I am a science teacher teaching secondary sex education and genetics

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Lets get this right I am still a lesbian , my g/f from school days became a man , is a very successful man ! and a very good looking man , (not that I have ever been into men )

he and his straight wife , are good friends to me and my now G/F
shortly to become my wife ,

I know how some girls at school called all us lesbians , get a life
and get out a little more

this is the 21st century , not Victorian Britain

yes being transgender is fine and normal.

So if having gender dysphoria is fine and normal, do you also argue that having anorexia is fine and normal?

daimbars, why do you keep harping on about section 28 when it has been repeatedly pointed out that that was a very different issue? Every social issue has to be judged on its own merits. We don't say 'Oh, in the end we changed the law on issue X so let's short circuit all the debating nonsense and just wave issue Y into law now'. If we'd done that we'd have accepted paedophilia when the Paedophile Information Exchange was campaigning vigorously back in the 70s, with the support of the NCCL (now Liberty).

sanluca unfortunately life cannot be categorised into neat little boxes. If a biology teacher was asked how trans women have children surely it wouldn't kill them to mention trans women are women by law but are biologically unable to have children due to having different anatomy.

Of course and if maths teachers are asked to say 2+2=5 will that be referred to homophobia too?

foxyliz26, I'm glad your schoolfriend has made a happy life but surely it would be more accurate to say 'my g/f from schooldays is now living as a man', not 'became a man'. Your ex is still biologically female and that will never change, no matter how many hormones are taken or how much surgery is done.

Sanluca

good idea.

What

You said: I've taught the biological development of gender (role of the various hormones etc involved in development of boys).

I worry about your abilities as a science teacher tbh

OldCrone anorexia is a mental illness. Being transgender is not a mental illness unless the person finds is particularly distressing or disabling. Funnily enough people used to claim being gay was a mental illness too.

unable to have children due to having different anatomy.

Male anatomy. Which is exactly what OP is teaching kids about. Men and women have different anatomy and it is impossible to change sex.

And they can have children if they haven’t taken drugs or had surgery which renders them infertile.

LemonJello nobody is claiming males and females don't have different anatomy but the OP was specifically saying she did not know how to respond to questions around transgender people.

Because they will then still have testicles and a penis so can father children.

I’m secondary science, taught in a mixed school in a deprived area and in an all boys selective fee paying.

I don’t get asked quite those questions. More like “how do I know if I’m going to need gender reassignment?” “What is the chance that I will want a sex change?” “Why do people decide to change sex?”.

The first very simple solution to the problem is to clarify the difference between biological sex and gender as a social construct. That solves almost all of the issues.

I find my students aren’t really trying to argue with science at all, they are just looking for information as they don’t have enough to understand the subject.

@daimbars I constantly see you on these threads purposefully misunderstanding and being disruptive. What's in it for you? Is it just the fun of annoying people on the internet? Aren't there better things to do with life?

Being transgender is not a mental illness unless the person finds is particularly distressing or disabling.

Is gender dysphoria a mental illness, daimbars?

bqhl I hate injustice.

She said she was asked how men turn into women, and she replies to say they can’t, they turn into transwomen. What’s your objection to that?

The kids I work with generally believe you can change sex - or that transwomen are intersex or have both sets of genitals. It is vey strange when you explain to them, they often just refuse to believe reality.

I was dicussing Hannah Mouncy with a girl yesterday and she just repeatedly said 'Well, I see what you are saying, but I disagree because she is a woman and has always been a woman, so she should be on the women's team' Hmmm not really......

LemonJello nobody is claiming males and females don't have different anatomy but the OP was specifically saying she did not know how to respond to questions around transgender people.

No, OP was despairing that children don’t understand that it is not possible to change sex, and about how children know they are ‘not allowed’ to talk about differences between males and females.

and injustice takes many forms, daimbar

this is the 21st century , not Victorian Britain

Quite. Transgender ideology is still stuck in some remote past where 'living as a man' was fundamentally different from 'living as a woman'. We now have a society where everyone is free to dress as they wish and to marry who they want to.

People who suffer from gender dysphoria should be treated with sympathy, but it should not be taught that a condition for which the only treatment is major surgery and a lifetime of cross-sex hormones is 'normal'. In fact, if it is a condition which needs treatment, it can hardly be considered to be 'normal'.

Gosh, you're still trying to drag being gay into things. It's not relevant here.

Please try to explain how it is not a sign of mental distress not to be able to accept the body one is born with.

You accept that it is a sign of mental illness in anorexia. I assume you would also accept this in body dysmorphic disorder, where a person obsesses over an imagined flaw in their appearance, or body integrity identity disorder where a person comes to believe that one of their body parts doesn't belong to them. So how is it different when the body part(s) the person rejects are their sexual organs?

Please also provide strong, peer reviewed evidence that there are such things as male and female brains and that an individual can have a male body and a female brain, or vice versa.

Finally, please explain why drastic measures such as surgery and hormone treatment are being pushed as the answer to this mental distress rather than intensive therapy for the individual and a huge push to abolish gender stereotypes from the rest of us?

I hate injustice.

Do you think we like injustice?

Oh and if really stuck you can always fall back on the DofE specification

“It’s a huge and complicated subject but we’ve run out of time for it right now, I have to make sure that the content you know matches the content in the syllabus, so let’s move on”

unfortunately life cannot be categorised into neat little boxes

Stop putting people in them, then