Aside from the clear Safeguarding issues.
The school & parents who support this are teaching that boy/girl's men/women's changing spaces are determined by who 'chooses' to wear a swimming costume rather than trunks. Except of course the majority of children are wearing sex specific swim wear.
Dr Katie Alcock (Psychology lecturer Lancaster University) explains well-established child development stages by which young children come to understand sex classification. This is initially based on superficial characteristics eg hair & clothing.
(extract)
"This is a rough summary of a talk I gave on April 27th in Lancaster as part of an event I and other members of For Women Lancashire organised entitled Gender Identity: Safeguarding Children and Young People. (continues)
Now these days we are all anti-stereotyping and we are convinced we have not raised our children to know what sex stereotypes are. If the only influences on children were things people said directly to them, and especially things we as parents said directly to them, this might work out. But children don’t grow up in a vacuum — they see the other children at nursery, they see toys that other children play with, obviously they hear what other adults than their parents say but most of what children take in is not from people talking to them, but from what they see.
Making generalisations is a very useful skill for a baby or child — if they couldn’t make generalisations, they would never be able to work out that a new cat they saw was in fact a cat, or a new apple was just as good to eat as the last one, or a new car is likely also to go places. Children can work out at a very young age that there are men and women, boys and girls, in the world — it’s probably quite useful for them to work this out in the general scheme of things.
So when they see all the girls at nursery wearing pink and having long hair, well, that’s what girls do! And they also realise, from what people are saying, and from how their parents dress them, what toys they are given, and what toys other children who look like them (same clothes, same hair) what they are supposed to like and do based on what sex they are.
If you’re interested in reading more about how insidious gender stereotypes are in children’s worlds, you could do much worse than read pretty much the whole website at Let Toys Be Toys.
So, based on the idea that girls have long hair and boys have short hair, James is also age-perfect in thinking that when appearance changes, sex changes too. Until the age of about 7 (yes, 7 — in some children it’s older) children think that when something changes its appearance, its underlying reality changes too. This doesn’t just apply to sex, it applies to pretty much everything."
www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLd6suGdLIPWWnUIXHJYllSnnpWB7oeONx&time_continue=62&v=_BFDgO_y9cc&feature=emb_logo
But at the same time — we’re talking 4, 5, 6 and even 7 — children do NOT understand that people’s genitals (and biology in general, but genitals are more obvious to small children) are what makes them boys or girls, men or women. Researchers think that earlier knowledge about biological differences between men and women does help children to understand at a younger age that people cannot change sex.
But it isn’t a complete answer — some children can understand that men have penises and women have vaginas, but still think that changing clothing makes a girl into a boy, if they also think that a cat wearing a dog mask has become a dog. In other words, to get to a mature understanding of sex constancy you need to understand what makes a boy and a girl, biologically, and also understand that the underlying essence of a thing isn’t dependent on its appearance.
Now we come to the present day and the transgender agenda. Parents are, by and large, reasonably happy for their children to do things that are outside the range of what’s generally in the “allowed” stereotypes for their sex. That is to say, mums are happy whatever their children do and dads are happy for their girls to do “boy” things. Dads are much less happy for their boys to do “girl” things or wear “girl” clothes. This is 100% no doubt linked to the devaluing of things to do with women — lower pay, lesser status, “run like a girl” is an insult, “man up” a positive suggestion.
But of course children have their own preferences and influences and they like doing what they like doing even if that happens to be something their parents think isn’t “right” for their sex. It’s called personality. So, even when children realise that boys are “supposed” to like cars and wear jeans and have short hair, they may not actually want to do that if they are a boy.
So we now have children like “Lily”, here shown on the Victoria Derbyshire programme. Lily is 6. Six year olds think that if you change your clothes, you change sex. Lily therefore thinks that putting on a dress makes you into a girl. Literally makes you into a girl. Not “means your inner gender essence is a girl”. Literally changes your sex." (continues)
medium.com/@katieja/young-children-reality-sex-and-gender-3421f4f165f1