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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To wish this 13 year old girl the best of luck and hope she is successful?

267 replies

Whatisthisfuckery · 06/02/2020 08:49

A 13 year old girl is taking Oxfordshire County Council to court over its transgender toolkit for schools. According to the toolkit students who identify as trans can choose with which sex they get changed, or with whom they share a room on over night school trips.

This is madness, right? Potentially letting teenage boys get their kit off with the girls or share a dorm? When my DS has been on residentials he’s not known in advance who he’s sharing a room with, I just assume, naively, that the rooms will be single-sex.

Kids who are trans need to be supported and made to feel comfortable, but surely that shouldn’t come at the expense of everybody else?

AIBU to hope this 13 year old girl wins her case and gets this nonsense out of schools? As I understand it it’s not just Oxfordshire that would be affected. There are toolkits like this throughout the country, so if it’s ruled unlawful in court all of them will have to come down.

Sorry for the DM link.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7971457/Girl-13-launches-High-Court-fight-block-councils-advice-trans-pupils.html

I’ve also found an article in the Oxford Mail, for those of you who understandably don’t want to click on the DM.

www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/18213788.oxfordshire-girl-seeks-judicial-review-trans-toolkit/

OP posts:
RufustheLanglovingreindeer · 06/02/2020 18:43

areyoureallylistening

I am so very very sorry that your daughter has been subjected to that

Flowers
wellbehavedwomen · 06/02/2020 19:11

Can anyone tell me how widely distributed these "Toolkits" are?*

They're everywhere. A search for 'council trans school guidance' brings up 'toolkits' for Brighton, Leeds, Shropshire, East Sussex, Leeds, Denbighshire, Bath, Cornwall, Wrexham and Berkshire just in the first couple of pages.

My LA isn't mentioned, but it uses it. It also has a video on challenging gender stereotypes. I was delighted, until I watched it. What they do is draw one line from "girl" to "boy" and tell everyone that's sex assigned at birth. And then they draw a second below it, also "girl" to "boy", and that's gender identity. And then they talk through stereotypes (boys climb trees, are brave and strong, like lego and sports; girls are gentle and sensitive, easily upset, love dolls and pretty clothes and pink) and tell them to choose where they are on the second line, boy or girl, according to those stereotypes, because that's your gender identity, and you can be a boy inside even if you're assigned girl at birth, and vice versa, based on those stereotypes. If you are extremely gender non-conforming, then you may be trans. This is suggested for KS1. That's 4-7 year olds. They're being taught, despite no medical basis for it, that everyone has an innate gender identity that's nothing to do with biological sex. As a fact, and challenging it is deemed transphobic, and hateful. So the kids don't want to be that awful thing, and they believe what they are taught. It's indoctrinating them into a new secular religion, and they're told it's science.

Go and look at SRE resources for your local LA. Watch the videos and read the resources. Check to see if they are talking about sex (which means boys and girls defined by biology - personality is wholly individual) or gender (a bunch of stereotypes, which could mean a child thinks they were born in the wrong body... and check out what puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries could mean for that child, if they take it that far... and how many children being treated now are autistic, or anorexic, or have complex traumas).

SRE is now compulsory. You can't remove your children from it from this September. And more than half the resources on my own council's site are about transgender - barely any on race, or sexuality. Very little on disability and bullying. Nothing on girls and sexism at all.

I am donating to this crowdfunder. And talking to my child's school. We are entitled to see the lesson plans, and entitled to question why our children are being taught something utterly evidence free, that has enormous safeguarding implications, without our knowledge or consent, as with the head of Safe Schools Alliance makes plan. Don't even get me started on what happens to children who decide they are trans, and want medical intervention, because that's a whole other can of worms (suffice it to say dozens of medics have whistleblown, are still doing so, and another judicial review us underway).

Of course trans people deserve to live lives of dignity, in freedom and with respect. All people do. That does not mean our children should be taught as factual things that are, frankly, ridiculous - the thread on "is biological sex really real at all!" should illustrate that ably.

This is why so many Mumsnetters are alarmed. Women's rights are being removed under our noses, and women questioning this are threatened with rape or murder, while politicans and journalists say that those women are the bigots. It's Owellian, and I am really sorry, to the women on Mumsnet who have been arguing this for years, that I was one of the eyerollers who thought you all over the top. You were right. Everything you said is happening, or has happened, and we've sleepwalked into it.

The "hateful, bigoted" A Woman's Place site: womansplaceuk.org/ - I'd love to know where the hatred is, because it looks pretty reasonable to me. And here's a thread that explains a fair bit on what's happening to shut down debate and questioning, and why you don't know this is happening at all.

As JK Rowling put it: this is not a drill.

MrKlaw · 06/02/2020 19:24

Thanks for the replies. Eye opening to say the least

Newuser123123 · 06/02/2020 19:38

I wish her luck, and on behalf of my children I'm so grateful to her for taking this on x

wellbehavedwomen · 06/02/2020 19:46

Please, please, google for your own LA's SRE resources. Then watch them, read them, look into it. Research, research, research. Because knowledge is power. Make your own mind up when you've done so - just do so from an informed standpoint.

Only one side here has #NoDebate as a slogan. Telling, I find.

BuzzShitbagBobbly · 06/02/2020 19:51

@MrKlaw now you know more, are you shocked at what has been happening?

I remember when I started reading and learning more - it felt like some elaborate hoax, because surely this stuff couldn't be right. Surely! And yet...

ScrimshawTheSecond · 06/02/2020 20:00

The girl in question is enormously brave. Wishing her all the best, and I can't really believe in 2020 girls have to fight for their privacy, respect and dignity like this.

wellbehavedwomen · 06/02/2020 20:08

She's a little heroine. Her parents must be bursting with pride. As they should be. Flowers

BlackForestCake · 06/02/2020 20:11

Where are all the posters who usually pop up to tell feminists
they're being unreasonable and mean?

