Brighton primary school admissions - gender identity

[SisterMoonshine]

I just caught the end of something on the radio about parents receiving letters this week to say which school their child has a place at. And that they should put which gender their child identifies with.
Big question!
I think I'd have to give an essay for an answer if this was our area. As far as DD is concerned, at 3, she is simply DD.

No sunburnt, you need to be more specific.

I know I am a woman because of my physical features. If you are proposing that people who don't share these features should also be in the subset of human beings who are women, you need to explain what they have in common with other women.

HairyLittlePoet I'm not making it up. Promise. There are millions of references to "gender identity" online. Heres one.
itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2011/11/breaking-through-the-binary-gender-explained-using-continuums/

SueTrinder To which American Dad do you refer?

So that link specifically says that you work out your gender identity by how well you fit into the societal role of men and women.

I assume in this case we would use boy and girl for the Brighton form.

So what do you think the societal role of a four year old girl is, Sunburnt?

I read your link sunburnt. It didnt make your point of view any clearer. It just labelled various normal human behaviours as either male or female and claimed that people engaging in those behaviours were 'expressing gender' rather than just being a human being.

almond pudding Why would I prescribe a societal role to a four year old girl? What are you on about? Im talking about gender dysphoria in very young children and how that relates to them being schooled inclusively rather than excluded from an education.
Why does the Tavistock clinic in the UK provide therapeutic services for kids like this on the NHS? How is it justified? Because children's mental health dramatically proves when the gender identity, yes there's that word again, they assert, even when it is different to their natal sex, is affirmed in their environment and they can congruently express their sense of self without anyone telling them they're disordered or a product of the patriarchy or that their parents won't let them grow up gay.

Oh, but you're kidding right! Good one.

That article is about stereotypes and gender roles - (do you prowl like catwoman, do you grasp your cereal spoon like a viking, do you plead for help with choosing an outfit?) It's a comedy article.

No, let's be serious.

You're insisting I have a gender identity.
I'll agree if you can tell me what that means.
I'm sure you don't mean do I like frilly dresses or power drills. Otherwise gender is a huge joke, right?

Seriously - you haven't explained at all. So far it's been a circular and meaningless argument. You're a woman if you "feel" you're a woman. (What does "feeling like a woman" entail?)
Or you're a woman if you're a non-man. Nice.

I've been engaging with you in good faith, I even enjoyed your little physics tutorial, but you haven't even attempted a definition of gender or gender identity or gender spectrum.

You still haven't actually answered how one defines one's gender, RE Hairylittlecarrots question long ago, other than stating that you can self-identify.

According to your link, you do seem to recognise that people do actually have differences in their sex based biology! Great start. Do you understand the implications of such biology? I'm guessing not.

the gender identity, yes there's that word again

The word you don't seem able to define.

To be fair, the NHS has also funded homeopathy treatments which is a dreadful hoax of ineffective and inert sugar pills passed off to the gullible as if it had actual therapeutic effect, as any doctor who presumably has an understanding of evidence based medicine and scientific method knows well.

Soooooo.......

Sunburnt, you answered the question of what gender is by posting a link.

The link says that people should decide their gender identity by deciding how well they fit the societal roles of men and women.

The vast majority of four year olds are never going to go to the Tavistock clinic, so what goes on there is not going to help them answer the Brighton question.

Using the explanation in the link you posted, Four year old children will need to be given a choice of societal roles so they can decide their gender identity. You should have no problem explaining them, as it is your link.

HairyLittlePoet Gender is one big stereotype and lucky you, you're the only one who can see it. The human experience of gender is vast and expansive subject and you want me to put some neat little definition of it into some neat little sentence (so you can pick it apart) and tell me I'm wrong and you're right. Whatever.

"The gender spectrum is a linear model, ranging from 100% male to 100% female, with various states of androgyny in between. The gender continuum or matrix is an multidimensional extension of the spectrum that includes additional gender identities outside of the spectrum."

"Gender identity is a person's private sense, and subjective experience, of their own gender. This is generally described as one's private sense of being a man or a woman, consisting primarily of the acceptance of membership into a category of people: male or female."

"The gender binary, also referred to as gender binarism (sometimes shortened to just binarism), is the classification of sex and gender into two distinct, opposite and disconnected forms of masculine and feminine. It is one general type of a gender system."

But whats the point. 'Cos you'll read all that and still say you don't understand. Why? Because either it doesn't fit your politics or you've no lived experience of the parents' despair over the kids who cry themselves to sleep every night wishing they were dead because they...hey, it's just a social construct kid, Get over it. You're just disordered/ A victim of the patriarchy/ Misled by society/ Forced to conform instead of allowed to be free...just be a human without gender...

Four year olds don't need to get a referral to the Tavistock to understand gender. Be serious. Most four year olds, rightly, will never have to think of it. It shouldn't matter to them but you will find that it does. For parents of children (I am on MumsNet right, not "crawling" over her from Reddit) struggling with the agony of gender dysphoria this option around gender identity, inserted by Children's Services into the schools application, is welcome because it is about breaking down the expectations around the gender binary and allowing children to just be. It is precisely about achieving what everyone is arguing it's not about and that is perpetuating binary expectations on children's lives.

