School Transgender advice

[TealKoala]

New to posting so, please forgive me if I get any protocols wrong. We have read previous posts about transgender and changing rooms but this is a different scenario.

I wanted to ask your advice about a situation we are currently facing.

Our AD (straight girl) was violently attacked in the PE changing rooms this week, we have seen a video and it was really aggressive. There was not a teacher in the room whilst this was happening.

School called me fairly quickly to say she had been hit and they would investigate and get back to me. It took until 6pm the next day to get a call (after me chasing). I had raised the obvious safeguarding of no teacher present and a pupil videoing.

Later that evening I found out that the girl that attacked our daughter was in fact transgender and born a boy. We have every empathy for this girl's situation and respect her life choices, to a certain degree I can understand that in an effort to not draw attention to her being different she is changing in the main changing room and not a separate changing room.

I have written back to the school asking about safeguarding with this new information and again not received a response. Our question is how do we proceed?

We really don't want to make a difficult situation more complicated or draw attention to this girl as so far she appears to be getting through school with minimum disruption.

However, when we saw the video of the attack something didn't feel right, (especially as we were told this is the first time anything like this had happened) the anger and aggression and the force of the punches were something else. It now makes more sense, as it was a boy doing the attacking. Our daughter was trying to talk to her to sort a misunderstanding and did not fight back in anyway.

The aggressor has been suspended for a few days. We want to ensure that this doesn't happen again but don't know how to proceed. No violence is acceptable but if this were a boy on girl attack or say a husband on wife attack this would be absolutely unacceptable and the punishment more severe.

What would you do? Any advice gratefully received.

Like you say I am grateful for the evidence. However, the girl recording was actually goading them into fighting. My daughter was just trying to resolve malicious Chinese whispers, she didn't start it and didn't retaliate.

Report to police. Your DD has been violently assaulted by a male

Report to the police.

Arange a meeting with the school to ascertain why a boy was allowed into the girls changing rooms and why your dd was put into such a vulnerable situation. What is going to be done going forward to protect the girls in the school, particularly in single sex areas that are being used as mixed sex by the school.

Inform the LA and Ofsted and any other stakeholders (academy trust, governors, religious organisation if a religious school).

Don’t tell anyone that you are empathetic with a boy who had barged his way into a girls changing room and assaulted one of the girls. A big driving force towards making single sex spaces mixed sex is the erroneous idea that boys wants are more important than safeguarding girls. It’s not something you should be encouraging if you want to be taken seriously. Especially don’t tell you dd that. She’s been beaten up and she doesn’t need to know her mum feels sorry for the poor boy who did it.

Police - it is assault and a criminal offence. You have good evidence - the video- to show them as well.

I'm a retired secondary school middle manager, albeit in Scotland.

Phone the police. Press charges.

In my experience, schools will do very little about a violent incident on the premises - the SLT normally pushes to minimise because it makes the school look bad.

It is a boy on girl attack! They need to protect your daughter from this aggressive boy. Disgraceful