To Say Well Done Suella Braverman.

[AnonIsUsuallyAWoman]

Of course I'm not and I'm going to applaud her. Well Done and Thank You! Brava!

Everyone is non-binary. No-one identifies with the stereotypes of only one sex.

I mostly entirely agree with her.... except for her comments about uniform. My DD wears mostly trousers and shorts. She is not non-binary or trans. She is a female child expressing her clothing preference, and why shouldn't she? I would have no problem with a male child wearing a dress or a skirt. It doesn't change his sex or make him trans (or even gay, for that matter). But that probably happen as by today's societal standards it's considered mostly acceptable for females to wear what was once considered traditional male clothing, but not so much the other way around.

Schools are free to use pronouns etc. She simply said they didn't have to.

In fact I think it is you two who are on the same side as section 28, by wanting to force schools to conform to an ideological approach without regard to the welfare of each individual pupil and their needs.

No one else had to give up any rights to enable gay and lesbian people to have the same

What rights are you being forced to give up if 16 year old Amelia now wants to be called Aaron at school, and be addressed as he/him? Or Jonny wants to be called Jane? Why do you think the choice of these children to be known how they want to be known is taking rights away from you? If Amelia wanted to change her name to Alice, would you refuse to call her Alice because she was born as Amelia?

Would you really stand in front of that child, and deliberately call them the wrong name because you don't want to be forced to ascribe to their belief system, even if you have no idea at all as to why they want to change their name?

The people currently pushing back are just as bad as the TRAs.

Ah, that old chestnut: both sides are as bad as each other. You genuinely think that those who are pushing back in any way, even if’s just a “Hang on a minute, what about women?” are on a par with the balaclava-clad and flare-waving TRAs who hounded an academic out of her job, the TRAs who say that lesbians who don’t want to sleep with someone who has a penis, even if the penis-owner identifies as a woman, are bigots and transphobes, and the TRAs who harangue women with “suck my lady dick” and so much worse on social media?

Riiiight.

All this simply from Braverman saying that schools don't have to listen to what children would like to be called.

What rights are you being forced to give up if…Jonny wants to be called Jane?

What happens when Jonny wants to use the girl’s loo but biological girls object to sharing that private space with someone male bodied?

What happens when Jonny takes a place on a girl’s sports team, which he qualifies for because he identifies as Jane, but he has a huge physical advantage over all the biological girls because Jonny went through puberty as a male?

What happens when Jonny isn’t a very nice person and ends up in prison, but in a women’s prison, and a male bodied person is locked up with biological women? Or Jonny needs medical treatment and ends up on a women’s hospital ward with women who aren’t happy with a male bodied person being around when they’re vulnerable and undergoing sensitive treatment?

Women have the right to female-bodied only spaces. THAT is the right that’s being given up.

She's ghastly. The worst of the careerist Brexiteers Boris acolytes. Totally lacking in intellect or integrity (she's my constituency MP)

All this simply from Braverman saying that schools don't have to listen to what children would like to be called.

Whatever Braverman has said, it’s just part of a much bigger problem. But sure, dismiss it all.

All this from Braverman saying that schools don't have to respect a pupil's preferred pronouns... 🙄

Regardless of where you stand on the issue (and I'm not getting into that), do you really want children to be told that the way they're feeling doesn't matter, that any struggles or issues they're having in that area aren't real, that they should just ignore it and carry on as normal?

No. I also don't want girls to be told that their feelings don't matter if they don't want to share toilets with trans identifying male children, or have them on their sports teams.

Whilst I think that Suella Braverman's language was unnecessarily inflammatory, I think the way gender identity is being treated as this huge important thing is actually really unhealthy for children.

Mental health issues? Trans. Eating disorder? Trans. Divorcing parents? Trans. Gay and struggling? Trans. Not very cool and want some instant street cred? Non-binary.

I think it reinforces sexist stereotypes about boys and girls and encourages way too much navel gazing. If gender identity is about how you perceive yourself, I'm not sure we should be encouraging children to spend half their lives contemplating it and trying on different pronouns at the expense of more useful pursuits such as playing team sports, learning a musical instrument or excelling academically.

