To be shocked not to be told trans student sharing bedroom on school trips

[rosesrredviolets]

DD aged 15 shared a bedroom with a trans girl (born a boy) on a school trip. Dd only found out the sleeping arrangements whilst on the trip and we only found out later. I presumed that trans students would have their own bedrooms at this age. Am shocked not to have at least been asked by school in advance. However it would appear that the policy given to schools is that sharing is fine.

You can’t get riled up about a female teenager having to share a room with a male teenager on a school trip? It doesn’t take much to work out the issues.

Risk of assault, rape, sexual harassment is just the start. The removal of privacy is also obvious. If the female child is menstruating for an obvious starting point.

There is also the lack of privacy for the male child. If the fact that they were male had been undetected before, how do you envision them remaining undetected in this situation? This then becomes a ‘secret’ that the female child is expected to keep which should not be an expectation put onto any child.

If that female child had not disclosed a sexual or physical abuse trauma and was triggered by being in a room alone with a male person, how do you think that female child now feels? What a position to put that girl in!

What about if nothing at all happened, yet the female child would never have agreed to the situation with full knowledge for any reason? What about how that female child then feels when they find out that the person they had to share a room with was a male person, not the female person they were led to believe?

There are the philosophical and ethical issues. Such as the above. Such as, should any child be used to validate another child’s philosophical belief? There is no evidence at all that having a gender identity is anything but derived from a belief. The material reality is that male child is a male child. Yet believes they are a ‘girl’ and therefore a female child is being used with or without their knowledge to validate that male child’s belief that they are a ‘girl’ in this situation. How is that ethical?

If the female child knew that their parents would not ever agree to them sharing a twin sleeping accommodation with a male child, but was either not told that this was a male child, or was put in a position were their permission was effectively coerced through fear or socialisation or just time pressure, can you see the issue then? Now this female child is carrying a secret that she is going to then be stressed about keeping. Who does that to a child?

What about if that situation puts that female child in a dangerous position at home when the people who she lives with (parents/guardians or whoever) understand what has happened?

If that female child trusted the adults that put her in that room, and then found out that she was in a room with a male child when she would not have agreed, the trust that child had for those adults and the school is broken. Significantly broken.

There are plenty of other scenarios. There are many other considerations.

All children are deserving of the highest standard of safeguarding and protection. Why is a female child being less protected than a male child?

The absolute dismissal of female children’s needs has been very enlightening on this thread.

If you want to call discussing safeguarding issues ‘transphobia’, I would suggest you have your own personal definition of transphobia that doesn’t reflect society’s understanding of the word.

Now if you said you saw plenty of misogyny on this thread, I may think you had a point.

Sorry OP but you have to be the adult in the room and go to the school about this. Speak to the safeguarding lead and make it really clear this is not acceptable but the complaint is in confidence.

Someone has to stick up for your DD and it needs to be you.

This is her boundaries, privacy, dignity and safety we are talking about here.

Awwww look at the generic 'transphobia' bullshit response. Try harder.

The language issue is stark.

I hate to use ‘female people’ and ‘male people’ but I deliberately do so to make sure my posts are not deleted and that the message remains clear who I am talking about.

And the word ‘female’ has most certainly been taken as well. I have found myself times even having to substitute female person to ‘someone with a body formed around producing large gametes’ in posts where male posters have claimed the word ‘female’. But apparently, there is nothing to see here. No eroding of clear language is happening at all… according to some.

So, for now I will continue with the laborious ‘female/ male people’. I hate it but the message without it becomes ‘this girl should not be sleeping in the same room as this girl’. Which, of course, is the very point that extreme activists want. And it then brings out the accusations of transphobia.

@tiredinoratia @BedBugs5 @Tandora and others who are defending the school's actions here.

What if that trans girl decided he was actually a boy during that trip. Gender is fluid, you know?

What action would you have had them take in that scenario? Move rooms halfway through the trip? Trust the boy in the first place to come clean about his feelings?

Good point.

What if that child announced they were a boy/man next week?

How is OP’s DD to process that? Or is OP’s DD just expected to go with it, because it is nobodies business?

One of the things that some posters cannot conceive is that other children are directly impacted by a child’s gender identity. Despite the dismissals and the denials.

The dismissal of the potential harm of other children as just acceptable collateral damage is clear once you see it. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Nor can you unsee the tactics used to confuse or obfuscate the issues needing to be discussed.

What if you didn’t get told though?

Why is it phobic?

This is what worries me the most about things, you can’t call anyone out, you can’t say anything vaguely oppositional without being called phobic etc.

