Transgender child at DD’s school. Please help me write to the head?

[Comeymemo]

DD attends an independent co-Ed British international school. We are in a jurisdiction that provides for protection against sex discrimination, including in education. This country has no protection against discrimination on the basis of gender, and only recognises transgender persons when the person has undergone full reassignment surgery (including sterilisation). In other words, there is no right to self gender identification where we live.

The school is split in houses, all of which are either all boys or all girls. The school has a mix of boarders and non boarders.

We recently received a letter from the head, saying that a male pupil will be moving to a girl’s house after half term as the pupil is transgender. The letter states that the pupil will use the unisex accessible toilet including to undress (eg for sports). The letter does not state if the pupil is a boarder.

I want to write to the school outlining my concerns and would welcome any help.

The areas where I would like to get reassurance are:

• confirmation that the pupil will not be allowed to compete against girls or to be in girls’ teams for any sports
• confirmation that the pupil will not be allowed to play female parts in any dramatic productions (DD is into sports and drama and I don’t think it fair that female roles should be given to boys, as male parts are never available to girls)
• confirmation that the school will never allow the pupil to board in a girls’ house or to have access to girls’ boarding houses
• confirmation that girls will never be allowed or expected to share a bedroom with the pupil on any overnight trip
• confirmation that the school are not altering their records to reflect the pupil’s so-called self-ID, so that the pupil remains listed as male
• confirmation that the pupil is not taking the place of any girl on any awards or recognition list, such as for school prefect, scholarships or prizes that are only available to girls.
• would it be reasonable to request that DD is not in the same house as that pupil?

At this stage I don’t want to engage into a broader debate with the school over human rights, feminist theory or GC theory, so I’m trying to stay as down to earth as possible and seek clarification on practical areas.

Is there anything else you can think of that would be relevant in this context? Please feel free to direct me to other threads if this has been done before.

Many thanks 🙏

There are many things the school does that I think are sexist - from boys being depicted as superheroes and girls as princesses in the first grade, to girls doing netball while boys do rugby, and the school using James Bond to teach in the primary school years

The school sounds awful. The netball /rugby thing is pretty standard and tbh I don't think most girls are interested in a contact sport , but your other examples are weird.

Like a few others I found the tone of your opening post pretty horrible.

limpbizkit I'm assuming you are fairly new to this long running debate because I and others can very much assure you that males identifying as lesbians is a very common thing.

There have been some very gut wrenching threads made here by women who have seen their lesbian spaces decimated because of it and have faced a lot of harassment over their unwillingness to accept self id lesbians with penises.

So you think it's okay for male bodied people to compete with girls in sports happygolucky? Are you for real?

The high risk of suicide thing is a myth btw and has been debunked many times.

I'm not sickened by it, but not impressed by it either. There were six points on the OP's list of which two were safeguarding and one or two others might be safeguarding if you really stretched the point. The two clear safeguarding ones were not top of the list and she asked if we could think of any more issues to add.

More broadly I don't believe that the rights, opportunities, equality and mental wellbeing of the OP's DD are any more threatened by the presence of this young trans person than they are threatened by the sexism that the OP has swallowed from the school so far. Her DD is at a school where only boys can play rugby and only girls can play netball and there are separate prizes for boys and girls etc. That alone leads to worse problems with gender identity (does playing rugby make you insufficiently female? does wanting to play rugby make you a boy?) then allowing a trans child to captain the school netball team.

I bet they all end up really good friends.

The problem really lies with our society allowing children to make their mind up that they identify as the opposite sex. I think the right thing to do would be to give the boy lots of psychological support and allow a transition officially when he becomes an adult if that's what he wishes to do. I think it's wrong to allow children to make any life changing decisions that they haven't got the ability to fully weigh up. I feel sorry for him really. I still doubt very much he's a sexual threat. Really this isn't his problem its a society that allows children to think they can change gender. It must be terribly confusing for him. I think he's the wrong target for thr anguish

I think its only appropriate to check about changing rooms/ sleeping arrangements xxx.
How the school keep records/ organise activities and prizes etc is not your business in relation to your daughter in my opinion.

Also "do as I say or I will kill myself" has always been an abusers move.

limpbizkit that research was carried out by the US National center for trans gender equality. Its trans people themselves (in the USA) who are saying that 81% of them are attracted to their own natal sex either exclusively or as well as the opposite sex.

I feel sorry for him really. I still doubt very much he's a sexual threat.

You don't even know the child. How can you possibly say that?

Sorry my last post was incorrect - its trans people themselves who are saying that they are attracted to their acquired gender - not their natal sex - in the trans equality survey.

Amaryllis

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the child in question is any more of a threat to the girls than any other boys are. The threat comes from the ideology of gender identity, which perpetuates and emphasises harmful and regressive sex-role stereotypes.

The only other potential threat comes from the way that the school ends up handling this issue. Harm may be done to the girls if some boys are allowed to identify as girls and share sex-segregated areas such as changing rooms and dormitories with the girls.