I'm worried we're creating a generation of self-obsessed narcissists who are stuck in their own heads, and in that sense I do sort of think, "Pull yourself together, your identity isn't interesting to anyone else and there are much more important things you could be focusing on" is a message many of them need to hear.

Whether they would listen is another matter though.

Absolutely, gender ideology is about lies and obfuscation, nothing like the fight against Section 28 which was literally the LGB community fighting to just be themselves

How does it benefit anyone for a school to refuse to respect someone's chosen name and pronouns? Conversely, how does it harm anyone to respect those things?

TRAs are wrong and offensive. But not respecting young people who are thinking about their identity achieves nothing positive - not for the young people, not for women who want safe women-only spaces, not for anyone. Suella Braverman is just jumping on a bandwagon here, not bringing anything positive.

Names are fine. Pronouns are the problem. No one should be having to give so much headspace and to changing their lifelong language use to accommodate what is essentially a social contagion, which is being encouraged by certain trans activists for their own very questionable motives. Tbh I suspect those of you who are shouting about this and making accusations of cruelty, bigotry and transphobia blah blah are just angry and maybe a little frightened that something you've built your family and perhaps social personas around for the past few years is being so easily swept away. It's a house of cards, it always was, too fragile to sustain.

What rights are you being forced to give up if 16 year old Amelia now wants to be called Aaron at school, and be addressed as he/him? Or Jonny wants to be called Jane?

Well, if it stopped there there wouldn't be too much of a problem. But when Aaron is getting his breasts chopped off and Jane has been conditioned to think she is entitled to use the female changing facilities and if her peers have a problem with that then tough shit they are just bigots anyway, then yeah there is a problem.

It's pretty disingenous to claim this is just about pronouns.

Also, someone made the good point upthread that we don't 'affirm' teenagers with anorexia by telling them that yes, they are absolutely correct that they are fat and need to lose weight....

That's not what they conversation is about. The conversation is about whether jonny should be respected at school and be called the name they wish to be called by.

Exactly.

Delighted that Suella has said this, clearly and unequivocally. For me this is about the safeguarding of girls and women and our safe spaces. I really hope the tide is beginning to turn on this matter.

Interesting that Conservative Suella is a child of immigrants to this country, standing up for women, while Labour’s Stella Creasey from a hugely privileged background throws us under a bus! #respectmysexifyouwantmyx

The Section 28 comparison is just TRAs using it to cover up the fact that they don't actually have any credible arguments.

If all you have is trying to emotionally blackmail people into coming round to your way of thinking by telling them that they are just like the bigots of days gone by, and just keep rolling that out every time you are challenged, then you have nothing.

This post and therefore conversation is specifically about pronouns though.

You're using the slippery slope argument. It's nonsense. Find the middle ground - so yes to female-only and male-only spaces. Also yes to unisex spaces - in addition to, not instead of. Hard no to biological males in female prisons - but find a practical solution.

It's also perfectly possible to excel academically or otherwise whilst at the same time considering one's identity and pronouns. And that's the problem - people on both extremes of this issue want it to be a zero-sum game. In real life, most things just aren't. The pragmatism, compassion and common sense are missing from both sides.

@babyjellyfish Absolutely.

There’s a lot of kids who need to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around them, and that they aren’t more important than everyone else.

Life isn’t a safe space. At least some resilience is necessary, and it’s as well to learn it at a younger age than have it come as a shock.

No issue whatsoever with names or uniform.
names are abritary anyway and clothes shouldn’t be gendered at all.

Those of you who are desperate for adults to play along with pronoun choices, should this be for all pronouns including neo ones.
am I being mean if i don’t use ze and Zir or meow for cat gender?
After all it’s not much to use requested pronouns and it might upset the children if we don’t use the right ones?

Ok so i will ask again. You have Amelia in front of you, 16 years old and vulnerable. She tells you she wants to be known as Aaron and he/him. You're going to say... What?

This is about whether schoolchildren should have respect shown to them at school. Not changing rooms, not prisons, not toilets.

She's not very bright and she never seems to have done her homework.