After all this discussion of spectrums, tonight I understand polarity. No wonder kids still stay in the closet.

Gender disphoria would not be a problem without the artificial constraints of gender.

I can think of no other human characteristic that cannot be defined.

Things can be vast and expansive and still be defined and have characteristics.

Sorry sunburnt, still didn't understand what that meant because you didn't explain the key terms.

If gender is a spectrum with masculine on one end and feminine on the other, what is meant by masculine and feminine?

I think most of the people on this thread are quite happy to live as humans with male or female sexual organs. You (and Brighton council) are claiming that it is further necessary to identify as having a male or female gender. However you don't seem to want to explain what this means.

This is interesting. Now generally I am not 100% persuaded by assertions that there is no difference between men and women except biological differences. And I would be very upset if someone mistook me for a man. But ....

The gender spectrum is a linear model, ranging from 100% male to 100% female, with various states of androgyny in between. The gender continuum or matrix is an multidimensional extension of the spectrum that includes additional gender identities outside of the spectrum."

"Gender identity is a person's private sense, and subjective experience, of their own gender. This is generally described as one's private sense of being a man or a woman, consisting primarily of the acceptance of membership into a category of people: male or female."

Oh bugger , I didn't mean to post that. I was basically going to say that as the FWR regular most likely to have some sympathy with the idea of having a gender the paragraphs quoted don't make much sense.

Sadly gender stereotypes absolutely do affect all children even at primary. They mean girls participate less in classroom discussion, are given less pocket money, are praised for their looks not their intelligence. Its not a facebook personality quiz

And anyone who wants to try to send me back to some 1950s woman = feminine shit can frankly do one

Sunburnt

Here's just one of the big scale studies last year that showed no differences.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151029185544.htm

If you're going to tell me to "get back to school" can you please link to meta analysis (not small scale individual studies ) which does show innate sex based brain differences from birth - Ie: which cannot be explained by neuroplasticity

The gender spectrum is a linear model, ranging from 100% male to 100% female, with various states of androgyny in between

This makes no sense. Gender is not about being male or female. Also - human beings are either male or female, there is no wide spectrum of androgyny in biological sex. There is a tiny subset of humans with intersex conditions but to state that represents a linear spectrum with huge shades of male and female is utterly wrong.

Unless....this article is using male and female where they mean masculine and feminine? Surely they understand the terms well enough not to make such a basic mistake?

Even if you want to define gender as a spectrum, you'd still need to actually tell us what gender is. And you'd need to be able to precisely define what 100% masculine and 100% feminine actually involve, so that you can then claim that people fall all over the place in between.

So what exactly does being 100% masculine and 100% feminine involve? If you cannot actually provide clear (and not overlapping) definitions, then you don't have a spectrum; you've got a mess of utter nonsense.

But, if gender is completely subjective (it's a feeling and everyone gets to self define) and different for everyone, then it is very clearly not a real thing (with objective reality). It's just a word for describing (and stereotyping) behavioural characteristics that we decide to attach a label of (more) masculine or (more) feminine.

(Also, hate to break it to you, but articles online do not constitute rigorous evidence any more than enormously flawed 'studies').

Similarly, just because the Tavistock clinic do something right now doesn't mean it is actually helpful. The history of medicine is absolutely riddled with well meaning but ultimately unhelpful or even damaging interventions. Better outcomes are not necessarily the same as 'good' outcomes, and they aren't necessarily the best that might be achieved. After all, you choosing to break only one of my fingers is a better outcome for me than breaking all of my fingers, but really it would be much, much better if al my fingers remained unbroken.

It might be worth considering that individualised medicalised solutions to an issue that comes from social norms is entirely the wording way to solve a problem that is sociological in nature.

Gender disphoria would not be a problem without the artificial constraints of gender - 0phelia

I'm not sure if I agree with this or I don't. I do wonder if there is an underlying condition that's multiplied and amplified by society, and whether if the individual existed in a vacuum as it were, would they still feel the same disphoria

I think gender dysphoria is entirely rational. I have 'star sign dysphoria' as well as 'gender dysphoria'. I also have 'chinese year dysphoria'. I feel my personality is not well described by one of twelve boxes so how it could be described by one of two boxes is even more ridiculous. Body dysmorphia (i think thats the phrase i mean - feeling your body is not yours/right) is a different thing again and i can see there being a medical cause behind that and also psychological triggers (eg rape victims can describe this kind of feeling)

Sex dysphoria certainly exists, I don't know if it's psychological, hormonal or what. It can also manifest in young children no doubt. The disputed area is how and why we treat it. Sex reassignment surgery may work to alleviate some of the distress but it's not a perfect solution. I have huge sympathy for people with sex dysphoria. I just disagree with the strange and illogical assertion that sex dysphoria comes from having the wrong sexed brain.