The need for that mentally ill boy to be affirmed in his delusion, does not outweigh the need for girls to feel safe. As a young child/teenage girl, I would not want to be in the same bedroom as a child with the opposite genitalia. Especially not in a room with a mentally ill boy. It’s ludicrous. As an adult woman I don’t want them in female bathrooms.

Women fought long and hard to have equal rights to men, they would be rolling in their graves to see little boys to grown men masquerading as women invading our space and undermining our rights.

We are all assuming these two are not in a relationship - they might have had a wild time!

Imagine too, if you were this male child and you knew that all these people had made so much effort for you, that a girl had been put in this position to make you happy, the pressure that this male child is under to stay within that gender identity.

This is what Dr Cass was pointing out. This is what many people have been pointing out for years now.

Putting that male child in a private room is more of a nuetral solution and doesn’t add a burden on either the male child or another child.

This policy is almost definitely illegal according to a legal analysis last week. Dozens of other families are threatening to take their child’s school to court over this safeguarding and you should too

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5050647-cass-report-school-policies-write-to-your-childs-school-for-evidence-their-current-policies-and-practices-are-lawful-and-in-line-with-the-cass-report-links-starter-info

just send them a letter asking if their trans policy has been updated with this legal advice and in light of the Cass review

it’s really really important every parent who cares about their child takes this step. Won’t take 5 minutes

Good to see change on this

Feel free to point out the transphobic comments. I'll wait...

And there we have it ...

Attempting to shut down debate about female safeguarding by lobbing in the word 'transphobe'

I hope these tactics are clear to all by now because it is obvious what you're trying to do. Eroding girls boundaries - threatening them with a label if they speak up for their legitimate needs.

Absolutely disgusting thing to do.

Ok, so when you next go in a residential trip of some sort.... volunteer to share a room with a penis-having male bodied 'woman' and see how you feel about sleeping next to them, changing in the same room, sharing bathroom facilities.

And then please do report back.

Of course you can't.

In the last couple of weeks I've started to use "birth registered males" and "birth registered females" a lot, which is the terminology Dr Cass uses.

I like it because it's very clear who we are talking about. We don't have to pretend everyone is assigned a gender by the gender fairy at birth which mysteriously has a 100% correlation with genitalia.

And surely Mumsnet can't delete posts for using the same terminology as Dr Cass.

I agree that this language is accurate however dont you feel that using it is fuelling the trans movement?

My post certainly wasn't aimed at you. Women, Mumsnet and people in general have been manoeuvred into an invidious position whereby they have to choose between standing firm in defending the meaning of the most basic words in their native tongue and risk their words being literally erased, or capitulation to Newspeak and covering half the argument before they've begun.

At best, you have to waste time defining your terms upfront to avoid the nonsense Humpty-Dumpty 'words mean whatever I want them to mean at any given time' approach and even then will encounter ducking, weaving and massive pushback to even the act of defining terms (because, again, this would enable a clear discussion, which does not benefit an irrational position).

In addition to @Helleofabore's post.

Another thing to consider. I used to teach in an area of Birmingham with a lot of Muslim students. Some were kept really sheltered, as in they had never been to Birmingham city centre, were not allowed to travel by bus, if they went to the corner shop they had to go in pairs. The only way they were allowed to visit a uni was with a female member of staff driving the minibus.

They probably would not be allowed on a residential but if they were and they were put in a room with a biological male the consequences could be dire.

'Honor' killings do happen in this country. Girls are sometimes sent to family abroad to get married, even at 15 ort younger if they are perceived to not being 'good girls'.

I don't for one minute think the OP's child is in that type of danger but it exists for others.

It shouldn't exist and it pains me to say that this is a possibility but even the 'that's transphobic troll' should realise affirmation of this boy could lead to the death of a roomate.

*ceding not 'covering'

This is exactly why this ideology gets away with making girls uncomfortable and putting them in danger, while saying 'nothing to see here'.

With respect OP, your daughter needs to learn that boundaries are important and that you should stand up for your own rights, or you'll be walked all over. Approval by the group is not the be all and end all.

No.

I feel spending time clarifying what I mean or being stuck in a cylce of countering accusations of transphobia to be a waste of time. I find losing long posts that I take effort to write because someone reported it a wasted opportunity.

And I know that there are some posters that will report posts whenever they can based on their own personal definition of transphobia, or because posts use correct sex pronouns, or have tried to report my posts for using the term ‘male person’. I know because they have told me in threads that they have done so and been indignant when the posts remain. I know at least one poster on this thread has tried this on other threads in the past.

After having these discussions now for years, I don’t have any fears that what I say supports a movement that prioritises gender over sex where sex matters.

I was agreeing with your post and I agree with this one. I didn’t think it was aimed at me.

And I hadn’t read this when I just posted to flex and can see I have cross posted with you. But you are right.