Stonewall award and teaching at school

[DebbieBarry]

Our school newsletter tells us:

"We are very proud to have been awarded our Stonewall Award... this award allow Schools to effectively benchmark their progress and give direction to their ongoing work in tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying and celebrating diversity. Some feedback from Stonewall: “Your PSHE lesson is exemplary, a best-practice example of discussion around consent, and the difference between gender identity and gender expression, and how they're also related concepts....you've also clearly started threading LGBT themes into other areas of your curriculum....”

I have no issue with some of this but I do want to ask how they are teaching sex / gender etc given Stonewall's view on self id and so I've drafted this so far:

Dear Mr X
Please could you let me know how Stonewall guidelines are being followed in lessons and particularly how these relate to sex and gender and self id?
Thank you yours xxx

Any suggestions for improving this? AIBU?

Also very interesting about the Birmingham case.

Social engineering at its finest.

Yet my son's headteacher defends the teaching of gender ideology as fact.

Yours faithfully, a reader of Bunty.

Well I read the link provided by HandsOffMyRights and I am still not clear what is the difference between gender expression and gender identity or more importantly, why it is being elevated over sex.

Gender expression - I think this means whether you express yourself in a masculine or feminine way (although I am not sure where my jeans and knitted hoodie fit, maybe the bunny slippers I am wearing are an expression of femininity, rather than just borrowed from my DD?)

Gender identity - this is I think how I feel about my gender. But what is my gender? The link says it is distinct from my sex which is based on biology (so they have that right). So my gender identity is how I feel about being assigned to the bunny slippers group and not the car slippers group? So what if I would prefer car slippers and everything which the car slippers group get? Then my gender identity is male?

Okay, so far so good, but why would I want everything to be organised on whether I want car or bunny slippers as opposed to what medical tests I might need based on my biological body? Why would gender expression (car or bunny slippers) be the basis for legal or social organisation rather than sex? Nobody seriously thinks that whether people can get pregnant say, or need abortions, is down to whether they prefer bunny or car slippers, do they?

It is just so confusing. It is not like they are saying biological sex does not exist; they acknowledge it does, but then they are saying what matters is your gender expression and how you identify (bunny or car slippers) and whether that matches what society thinks you should identify as. Just why?

I have finally gone up in flames and am now burned to a crisp with rage. Books for boys and books for girls? I used to be a school librarian - thank goodness I have retired. They would have to carry me out kicking and screaming.

The world has truly gone insane...

Thank you for all of these links, I’m going to draft something and I’ll report back on the response I get.

Gender expression - I think this means whether you express yourself in a masculine or feminine way

But men and women generally wear the same, jeans and t-shirts/jumpers.

Except the national dress for men is a skirt.

So I guess people who wear skirts are masculine and the rest of us neutral? Right?

What a steaming pile of pish.

Omg that young stonewall site is incomprehensible.
Let me see if I've got it straight.

Your gender is some feeling you have that attracts you to attaching the word "boy" or "girl" or neither to yourself. We all have one of these feelings even if we feel that we don't. It has nothing to do with the physical reality of sex, it's something else.
Everything we do - how we dress, stand(?!), what we read etc etc is deemed to be expressing this feeling that we can't tell we're feeling, even if we don't feel we're expressing anything. And everyone expresses their feeling differently. They may express it by matching stereotypes for the gender feeling that they don't know they're feeling, or by matching stereotypes for a different gender feeling that they're not feeling at all, because gender expression is unique and individual, and girls don't have to conform to any particular stereotypes.

So it's a feeling you can't tell you're feeling expressed in a way you can't tell you're expressing, and as such much more important than boring old observable biological sex in determining which 100m race you should participate in.

Have I got it right yet?

I’ve just seen another mumsnet thread, about Safe Schools Alliance taking legal action on this:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3768850-Safe-Schools-Alliance-support-Legal-action-against-Oxfordshire-Schools-Trans-Guidance

OP you could just ask the school how they are handling the obvious tensions between not wanting to promote gender stereotypes (because to do so is widely seen to be sexist and sexism blights lives) but wanting to promote gender stereotypes because that’s the basis of the political position that would describe everyone as having an inherent gender identity and that this identity could be trans or non binary or ‘cis’.