to not know how to explain transgender child in DD's class

[Peaches44]

I'm sorry if this comes across offensive but I am incredibly naive when it comes to these kinds of issues.

DD has a boy in her class, they are in reception year. At the start of the year she asked if the DC was a boy or girl and I could only answer as being not sure. The mother is very quiet so I hadn't heard her refer to the child as a he or she. The name is more 'boy' but could possibly be a girls also, the child wears a mixture of girls and boys uniforms and on non-school uniform days they wear girls clothes.

DD now knows he is a boy, but he is apparently allowed in the girls toilets and DD at 4 doesn't understand why, she also said a few other boys see this boy able to go in the girls and the boys follow.

She has asked a few times why he does tis etc. and I don't know the right answer, they are likely to be in the same school year for the whole of primary so they are questions I need to answer but I don't know how.

Would the mother be offended if I talked with her about it??

stop but that brings it back to the same logic, if they're so young it doesn't matter then it shouldn't matter to him if he uses the males toilets.

Unless what's really going on is that his mother is telling him that if he prefers to wear girls' clothes he should be using the girls' toilets.

My 6yo niece is about as intelligent as they come. If she said she felt like she was a boy her parents would tell her to stop being silly. Encouraging her to confuse herself and peers, alienate her and make her a weird object of derision? And the op is a 4yo ffs. It's child abuse and the parents are completely unfit. I bet children have been removed by ss for less harm than this could cause a child.

I would be taking it up with the school to because although they are thinking about the needs of the child you say is transgender they also have to consider the other 20 or 30 kids in the class too!

I think it is so much more than just about this little boy, and more about what the issue represents. if the toilets were Unisex there wouldn't be an issue per say, or as a PP said in terms of coffee shops there may only be a unisex loo but this is normally a single cubical they aren't sharing a space.

I think what seems to be the case is that the boy likes clothes/accessories from both sexes and must just decide how he feels on the day. This is fine and I'm not judging how his parents choose to dress him/treat him. I just think the school seem to be bending over backwards to keep the boy and his parents happy so let him go into a place that is for the girls, and overlook his uniform when he wears things others aren't allowed.

I know they are 'only' 4, and its not that he is the problem its about the fact the little girls are meant to turn a blind eye to a boy that can seemingly do what he pleases 'because the teacher says so'.

Also what if this child was a girl?

Then I strongly suspect there would be more resistance, even though boys and men are much less at risk of sexual assault through girls/women than the other way round.

(But I don't think any parents would dare trans a toddler girl, because no one would believe any bullshit about her wanting to wear trousers making her somehow not female.)

And please do stop pretending that this child is somehow a genderbeliever and would have his feelings hurt if he wasn't allowed in the girls' toilet.

At this age, it is MUCH more likely that he is just a normal boy whose parents are batshit insane and think that just because he likes sparkles and glitter and pink sometimes, he must be "genderfluid" or some shit.

He wouldn't mind any more than other boys if he was told to stay out of the girls' toilet.

But when he is an adult, who has always been allowed to walk all over girls' feelings, THEN he will mind being told that the women's toilet is not for males.

My DS's friend's little brother announced when he was 3 that he was not a boy but a mermaid. He absolutely wouldn't have it that he was a boy though mermaid became girl:

It can come from children, not always parents. His case has been well handled I think. He has had counselling and is now 14 and in a coed secondary school. He has not had any drug treatment as far as I know.

I think there is a real problem when the gender crap needs to be 'validated' by using accessories like pink and sparkles.

OP I think you need to make this argument to the school:

If the school rules disallow coloured shoes and headbands etc, then the school rules are trying to eliminate gender stereotypes as a defining feature of a child's personality. The idea or benefit, rather, of a universal uniform is to let the child's personality speak for itself. The school rules therefore benefit gender non conforming girls.

