"Nearly one in every 15 pupils at a leading secondary school identify as trans or non-binary - with majority declaring their gender change after lockdown last summer"

[ResisterRex]

In the Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10746771/Nearly-one-15-pupils-leading-secondary-school-identify-trans-non-binary.html

• More than 60 have declared their gender to be different from their birth sex
• A teacher said the pupils were aged between 11 and 18 and almost all were girls
• They added staff were ‘blundering in the dark’ without government guidance

"The majority have done so since most Covid-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted last summer, raising concern about the impact of online trans ‘influencers’ on youngsters who were largely confined to their homes for months."

"Fearful of criticism or censure, she claimed many colleagues feel obliged to accept the situation even when they have concerns about a student’s mental health or that they may be subject to peer pressure.
The revelation comes days after Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said officials were drawing up ‘clear’ guidance on how teachers should deal with trans pupils."

Miriam Cates is quoted and the school in question, is anonymous.

I think DD nearly fell down this hole and much of it was to do with finding puberty distressing.
I think there is an idea that for girls puberty is awful and boys just sail through it. We’ve had discussions and she is now seeing some boys in her year going through it (and laughing at their voice changes).
my friends daughter who is ‘trans’ seems an awful lot to do with not wanting to have periods/breasts. Basically not to change at all.
Puberty is awful and your body changes out of your control etc. it doesn’t mean your body is wrong though.

Yes very much a step backwards. We as grown adult women can see it for what it is but our young people have been so thoroughly bamboozled. The whole gender ideology movement slowly crept in and then seemed to snowball. Adults need to stop facilitating and instead promote the positive message that it is just fine to be however you want to be in the Gender you are born in.

My dd is yr13 and I have the exact same debate with her. Surely separating sex and gender is just reinforcing gender stereotypes that woman have spent the last 100years campaigning against?

I also work in a secondary school. It was a big thing when we got our first transgender student 4 years ago. Now there are over a dozen on our registers. And the fast majority are yr9 girls. It’s scary watching this trend.

Couldn't agree more. Feels like watching a slow motion car crash that we can't stop :(

I agree with gender ideology being a current social contagion but I also agree with others that it links in with other wider changes to our society including:

• everyone being online all the time
• easy access to porn
• greater access to and acceptability of cosmetic surgery, fillers etc

I think all of these things are really hard to tackle, especially with teenagers. Not sure what the answer is!

I agree with these:

• everyone being online all the time
• easy access to porn
• greater access to and acceptability of cosmetic surgery, fillers etc

I'm surprised at the number of 30-somethings doing various things to their faces. Some of these are school mums and some of these are colleagues. But I don't have an SM account so I've no idea how often some form of intervention for your face is pushed at you though I'm sure it's often enough.

Anyone with pre-teen or teen daughters might find this useful. It's Helena Kerschner's account of how she "became trans".

She detransitioned and now, at 23, writes and talks about her experiences.

I think a key headline for the mums here is that her transition was closely linked to the online world she spent so much time in inc. Tumblr and various fandoms.

lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name?s=r

Here are some YouTubes with her:

Worryingly, I have a friend who works in the DfE who says it's mostly captured - so I worry about the guidance which will emerge.

If people have time, have a read of this article
www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-30916794.html

It covers a period of Irish history in the mid 80s where the country seemed gripped by the phenomen of religious statutes moving of their own accord. It was mass hysteria, egged on by the Catholic church, who were facing a crisis of societal changes outstripping their stance on matters such as divorce & womens reproductive rights and their grip on society was weakening. I am old enought to remember it being pushed in school as fact (although not catholic, I went to a convent school) and the fervour whipped up by it. I don't have kids so really haven't paid much attention to the child side of the trans movement. Reading the posts on this thread made me automatically think of that one year when common sense flew out the window to be replaced by make believe. As the author of the quoted piece says, it was a diversion from troubling economic, social and world events and became a social outlet for communities otherwise ignored . Can't help thinking there are echos of it in the current trans phenomenon.

The DfE has been completely captured for many years. It's why so many completely unsuitable individuals and groups have received so much government funding and publicity to push their toxic views at young children. Fortunately it is the EHRC who are leading on drawing up the guidelines so I doubt the DfE will be allowed to push illegal Stonewall etc lies laws. The EHRC have been de-Stonewalled and we must hope that this happens to the DfE asap.

