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??

I think they talked about her being born as a boy but feeling more like a girl inside.

Please do not use this phrase. There is no value in telling girls that the only way to 'feel like a girl' is to want to wear frilly dresses and makeup, and it is playing into the stereotypes of society to do so. Instead of encouraging young children to transition because they want to play with barbies or matchbox cars, let's promote the 'that's cool, everyone can enjoy what they want, regardless of whether you are a boy or a girl'.

Meanwhile.... back to the point of the thread. Talk to your DD's teacher first, there are lots of things that young children report as fact, that are a mixture of fact and imagination. If the child has identified as trans then simply say that they identify as a different gender. Children don't have the same bias as adults do (as exampled by people's reactions on this thread) and are more than capable of accepting quite complicated concepts if put simply to them.

Haw haw! Having critical thinking is now "bias". Referring to how easily children can be manipulated is a "lack of bias".

I'm quite surprised this thread hasn't been deleted. Mumsnet seem to be getting form for deleting threads where every poster doesn't adhere to its strict guidelines of being overly politically correct even when it flies in the face of downright common sense. But back to the point in hand, op don't explain anything. Speak to the teacher, make sure this is a boy and ask why it is appropriate for a child who is a boy to be using the girls loos. Why should his slightly crazy parents wishes taking priority over the other kids

Could the child be inter-sex or have a history of physical/ sexual abuse or bullying? Checked with my cousin who teaches kids this age, and those are usually the main reasons why kids would be allowed to use the opposite toilets. Not sure if a 4 yo would be transitioning tbh, but it's possible their genitals don't conform to the norm and so they need the privacy of female cubicles.

"They don't get 'girl' stuff. But neither fit in with 'bloke' stuff. "

Hold the front page

Does that make me "non-binary trans" (WTAF)? How did I get to the age of 45 without knowing that?

There is no eye-roll big enough to express how I feel about this issue.

Allowing this child into the boy's toilets is wrong on so many levels. It's confusing him about which toilet is appropriate for him to use and so confusing him about following rules and the expectations of society which we all have to do to a certain extent whether or not we like it. It's also confusing for others who see that they can't have a female only space and for the boys who think they can go wherever they like because this child is.

The school need to get some balls (sorry!) and tell this misguided parent that their child has a penis and testicles and therefore is a boy who is too young to be persuaded feel that he is a girl and stop pandering to this nonsense.

4 years old

Good grief.

If he truly is then he has years ahead of him to work it out and think for himself.

Up til then surely he can just wear and do what he likes and be themself.

Obviously I know nothing about it but it must be a long hard lonely road to figure it all out. Why would you push that into a four year old when you could just not make gender an issue st all.

Lurkedforever1

I am well aware of what schools are allowed to tell the parents of other children, and am also well aware that the school is legally required to meet the needs of every child.

It puts the school in a very difficult position.

I don't know of any actual trans person who condones transing a pre-teen.

I'm afraid you're behind the times, TabascoToastie. This is Ada Wells, the LGBT officer at Edinburgh University.

Sending a child to school in the clothes of the opposite sex, giving them a neutral name is all about gendered expectations and stereotypes. And why not?

But if toilets are separated by sex, that's telling the child, and all the other children, either that you can change sex, or that gender presentation overrides sex differences.

You can't, and it doesn't.

And it's all well and good saying that children accept these things but that's not what's happening. They're not accepting, they're believing.

I actually meant gender neutral .. not fluid ... some people don't believe in giving their children a set gender do they? Maybe this is the case ?
I have to say I was such a tomboy and hated anything girly , had my parents paid more interest I may have been told I was transsexual but I've grown up into ' normal' woman who got married and had children etc .. I'm still not overly girly but you wouldn't really notice as such .

I would like to ask the posters who think this is all fine and we should stop flapping about it if they would be happy if their children were told that God/Allah/whatever was real and they had to believe and accept it unquestioningly - how happy would you be with that? Still wonder what all the fuss was about?

Belief is not fact. This child is not and can never be female, a girl or a woman. And he should absolutley not be allowed in the girls' toilet and the girls should not be told to accept that.

I used to enjoy the mommy blogger Renegade Mom, she was funny, genuinely honest and original.

But I had to unfollow her, after her post about her transgender kindergartener. Her friends were all like 'ignore the hateful bigots'.

Just read your update OP about the child being male. The gendered aspects of the situation (name, clothes, toys whatever) are a non-issue IMO. However I would object to the boy being allowed to use the girls' toilets. Not because I think he personally presents a danger. And I appreciate that making him use the boys' might be unwelcome for his family.