However this boy needs, apparently, to have his internal feelings validated by others - he needs to feel inside that others are observing his 'costume'. By creating a rule where confused boys are allowed to emulate girls by wearing banned accessories, what message is this sending to the girls? What message is being reinforced to this confused boy about artificially created gender stereotypes?

The mind just boggles that the boy is allowed into the girls' toilets when he's wearing his 'girl costume'...

Pansiesandredrosesandmarigolds

I'm not normally a great fan of memes. But this one got me. It should get everyone. Especially if you are a feminist.

It can come from children, not always parents. His case has been well handled I think. He has had counselling and is now 14 and in a coed secondary school.

Other people's 3 year old children claim to be dinosaurs. Surely, that doesn't require counselling unless it persists until, at least, the age of 7?
(And considering that these days, counselling often involves confirming the child's delusions, I would be very wary of it)

In any case, the parents ought to not encourage it. This boy is 4 so hasn't had much time to persist in his delusion (IF he is the one who started it), which means it is likely meant as seriously as other children asserting that they are dinosaurs and tigers, and the parents are not doing him a favour by pretending that everything he says becomes reality. Children need firm boundaries, and to be able to rely on their parents' common sense to explore their personalities. A child pretending to be a tiger would be very distressed if their parents suddenly fed them raw meat!

I can understand why men don't get this. It doesn't affect them.

But honest to God, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why women don't. Or if they do, don't care.

Acceptance of this ideology is not qualified by the age of the person concerned.

You can't believe it's okay for four-year-old, but not okay for 40-year-old.

Either you happy to cede women's rights, or you're not.

You can have sympathy and compassion. I think we all do. But it stops at the point where women's spaces, the right to privacy, the right to gather, the right to feminism is dictated to by men. However they bloody well feel.

In the UK, schools have to provide single sex toilets and showers for pupils aged 8 and over. Thats the law.
A trans child can use a third unisex toilet.

Second link down, its a PDF
www.google.co.uk/search?sclient=psy-ab&biw=1166&bih=885&noj=1&q=UK+laws+schools+have+to+provide+single+sex+toilets+and+showers+laws&oq=UK+laws+schools+have+to+provide+single+sex+toilets+and+showers+laws&gs_l=serp.3...870.870.1.1161.1.1.0.0.0.0.62.62.1.1.0....0...1.1.64.serp..0.0.0.hbW0dO6ioSg

My four year old has an imaginary friend. Should the school validate it by creating an extra seat at the table next to her in the classroom.

She is utterly convinced that her imaginary friend exists.

I understand people get upset when someone they know has gender dysphoria. Or someone they know has had a hard time being able to express themselves. Or need hormones to make themselves feel less like their birth sex.

But it's not real. They are not really the opposite sex. Like anorexia or a regular, old fashioned 'identity crisis'. People get upset with the word delusional. But it is delusional. It's real to them, but it's clearly not real to anyone else.

Especially when it utterley relies on everyone else's complicity.

Which is very hard to obtain when the smallest infraction results in threats of violence, rape and highly gendered aggression.

When two women only gatherings in America have had to triple their security over threats of infiltration and violence because they are committing 'genocide'. A bunch of women messing about in the woods?

People being no platformed, feminist libraries actually giving in and banning books by certain feminists.

Juno Dawson - a transwoman feminist. Who tells women how to centre men in feminism. Deciding they cannot attend a talk (on nothing to do with trans issues), on the basis that Jenni Murray is talking and they are too 'scared'. And she should be banned, as a result. Germaine Greer also.

The ideology has taken a very, very nasty turn.

Of course it's not the 4yr olds independent choice to be trans. Children live up to what their parents expect. Tell a 4yr old they are football mad, only interested in Lego, love dancing, or computer obsessed or anything else based on something they've done/ enjoy, and they tend to stick with it.

By comparison if you support whatever their current interest is, but still leave the door open to explore other choices, rather than letting that interest define who they are, then by their teens and adulthood they can decide themselves.