Thank you for highlighting this helpful resource.
When a male 16 year old friend of my daughter's began to identify as trans (and a lesbian) in y11, their school was unsure how to proceed - they'd only had females identifying as trans before - and decided to take advice from Mermaids and Stonewall about how to handle any issues that might arise.
They had a whole year celebration assembly for this student where the teachers were emotional and praised everyone for warmly accepting this student as a girl. The male pupil was now in the girls' PE lessons, though fortunately these were non- contact sports by this stage, and, although they were given a separate place/toilet to change, on at least one occasion they tried to come into the girls' changing rooms after PE to 'find their water bottle' and sometimes popped into the girls' loos as they were 'nearer'.
In mentioning these incidents to the DSL, I reminded the school that they were the safeguarding experts, not these organisations, and that above all else, normal rules for safeguarding should still apply for all pupils. I think the DSL would have found it useful to have this resource.
Going back to the earlier discussion around:
the 'incorrect' assumptions that male=male, female=female, girl/woman=female, boy/man=male.
And that some people may prefer "to interpret the Acts imagining that male can mean female, girl might mean boy, woman might mean man etc and vice versa".
Having now read through most of the committee stages of the Equality Act in Hansard, it is very noticeable that it is always the definitions male = male, female=female, girl/woman=female, boy/man=male, women = female of any age which are consistently used and intended and never the latter neo-definitions.
So what is the driver for changing the 'real' meaning of words for a 'pseudo-real' one? What are the consequences of change? Why is it so jarring when the ability of women and girls to preserve a single sex space - even linguistically - is questioned? Why does it matter if Stonewall conflates sex and gender, so homosexuality becomes 'same gender' rather than 'same sex' attraction? Or considers that a man or boy may be female or male and a woman or girl be male or female? And what might be the implications for safeguarding if we embrace such 'social fictions'?
I thought this might have some resonance once again:
"Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.
Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies, which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal people."
newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/
Further discussion here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4169150-Pseudo-realities-Power-and-Language-Games?pg=1