transgenger book being introduced to 12 year old at school

[Molucco]

Just wanted to see what other parents think about a book called the art of been normal being introduced to all girls secondary school year 8 in English ?

Indeed. It’s mindblowingly bizarre.

Agree with everything being said. I hope I don’t get nasty comments but just wanted to share something I have never spoken about before but wondered about a lot - when I was a child I wanted to be a boy and would act like a boy because I was the youngest daughter and I knew my mum wanted a son but couldn’t so I was her last chance so I disappointed her in my sisters words for being born a girl (she was a kid st the time so forgive her choice of words!). What scares me is if I was born later, like in this day and age, would I have acted on this and wanted to change gender. I don’t know because st the time I didn’t know you could but can this be adding to confusion for some kids?

My sister would absolutely have leapt at the chance to ‘be a boy’. She was the ultimate tomboy and I was the doting little sister who copied her, so that could have been interesting huh?

Luckily my parents had brains and just bought her the cars, action men, train-sets, let her have a ‘boy’ haircut and glasses, never tried to make her ‘be girly’. Dammit she’s just a boring old lesbian - how un-fabulous.

If we are going to use public funds to surgically validate people who are unhappy with their bodies and believe them to be “wrong”, why don’t we give anorexics gastric bands? They genuinely believe their bodies are too fat, that life would be much better if they were thinner, and that belief causes huge mental distress. There are also ‘social contagion’ parallels. And yet anorexia is seen as a mental health issue and treated accordingly, rather than us all being asked to nod along and agree that the sufferer is indeed a bit of a chubber.

ha ha lord!

Exactly, Artesia

Agree with you Artesia. Wow this thread is really interesting guys. Not the usual mumsnet stuff lol! I’ll be watching this. Have a good evening everyone x

You need to get yourself over to the feminist pages, Tia3251. You’ll be blown away by some of the wonderfully articulate posters on there.

I suppose it could be said that the parallel with anorexia is inexact as facilitating anorexia would result in death, whereas facilitating surgical interventions for gender disorders merely leads to - I can’t use the word I naturally would here, as I’ll probabky be banned, so I’ll stick with “alteration”.
An interesting comparison though is with adult childless women who present seeking sterilisation. They will be told wait, you may not know your own mind. But a teenage girl claiming to be transgender and seeking medication which may lead to her becoming infertile should be given it, in the minds of some anyway. And doctors have gone along with this in some cases.

Thanks MrGsFancyNewVagina will check them out tomorrow.

Year 8 is a time when we should be telling children that gender stereotypes are bollocks. That girls and boys can like any tv, any colours and any clothes they want. No judgement. It should also be a time when adults reassure them that feeling strange about their changing bodies is completely normal. Feeling uncomfortable about your body at that age, surrounded by your peers, is almost a universal experience of childhood. Not wrong. Not special. Just growing up.

This book teaches children that if they feel uncomfortable about their body then there is something wrong with their body. It teaches kids that liking certain tv programmes means they are not normal. That if they don’t conform to old fashioned gender stereotypes, or are gay, then they are outsiders.

I’d be asking some pretty pointed questions about this if I were you OP.

Trans ideology is homophobic and harmful to women and children.

Fair point LloydBraun. Maybe a better comparator is apotemnophilia- a belief that your body is “wrong” with 4 limbs and will only be right after amputation. A UK surgeon who had performed 2 amputations on healthy limbs was, in 2000, banned from performing any further such surgeries. But it’s apparently fine as long as it’s reproductive organs, not limbs, being removed.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2000/feb/01/futureofthenhs.health

I agree, that is an apt comparison.

HumberElla Spot on. I've had a very quick skim of the Amazon preview of the book and, it seems to me, that David's angst is very much about very normal and widespread angst about growing up.

Oh come off it, surgeries that are needed to keep you healthy are completely different to chopping off healthy body parts. My five year old is fine when we talk about surgeries or ones her sister has had but fucking hell, telling her she can change sex is ridiculous, a lie and unbelievably confusing for a child to try and understand. She’s happy to know that babies come out of vaginas, she also knows the surgeon cut open her baby sister and took out her heart and replaced with one taken from another child that sadly passed away. All explained to her age level which at the time was 2. She happily talks about it now at five and is fine but like I say, if I told her she can change sex and then realised as an adult that she actually can’t, I think that would be irresponsible parenting.

Trans ideology is homophobic and harmful to women and children

It is.

I'd be glad my daughter was reading a contemporary novel rather than something from the 1950s

a few people agreed with this. is it you prefer contemporary work to all fiction from the past or is it books especially from the 1950s like 'the lord of the flies' 'the crucible' doris lessings or iris murdoch or tolkiens work, youd rather your kids avoided?

I'm happy for my year 8 to read contemporary fiction. But not one that has been specifically written to prop up a homophobic, misogynist ideology.

@Molucco - you say the school has several girls who identify as trans. But they're not boys, and no one thinks they're boys, or they wouldn't be at your child's school if it's a girls' school.

I'd imagine identifying as trans must be quite safe in an all girls school. You get to be different and celebrated but without actually having to share space with smelly dangerous boys.

Not reading books from the 50s? I know Orwell was before that but you’d not want kids to read 1984 or Animal Farm? What about the Wizard of Oz - that’s way older? Dickens?

Great points Artesia.
This is an important point that concerns many of us.

www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/7362652/changing-gender-new-anorexia/

This book, written for teenage girls, promotes the idea that a healthy teenage girl wanting a double mascectomy is perfectly acceptable.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3506852-The-Breast-Book

i think reading 1984 and the crucible would be a great way in to learning more about the trans movement.

wouldn't it just?

Comrades! Repeat after me! War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! Transwomen are women!

Do you know what, this is getting really fucking scary now. My DD has just started year 7 so this text may not yet apply to her but I'm going to be making some enquiries to find out if it is to older students (CarolDanvers your post at 9.52 yesterday will help me to do this in a considered and logical way, thank you). Because if it is it's obvious the messages within it will gradually trickle down and be reinforced by teaching staff.

I want my DD to continue being accepting and compassionate to every child and I want every child that feels they relate more to the opposite sex to have the freedom and environment in which to express themselves and experiment with playing with "gender". But I cannot accept this must be done at the cost of my child's boundaries, inaccurate biological lies being fed to her as "reality" and very vulnerable kids being encouraged down a road of medication, sterilisation and removing body parts. Because you cannot come back from that if actually you were never actually transgender.

Why the F are the powers that be not seeing the bigger picture and not joining the dots?

When DD was little, she wanted to be a boy. She liked to wear what she considered boy's clothes and played with what she perceived as boy's toys.

When she was older, she told me that the reason she wanted to be a boy was because she liked girls and she thought only boys could like girls. She was too young to be able to fully express this when she was 7 or 8, or to fully understand it herself. But as she got older and realised she was gay it all fell into place. She tells me that in her experience, from talking to to others, this is quite common among children who know they're gay from a young age.

Imagine, in the current climate, what this means for children who think they may be gay but are unable to process this, and instead express a desire to be the opposite sex. The implications are terrifying.