Critic my Letter to DD school regards LGBT club

[Sickoffamilydrama]

I've just found out that our 12 year old autistic DD has been attending a lunch time LGBT club and now tells me she is bisexual, (apparently she needs choose what she is) & suddenly obsessively drawing flags on everything including herself.

She has been exhibiting worsening ticks like pulling her hair really tight and lip licking until above her mouth is sore & finger sucking.

She suddenly has a friend who identifies as a boy as well (I don't care if our daughter is straight, gay or whatever) but I'm worried what has been discussed, she's 12 hasn't gone through puberty yet and shows limited comprehension regarding relationships, she doesn't need to worry about this, or be considering any kind of sexual relationship.

This has left her confused and clearly anxious, I'm beyond livid to see her distress especially as the school are not doing much about her being massively behind and clearly academically struggling.

So help me by looking at the draft wording for a letter to the head of year and the safe guarding lead.

Dear
I writing to you to raise my concerns regarding the school's lunch time LGBT club, which my daughter informs me is open to children in all year groups. Whilst it is admirable the school wish to support pupils, it is inappropriate that sexuality is discussed in a mixed age group.

My daughter who is autistic and vulnerable has recently been attending with her friend, this has left her confused and anxious with her exhibiting increased ticks, some of which are boarding on harmfull.
She tells me that she now needs to choose what sexuality she is and has become anxious she doesn't have a boyfriend or particularly have any sexual feelings towards boys, this has led her to become very distressed culminating in her deciding she must be bisexual. Even though she feels no attraction to girls. She has then obsessively been drawing flags on herself and with her notebooks.

Prior to attending the LGBT club she had never exhibited any of this anxiety around her sexuality, rightly so as she is 12 years old and still in the very early stages of puberty, therefore she should not be considering sex.

I am unclear what is discussed at this club but the mixed age group is clearly a safeguarding issue a 16/17/18 year old should never be talking to a 12 year old about sex or sexuality these age groups have quite different needs and comprehension. This massive difference between young and older teens is recognised in PHSE guidance hence why children are given age appropriate information. They also appears to be no pastoral or any other kind of support attached to this club which is present when PHSE is taught as part of the curriculum, neither was I aware of this club or my daughter attending it until she suddenly became distressed.

There also appears to have been no consideration for children like my daughter who have a disability that disadvantages her compared to her peers.The difficulties in understanding intentions, missing social subtleties, limited peer interactions and often lower emotional age, means that children with autism require more support or they risk misunderstand important information regarding sex and relationships.

I await your response on this matter.

Not sure if I should put less about the distress and confusion she's been exhibiting. Once this letter had gone I'll be raising the stonewall & mermaids links they have on their LGBT web page using safe school alliance templates/advice.

I suspect the LGBTQ club is where the slightly quirky and non-conforming kids hang out. I suspect many of the discussions are driven by the kids and you probably have one of the very nice, pastorally minded teachers running it who is probably managing it in an appropriate way. To some extent, for your daughter, having an adult around for these discussions is probably useful. I think the wider issue, and I massively feel for you, is the lack of SEN/Mental Health support. She may be a child who will very much struggle to manage in a mainstream, large secondary and it's awful.

I would manage the discussions around sexuality at home as you would anything else. Lots of reassurance that it doesn't matter and she doesn't have to decide yet. The rainbow thing is probably a way of finding an identity in what feels a shifting situation. If you think it makes her more anxious to follow the rainbow, then discourage it, if it's something she finds soothing, support it but contextualise in terms of rights and wider issues not just about identity and her sexuality.

And yes I have teens, and yes one is high functioning ASC -diagnosed after a horrid time as an early teen and yes, my kids have LGBTQ+ identities (it's hard to find a straight teen around in some social circles!) and yes, I have a job working with young people and disabled ones at that. So I don't actually think it's hugely concerning. Her lack of support is and I would want to discuss this with the pastoral team in more detail.