Sadly there are bound to be some young girls in every school who have experienced or are experiencing abuse. Very possibly still undisclosed. It's incredibly common. Abused girls should not have to deal with boys in the girls toilets as standard. These girls would be my priority over the wishes of the boy's family, TBH.

I also think that every girl should be encouraged to feel a sense of entitlement to female spaces as they grow, in case they one day need those spaces themselves. It sounds like boundaries might be being blurred by adults here.

there's no intersex condition in the world that results in being born with a penis and a vagina
Try Googling that and you'll find it is not quite right :) some people are in fact born with something in between - a rudimentary penis and vagina. And some have genitals that can't be described as either. It is also not just about penises or vaginas; your sex is about your chromosomes, for instance, so you might have a vagina but also a Y chromosome. In the old days, if things were not clear, someone would decide what sex children were, and they would be dressed up and treated like a boy or girl ... until one day they discovered that they were not like other little boys or girls, which was sometimes traumatic. And sometimes they did not feel like the sex they had been assigned to, but had already undergone surgery to make them more clearly that sex. Again, traumatic for these children. I can understand it if a parent wanted to avoid their child going through trauma by allowing things to remain uncertain. As I understand it, this "accepting uncertainty" is what intersex people themselves think is better for a child. They should know, right?

At 4, the child should be encouraged to explore themselves and their imagination without boundaries. We called our dd Boris the dog for a week at her insistence. I think labelling them as 'transgender' actually pigeon holes them - I keep reading about how gender is a social construct, but by changing the gender of a child surely it makes the male/female category even more defined? I taught a boy who, at the age of 12, would always role play female characters. At parents evening, I mentioned it to his mum as he was getting a bit of stick from his classmates. I spoke to mum purely because I wanted to explain how I'd challenged the bullying and wanted to be informed if he had any further issues arose so I could deal with them. His mum thanked me for dealing with the bullies, but went on to say that she thought her son was probably gay, and possibly did want to be a girl. All she wanted was him to be given the freedom to discover who he was for himself and asked that he be encouraged to develop the characters he wanted to, even if there was a risk that his classmates would take the piss. Of course, I fully supported this. He's 20 now, living openly as a gay man and has a very successful drag act. He has supportive and loving parents who gave him the time and support that he needed to figure his sexuality out. If his mum had pushed for him to 'transition' as a child, it would have been completely wrong. He likes wearing women's clothes but doesn't want to be a woman. He doesn't want to live as a woman either. At 4, the child is far too young to decide for themselves that they want to identify as a different gender.

boney obviously not if you think the school has no choice but to allow the opposite sex into female only spaces. There is no rule on that.

I don't think at infant age a boy in the girls toilet is an issue on the surface, it is what it leads to in future and what it says to females about their rights.

My DS is going through a phase of wanting to be a baby again! I'm going to let him crawl to school in nappies and demand someone tgere breast feeds him. Obviously I am of the firm belief he won't grow out of this next week

Trans at 4 is just nonsense and the parents are ridiculous to pander to it. One of my sons went through a very long phase of wanting to wear dresses, telling me he was rapunzel, wanting to be Dorothy and dressing up as a princess. His friends are all girls and he would far rather dance and do stickers than go anywhere near a football. I could very easily have gone down the whole "oh he's trans" route but instead we embraced his interest, told him that it was perfectly fine to like what he likes and left it at that. He's now well past his princess phase but still prefers "girl" things to play with and is much happier in female company. However, he is a boy and knows he's a boy. If as a teen or adult he feels he's in the wrong body we will deal with it but I absolutely refuse to encourage it and put ideas into his head. My gut instinct is that he will be a gay man, but that's for him to decide when he is mature enough to make that decision for himself.

As I understand it, the OP just used "transgender" as shorthand to get the general gist of what might be going on. There's no indication that either the school or the parents say this child is transgender. The child could be intersex, or these might just be some of those parents who don't want to force a gendered life on their child, as long as it is possible. We don't know.

I feel sorry for the little girls hoping for safety and privacy in the toilets intended for their safety and privacy ie the female toilets. Even more so upon reading that it's not only the boy-who-sometimes-thinks-he's-a-girl going in but also groups of other boys who go in after seeing that he does.

I remember when I was a young girl and sometimes the only way to escape from boys harassing us was to run to the girls loos. Seems girls can't even have that nowadays.

If girls are having to hide in the toilets to feel safe, the school has a bigger problem than this.

God this is all kinds of wrong.

What the fuck are the parents/school thinking.

And ps, I was a tomboy until I was 10. I liked boys sports and boys clothes and had a pixie haircut because I wanted short hair.

I then grew up to be a very girly girl.

Labelling a kid as trans at age 4 is fucking ridiculous.