The EHRC has had its political impartiality training but a LinkedIn search shows they have pronouning staff there. That's a political act which has no place at work and especially not in a public sector place of work. Ofsted also has staff announcing pronouns on LinkedIn.

This matters because they're there to be impartial and to apply the law or the inspection framework.

But not many workplaces are monolithic so there will be some people in all of these places who know what the law is and how to provide balanced advice etc.

The EHRC are absolutely adamant that their current technical guidance for schools is correct. It effectively tells schools to immediately affirm children as the opposite see, with no lower age limit.

The relevant sections are 3.35 which says:

“A previously female pupil has started to live as a boy and has adopted a male name. Does the school have to use this name and refer to the pupil as a boy?

Not using the pupil’s chosen name merely because the pupil has changed gender would be direct gender reassignment discrimination. Not referring to this pupil as a boy would also result in direct gender reassignment discrimination.”

And sections 5.112-5.114:

5.112 “Gender reassignment is a personal process (rather than a medical process) that involves a person moving away from his or her birth sex to his or her preferred gender and thus expressing that gender in a way that differs from, or is inconsistent with, the physical sex with which he or she was born.”

5.113 “This personal process may include undergoing medical procedures or, as is more likely for school pupils, it may simply include choosing to dress in a different way as part of the personal process of change.”

5.114 “A person will be protected because of gender reassignment once:
• he or she makes his or her intention known to someone, regardless of who this is (whether it is someone at school or at home, or someone such as a doctor);
• he or she has proposed to undergo gender reassignment, even if he or she takes no further steps or decides to stop later on;
• there is manifestation of an intention to undergo gender reassignment, even if he or she has not reached an irrevocable decision;
• he or she starts or continues to dress, behave or live (full- time or part-time) according to the gender with which he or she identifies as a person;
• he or she undergoes treatment related to gender reassignment, such as surgery or hormone therapy; or
• he or she has received gender recognition under the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
It does not matter which of these applies to a person for him or her to be protected because of the characteristic of gender reassignment.“

In other words, the EHRC technical guidance for schools says that all a child has to do to become a protected individual via Gender Reassignment, is change their clothes or say they are the opposite sex. This is self ID for children (under 18s).

Baroness Falkner and senior staff at the EHRC have been made aware of the safeguarding concerns around their guidance but are not changing it. While they may be showing an understanding of the safeguarding issues around single sex spaces, I have no faith in their understanding of the issues around gender ideology in schools.

Missed out the link to the guidance. It’s dreadful, and I don’t think it reflects the requirements of the EA.

www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/technical_guidance_for_schools_england.pdf

@MrsOvertonsWindow @ResisterRex @rogdmum I wrote recently to the EHRC following their recent guidance on single sex spaces to ask about how it applies to schools. Their reply was as follows:

" The guidance has been produced for the use of service providers - swimming pools, healthcare facilities, shops etc. This guidance is not written with schools in mind, as schools are covered by separate legislation and face a range of regulations that go beyond our equality law remit, such as safeguarding and data protection. We have called on the Government to produce full and authoritative guidance to schools to support trans children in their care."

I responded to ask:

• Which government(s) have you asked to issue guidance? (I live in Wales, so DfE guidance wouldn't apply here)


• Does your call for guidance highlight the need to balance the rights of all children, and their parents/carers, and take into account all protected characteristics, not just how to 'support trans children'?


• Can you confirm that schools are expected to comply with equality law, and, if so, explain why is it not the responsibility of the EHRC to issue guidance about what that entails?

No reply after 12 days. I sent a chaser on friday, and have recieved an error message suggesting that their email server is not receiving emails. Hopefully a technical blip and not evidence that their correspondence team are trying to avoid questions!

That's disappointing @rogdmum. The only thing I can see is that this guidance isn't statutory guidance. DfE could change its statutory guidance and that could be the rules, as it were? Then this could be withdrawn.

@MintyMoocow you are spot on.

Society should be looking at what it’s doing to teenage girls that makes them so horrified by the idea of being female.

Society should also be taking legal action against people who persuade children into unnecessary drugs/surgery. Especially the doctors who carry it out. A lot of the problems we’re seeing now could have been avoided if the medical profession had stuck to the original idea of ‘do no harm’.