In my day they ‘quirky’ and non c kids hung out in computer club and ate pizza.

@SolasAnla

If it's a formal complaint open the letter with that statement as the school will have two process, one to deal with formal complaints and one for everything else.

Dear
I have a safeguarding concern please consider this letter a formal complaint.

Please note that I will be raising this very serious issue with the governors and Ofsted.

The safeguarding concern is for my daughter…she is 12 years old, still in..

To late it's already gone.

Then good luck!!

@Darhon

Your comments would be completely on the button if it wasn't for the emerging trend that the idea of social transition, binding, medicalisation and surgery for preteens is being normalised for & amongst our children - and we old fogey bigoted parents are being completely left out of the loop.

There are loads of trends that you have to navigate teens through and ASC ones with a more interventionist hand. Self-harm and neurological tics are fairly common at the moment. Knowing someone who thinks they are trans or wondering whether you are bi don’t necessarily lead to anything and overreacting and banning the child from attending are not always the best way to manage teens. But I also accept the poster’s child is highly anxious at the moment and probably needs lots of pastoral support.

@KittenKong

Yeah and in my day they were goths/undue kids. But this isn’t where we are at now. Also, I didn’t know anyone at all at School who was LGBTQ+ and kids who were often miserable and unhappy. So I really don’t want to go back to those days as some sort of accepting utopia. We are where we are in late post-industrialist capitalism and need to keep discourse open.

Indie not undue - sorry

The trouble is Darhon - what qualifies any teacher, pastorally minded or not, to run an LGBT club with children. What are the aim of the sessions? What qualifications do you need when dabbling in children's sexuality? Do you need to be LGBT? Apparently some groups in schools are run by sixth formers.
I'm a lesbian teacher with endless pastoral and safeguarding qualifications and I wouldn't touch a group like this with a bargepole. It's professionally dangerous, but like so many other initiatives being pushed at schools by adult LGBT activist groups, the issues of child development and psychology, let alone safeguarding are completely absent from all their work.

I said upthread, running a group like this, especially without explicit parental consent and an open curriculum plus supervision is opening up adults running this to all sorts of serious charges. Schools are places of learning, not where adults proselytise to children about sexuality. Children's emotional health and wellbeing is NOT best served by running groups about sex / sexualities.

I think it’s unprofessional too. When I was at school one teacher in particular was gay (others would have been - but we just didn’t care) and I remember my friend bumping into him at a gay club when she was almost 18 (in sixth year). She said that the just stopped, gawped at each other and then both sidled away (and it was never mentioned).

He didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know. As it should be! Unless a child (and these are kids) are exposed to harm then the teachers really have no right to get involved with their private lives, just as the children don’t have a right to their teachers private lives. And all l this ‘pick a sexuality NOW’ and ‘it’s our secret’ is just plain wrong, and very sinister.

Whilst your letter raises some very valuable and valid concerns, as the parent of a child with ASD I would be more likely to approach school first and ask what was being suggested in the club. My main difficulty being that my child hears "you could", "you might like to", "you may" as "You MUST". This leads to quite a number of situations where she has taken things in entirely the wrong way.

Lots of schools run LGBT clubs now- membership isn't restricted to those that identify as LGBT, but more as support groups for people and friends of people who are affected by questioning their identity.

All these threads make me wonder what the attitude of a school management would be to a mixed sex "heterosexual lunchtime club" with 18 year olds discussing sex and relationships with 11 year olds.

I somehow doubt it would be hailed as progressive and inclusive, and certainly any middle-aged-male-teacher who offered to run it (most likely alone) would be viewed askance!

Why is it that LGB children are presumed to be deserving of less stringent safeguarding than their peers?

@TurquoiseBaubles

All these threads make me wonder what the attitude of a school management would be to a mixed sex "heterosexual lunchtime club" with 18 year olds discussing sex and relationships with 11 year olds.