Does everyone get it now?

Good on this brave girl who's been failed so badly by the adults who run her school, who should be protecting her, and the politicians who allowed this nonsense to go ahead.

Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer have basically said they want this
13 year old to be forced to shower with boys.

And Mumsnet will delete you if you try to ask them about it.

AutumnRose1 · 06/02/2020 20:17

MrKlaw when I first started explaining this to people, I found a lot of them thought transgender meant full surgery and hormones.

Ikeasucks · 06/02/2020 20:21

Check your schools trans inclusion policy, i did and i’m not impressed

To wish this 13 year old girl the best of luck and hope she is successful?
To wish this 13 year old girl the best of luck and hope she is successful?
AskingQuestionsAllTheTime · 06/02/2020 20:26

"although the individual in question may have the body of a boy, they are in every other respect a girl"

What are these other respects? In what ways is this individual a girl?

OldCrone · 06/02/2020 21:02

In what ways is this individual a girl?

I think what they're trying to say is that if a boy claims to have a ladybrain, then that is more important than the fact that he has a male body.

They're also claiming that the fact that he has a ladybrain means that he should be allowed to use the girls' toilets and changing rooms, because it would be upsetting for a boy with a ladybrain to use the boys' toilets and changing rooms. The girls' feelings don't matter, because they're just girls, and everyone knows that boys' feelings are more important (even if they have a ladybrain, or possibly especially if they have a ladybrain).

It's impossible to test for or diagnose a ladybrain (there may be a reason for that...) so if a boy says he has a ladybrain, everyone else has to accept this as fact.

Yes, it is insane. But your children's school has probably got a policy like this.

SpeedofaSloth · 06/02/2020 21:09

My DC's primary has one trans child, for my DD's sake I'm pleased to say they have dedicated a visitor loo as unisex.
Good luck, Girl A. I don't want my DD to have to learn how to navigate this new world.

whatdoidoallday · 06/02/2020 21:44

Good luck to Girl A - very brave. Hope this case will make people more aware of what is happening and get the LAs to drop their toolkits.

Wereallsquare · 06/02/2020 21:49

@wellbehavedwomen Excellent. Thank you.

ExEUCitizen · 06/02/2020 22:33

Definitely wish her the very best of luck, and many thanks in fact.

By the time I was 13, I'd already been trapped up against a wall by a middle-aged man trying it on and followed around town by 'youths' as they were called then, 15-21 ish. The use of the standard male-to-female greeting "show us your tits" started in primary school and I had begun to realise that I would never walk past a bunch of males of any age in peace and entirely without fear ever again. I can't believe this madness that keeps telling us men are all nice really and it doesn't really happen, keep smiling and be nice, poor little menz can't help themselves. Absolute and total bullshit.

Melissana · 06/02/2020 22:36

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

AskingQuestionsAllTheTime · 06/02/2020 22:40

OldCrone
It's impossible to test for or diagnose a ladybrain (there may be a reason for that...)

I thought that neuroscientists had found some differences between male and female brains, just not the ones being claimed for them by transactivists? I mean, apart from the male brain being larger, every cell in it will have a Y chromosome and a female brain will not -- and transition doesn't alter that as far as I know, not that I expect many trans people have been tested for it.

Incidentally, while looking to see if I could find data on this, I found an article instead: www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/dec/04/male-female-brains-real-differences

Made Oi larf, that did.

Cremebrule · 06/02/2020 23:01

For me, a lot of these issues are nothing to do with trans individuals at all. It is the willingness of policy officials to create loopholes that can be exploited that make women and girls less safe. When talking through this stuff, they should be thinking what would the abusers, rapists etc of the world do with freedom to self ID. It is quite clearly a massive risk and to not acknowledge that is utterly baffling. Surely there has to be some weighing up of the potential benefits to trans girls/women versus the potential threats to all women.

A few years ago I had to ask a man to leave the female changing rooms at a pool. He wasn’t trans but was oblivious to the fact that my rights to change trumped his rights to wander in and help his wife change the baby for swimming. There was nothing sinister but I was not comfortable. Now, he could just say he identified as a woman and crack on.

Cremebrule · 06/02/2020 23:07

Ikeasucks that is quite shocking. Basically saying that the girls can sod right off and they are less important.

AutumnRose1 · 06/02/2020 23:08

I can’t read Ikeas link, I’ll try tomorrow on a proper computer.

Oliversmumsarmy · 06/02/2020 23:12

Are there really that many trans children.

From reports on here, a dozen in a 2000 pupil school

A couple in a year group

There seems to be a huge to do over what appears to be a tiny minority that could be accommodated with little fuss

When did everyone have to change for just a few

When did it become the norm to state black is white and anyone who disagrees can be prosecuted

It does sound like being different makes you more popular and special and able to get away with anything and what child doesn’t want that

OccasionalKite · 06/02/2020 23:13

This "toolkit" policy is so fucked up, just can't find the right words. The official policy is just so outrageous.

My very best of good wishes and support to this thirteen-year-old girl.

PerfectParrot · 06/02/2020 23:23

SRE is now compulsory. You can't remove your children from it from this September.

Only relationships education is compulsory. The sex education stuff you can still withdraw your DC from. And an awful lot of the stuff taught as part of "relationships education" isn't actually compulsory - only a very small portion of it is. And, really importantly, there isn't any particular way that it must be taught. So the vast majority of schools should be teaching that trans people exist and they have the right to live their lives without fear or discrimination. But teaching "gender identity" as fact is most certainly not compulsory.