The trans-identified child is not, himself, a threat. I see him more as a victim of this poisonous ideology. Especially so if the adults around him are telling him that he can change sex and become a girl. Poor child.

Safeguarding the girls is the key issue here. Boys/men who id as girls/women are more likely to retain a sexual attraction to girls/women than they are to be attracted to boys/men. We segregate sexes - as others have been at pains to point out - entirely because some males are a danger to women and we cannot tell which are and are not. There's also a privacy issue for girls and women.

I am required to be DBS checked for the work I do and as a school governor, despite the fact that I am never alone with a child. I don't object, nor do I feel in any respect offended, because children must be safeguarded against those who might abuse them and we cannot tell who those people might be.

The trans-identified child is not, himself, a threat.

With respect, OldCrone, you don't know that.

The problem really lies with our society allowing children to make their mind up that they identify as the opposite sex.

I agree, limpbizkit. Children should be allowed to play around with different roles. The adults around them shouldn't be telling them that they can change sex.

I would drop the positive discrimination points to avoid looking like you are mean spirited/bigoted/only interested in forwarding your dds interests. But it’s perfectly reasonable to address the safety concerns.

You're right, Vicky, I don't know that. But I stand by what I said in my first paragraph, that there is no reason to believe that he is any more of a threat to the girls than any other boy in the school is.

What I meant was that he should not be viewed as a threat just because he identifies as being trans.

The real issue here, Glitter, is safeguarding. Do you understand what that means?

Of course I do. Why so patronising? It's the OP who brought it up and wanted to exclude the child from certain drama roles at school not me, which doesn't really have much to do with safeguarding at all.

What I meant was that he should not be viewed as a threat just because he identifies as being trans.

Indeed - he is no more, but no less of a threat than any other boy.

My best mate at school was sexually assaulted by 3 boys she'd known since infants school. When they were all mid-teens. Even when a girl thinks she knows someone is no threat, she doesn't actually know for certain - so we cannot possibly know.

What I meant was that he should not be viewed as a threat just because he identifies as being trans.

Is anybody saying that?

Most people on here felt that that particular point was not the issue she should be focussing on

Didn't stop the OP coming back on to clarify that yes actually, she does still actually want them excluded from female parts in the play, cos they're for females only, not you.
which is against a child at a school. wanting to alienate and exclude them from their peers even more.
Must come down to "how far are you willing to hate/discriminate?" Because a lot on here are agreeing with her even though some of her points aren't to do with the usual "get out of our changing places" - it's more of a case of just get out altogether.

he is no more, but no less of a threat than any other boy.

Exactly. You wouldn't move in any boy from the boys' boarding house and hope for the best.

Wtf at the assumption that you can recognise a lesbian by her fashion choices. Unless she has a tattoo that says "I heart Mavis" or a lesbian definition T-shirt I suppose.

I find the lack of introspection of the "feel like a woman" brigade disturbing. Your feeling of female-ness doesn't spring into existence fully formed, it is based on things you have observed. Observable things consist of stereotypes and body types. You're describing your feeling of self as female based on your observations - either that you have a female body, or that you feel comfortable with some female stereotypes, or both.

There's no logical way around it. Feelings don't spring up fully formed with English language labels. We each have only our own experience of the world. You learn the difference between an orange and an apple by seeing oranges and seeing apples and hearing people consistently apply the word apple to one and orange to the other. And the word fruit to both. You don't get to try out different feelings of being male and female with someone telling you which is which. You can only assign the word female to your internal feeling by identifying it with external, observable things in others. Body type or stereotype. There is nothing else.

There's also the fact that identities aren't inborn. No one is born "identifying" as British, or glamorous, or female, or northern. Our identities are our narratives about ourselves which build up over time through our interactions with the world. Nothing innate about them.

I strongly feel that gender stereotyping is much at fault here. I have seen it happen. Happy nonconforming preschooler having no problem being a boy with long hair and a fondness for pink sparkles. Slapped in the face with stereotypes on starting school, he is told 30 times a day that he must be a girl. Duly builds that into his self narrative and now he "is a girl". And by telling himself that for the next n years it becomes harder and harder for him to extricate himself before the point of either serious medical consequences or the difficulty of going through a puberty that doesn't match his self-narrative of being female. I am angry for that little boy.

The threat comes from the ideology of gender identity, which perpetuates and emphasises harmful and regressive sex-role stereotypes.

Yes, I am aware of the theory, it's not changed since the 1970s. But in this specific situation it's the exactly the wrong way to go about tackling those regressive sex-role stereotypes.

Harm may be done to the girls if some boys are allowed to identify as girls and share sex-segregated areas such as changing rooms and dormitories with the girls.

That is safeguarding. I haven't questioned safeguarding, only the OP's contention that it's her biggest concern.

The adults around them shouldn't be telling them that they can change sex.

It's not clear to me that anyone has told the child that. The OP didn't say the school referred to the child as female, or as a girl, only as trans.

You sound bigoted. I would focus on the safety and privacy aspects only. The other users just make you sound anti trans people in general. Your only concerns should be if it affects the safety of your child.