between those physical characteristics and the way their brain internally represents and interprets their body. There is nothing inherently neurologically impossible or contradictory about that.

This doesn't mean we've established precisely why gender incongruence occurs. But the assumption that our internal experience of ourselves must always correspond perfectly with our physical characteristics is not supported by what we know about the brain.

Any discussion where one side uses the original definitions of key words, and the other unilaterally uses a new definition is pointless.
If the trans side had invented new words and used them at least we would have a chance to know what they are talking about.

Using the same word girl/woman with a non-standard meaning is just deceitful.

Very few people saw what is now described as 'gender identity' as the defining and driving imperative of their life, until ... the "queer theory" academic framework became popularised in about the last fifteen years. And then there was an explosion of people, mostly in their teens and twenties, who latched onto it and made it their identity. This is largely a socially driven phenomenon, which would be fine if it wasn't extremely damaging, to many of the trans-identifying people themselves, to families ad I have described, and to society with the damage to safeguarding structures and the removal of women's exclusive spaces, services and sports.

Another enabler has been medical, with the development of blockers and exogenous hormones, and 'sophisticated' surgery and clever but flawed justifications of mutilation, What is on the one hand decried as FGM is portrayed as acceptable because 'bodily autonomy'. Gillick competency has been stretched to encompass consent that no child and even many adults are not equipped to provide.

A child can't understand themselves to really be the opposite sex. That's the lie at the heart of this that's used to indoctrinate children, to psychologically destabilise them, to cruelly mislead them.

It's why transactivist beliefs are currently being challenged the world over with societies starting to safeguard children in health settings, schools and elsewhere.

Look at the impact of paedophile associated organisations- small national charities like Mermaids or bloated influential groups like WPATH. The red flags are everywhere but still we're meant to accept the morally vacuous argument that a 5 year old can really be trans.

Well done to all the posters repeatedly bringing the discussion back to safeguarding and children.