I somehow doubt it would be hailed as progressive and inclusive, and certainly any middle-aged-male-teacher who offered to run it (most likely alone) would be viewed askance!

Why is it that LGB children are presumed to be deserving of less stringent safeguarding than their peers?

Spot on Turquoise It's as if the collective educational brain has fallen out as soon as LGBT issues are raised. Out of the windows go boundaries, age appropriateness, safeguarding, the rights of children to be children .....

@TurquoiseBaubles

All these threads make me wonder what the attitude of a school management would be to a mixed sex "heterosexual lunchtime club" with 18 year olds discussing sex and relationships with 11 year olds.

I somehow doubt it would be hailed as progressive and inclusive, and certainly any middle-aged-male-teacher who offered to run it (most likely alone) would be viewed askance!

Why is it that LGB children are presumed to be deserving of less stringent safeguarding than their peers?

Definitely yes and possibly an argument I may resort to, just to highlight the issue. Perhaps this is why my spider senses tingle at these kind of things as innately know it is wrong.

So I have just sent this to my MP:

I am writing to you to highlight a potential safeguarding issue within my daughter’s school,..... Attached is a letter I sent to them, as you can see I only sent the letter today but I believe that it is still of interest to you as it highlights large holes in safeguarding, particularly of vulnerable pupils. My experience of schools particularly regarding autistic girls are that they are completely unprepared, lack knowledge of autism and because she is a “good, quiet” pupil completely underestimate how her autism affects her on a daily basis and her levels of vulnerability.

This issue emphasises for me that the school have not got a clear understanding of safeguarding principles, how can this club have had any kind of robust safeguarding risk assessment and been allowed to continue? There's a lack of protection for both students and staff in having unsupervised (as in the professional sense) mixed age meetings in school discussing sexuality. It leaves the adult/ older students open to allegations of grooming. Plus opens the door for peer on peer grooming and sexual abuse.

After the recent grooming scandals in..., County lines drug gangs operating in ... schools and the shocking testimony of children within Everyone’s Invited, schools in general should be much more cautious and robust regarding safeguarding however the abuse of girls continues, our older 14 year old daughter has already made us aware of the low level misogyny and sexual harassment she experiences in school. The lack of robust safeguarding within the school will clearly be contributing to this.

This issue is even more frustrating in light of the fact that we are struggling to get any support for our daughter’s SEN needs and she is slipping massively academically behind, as an example her reading age is 8 her chronological age is 12, however the school seem to believe that this is not an issue or even that she is “bad” enough to warrant extra academic support.

Thank you for your help on this matter. I will update you when I hear back from the school.

You'll notice I plagiarised some of you again

Today we have just had the report come from the autism specialist we paid to assess her and make recommendations to help her whilst in school, it's heart breaking to read, DH has just come in read it and I've told him what I've been up to, which has resulted in him crying and making me cry as he says what fucking chance does she have? Why did we bring her into this world?

I think this is my tipping point and time for me to stand up for my children and their future.

@Darhon No-one is over-reacting, certainly not with the children, but questioning school over clear breaches of safeguarding, with evidence.

I think you are in danger of an element of complacency, which is worryingly.present in those who work with children, including teachers and senior school management, and their unions.

[quote DoubleTweenQueen]@Darhon No-one is over-reacting, certainly not with the children, but questioning school over clear breaches of safeguarding, with evidence.

I think you are in danger of an element of complacency, which is worryingly.present in those who work with children, including teachers and senior school management, and their unions.[/quote]
I agree.

When we talk about grooming concerns, we're talking about the normalising of adult-child sexual talk. Even if the adult in question is well intentioned and not themselves a paedophile, the child is left more vulnerable to abuse by paedophiles because sexual talk with adults has been normalised.

The other huge concern with these groups is that they're not necessarily the safe space for girls that they purport to be. They are extremely likely to preach gender ideology, meaning that any girls with an emergent homosexual sexuality will be having their boundaries eroded from the offset.

That said I understand why young girls are drawn to these groups and to declarations of non-binary and asexual identities. I imagine they seem safer than the porn soaked alternative.

Today we have just had the report come from the autism specialist we paid to assess her and make recommendations to help her whilst in school, it's heart breaking to read, DH has just come in read it and I've told him what I've been up to, which has resulted in him crying and making me cry as he says what fucking chance does she have? Why did we bring her into this world?

OP I'm raging that your daughter hasn't received the support that she needs. This is heartbreaking to read.

I’m so sick of this shit. This constant pushing of discussions round sexuality to KIDS. My own dd - also autistic, also exhibited anxiety around what sexuality she might be at that age, also the flags etc etc. I think the flag thing is actually quite sinister and aimed directly at children - all those pretty colours and symbolism. Very concerned that it wasn’t apparent yet what sexuality she was and was there something wrong with her because she didn’t know yet? what if she was lesbian, maybe asexual given that she didn’t really fancy anyone yet, also she thought some girls were really pretty did that mean she was Bi? It went on for months. She was robustly told repeatedly that at 12 she wasn’t needing to “fancy” anyone or know what her sexuality was and gradually it tapered off. She’s 15 now and largely past it. My point is that this stuff is being forced into children who are not equipped to deal with it because they’re too young and don’t have the thinking skills for it, and it’s causing them massive anxiety.

Leave the kids alone FFS!

Great letter though OP. Will look forward to seeing what they say.

I would demand that your child is excluded from the club immediately based on her autism - children with autism usually develop their sexuality a few years after neurotypical children. She will also be highly suggestible regarding gender identity and is more likely to have issues with her developing body (can’t cope with change so well). On top of that once she has made a decision it will be hard to change her mind (black and white thinking). I would be extremely anxious that she will choose a trans gender identity.

Seems to cover it all. Well done.

I am a school governor and would certainly have serious concerns about this. The subject of sexuality should be discussed in a formal lesson with suitably qualified and vetted staff. It should not be discussed in an apparently school-generated and sanctioned extra-curricular group without proper supervision and without permission from parents.

Clearly these things will be under discussion in the playground, but that is a whole different ball game to an official school group.

It is particularly worrying as the incidence of transgender feelings is far more common amongst those on the autistic spectrum and your DD is likely to be susceptible to pressure on this matter, before she is able to deal with this.

I hope that you manage to get some satisfactory outcome to all this - although to some extent the damage is done it would seem.

I do think that some staff are so keen to be seen to be inclusive that some of the subtleties go out of the window.

How bloody awful; I'd be livid with the school that this was done without consultation with parents. At a time when so many kids feel confused and pressured to be woke or bi or sexy or gender different.

   Can you suggest to your daughter   " You don't need to make any decisions at all about   your sexuality. The reason you don't have those feelings  yet  is because  you' re not an adult yet.  When your body is ready  for those feelings  it will tell you, and your heart will   just know. "

is more likely to have issues with her developing body (can’t cope with change so well). Yes she's already expressed worry about developing pubic hair.

This makes me so cross - the inclusive agenda that is pushed by certain teachers within schools then passed off as "student led." I worry that children and teenagers are being manipulated - they are impressionable and the trend is being given credibility. As a parent when you voice a concern you are supposedly bigoted - I just hope the tide turns soon

@2bazookas

How bloody awful; I'd be livid with the school that this was done without consultation with parents. At a time when so many kids feel confused and pressured to be woke or bi or sexy or gender different.

   Can you suggest to your daughter   " You don't need to make any decisions at all about   your sexuality. The reason you don't have those feelings  yet  is because  you' re not an adult yet.  When your body is ready  for those feelings  it will tell you, and your heart will   just know. "</div></div>

Yes if I get an opening then I'll keep underlining that no decision needs to be made yet. Luckily her Dsister is very grounded and actually has an influence to so hopefully that will help.