I almost feel that it's a step backwards that all the gender stereotypes that previous generations have tried to break down, are almost being re-introduced.

Unfortunately, not everyone was on board with breaking down stereotypes. I honestly think that some of this traces back to this generation of teens having been the first lot of babies to have been positively bathed in girls-have-to-have-pink-megablocks. At one point, Early Learning Centre did two types of inflatable globe. A standard one, with blue sea, and a pink one in which all the political geography was laid out in shades of pink and lilac. And people bought the pink one for their daughters and grand-daughters.

At every turn, these girls have been told that to be a girl is to like stereotypically feminine things. If they didn't, they either had to find fault with the whole of society and their families that kept buying them pink versions of everything, or find fault with themselves.

Lots of girls clearly find it far easier to say, "girls like pink, and my family just didn't realise that I'm not a girl" than to say, "this society is horrendously sexist and I want to destroy these oppressive restrictions on what girls may like".

I hope so ResisterRex . The responses I’ve had direct to me and other responses I’ve seen to others have been simply awful. They have applied a very broad brush to gender reassignment under the EA which I believe goes far beyond the act. My understanding is that the legal person who oversaw the guidance has close links to Mermaids so it’s no surprise the guidance ended up the way it did, but to not update it now is incomprehensible to me.

Even if they just strengthened the section on other rights to make it clear that there is a balance of rights, the EA being ONE part, that need to be taken into consideration (with some examples) would be helpful. They argue that they can only tackle the EA which is fair enough, but they have made their own decisions on what constitutes discrimination to children under gender reassignment and not made it clear the EA comes within a wider legal framework.

There’s also the issue of NB with many schools misunderstanding that they cannot categorically say that a child is protected under gender reassignment if they adopt a nb identity. The EHRC could easily update the guidance to point this out but they have refused.

@rogdmum have you seen this? Putting this with your posts seems like the EHRC's technical guidance:

• can't be statutory (so what's it even for?)
• might never have had a good basis on which to be issued if they're saying safeguarding and data protection are beyond their remit.

@foodfiend I hope you don't mind me quoting this! It just seems like there are some jigsaw pieces that could be coming together.

PS @foodfiend you might want to see if the group challenging the Welsh government could help with your query on single sex? They're called Public Child Protection Wales

Legal challenge: Welsh government's RSE lessons www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4536619-legal-challenge-welsh-governments-rse-lessons

ResisterRex Yes, and that’s all along the lines of what I’ve seen from the EHRC. Personally, I don’t think schools should be following the guidance for the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but I know multiple schools that I would call “activist” schools that have used the guidance as their justification for affirming children where parents would prefer to take a more cautious approach.

The Head at my daughters school told me in writing (report following our formal complaint) that following watchful waiting is unlawful for schools because of the guidance!

I’ve also raised the issue with the EHRC about schools affirming without telling parents and their response was to say effectively say they have nothing to do with how schools implement their guidance and had no interest in the safeguarding risks around it.

It’s a bit of a sore point with me!

It won’t be I don’t think.

this has huge parallels with emo- not sure if anyone else was one or just me 😆

subcultures like this get their hooks into kids who are a bit unhappy - their parents have split, not many friends, or feeling a bit of an outsider. They become an entire identity and dysfunctional ‘community’ which makes them feel accepted, more powerful, part of something, like the reason why they always felt a bit outside has been explained. but they can’t see that that doesn’t make their new lifestyle good or healthy.
lots of girls at my secondary school were emos - the black/neon clothes, dyed choppy hair, they listened to melancholy rock music and spent tons of time on MySpace and similar interacting with other emos. But there was a fashion for self-harm - proving your ‘emo feelings’ by cutting yourself and self harming. The equivalent of puberty blockers and binders now I guess. And the online ‘community’ just encouraged the girls to distance themselves from their family; because the ‘grown ups don’t get it and don’t know the real you’. As far as I know every girl outgrew it, but it took time and emotional maturity. Luckily I didn’t get the hello kitty tattoos I desperately wanted, I dread to think of the state of ‘gender queer’ kids as adults with the irreversible damage of puberty blockers and operations.

@Organictangerine We’re all a bit long in the tooth to have been emos!! I was teaching when the shift from Emo to ‘identities’ happened, it suddenly just became a thing about 10 years ago.

Thank you rogdmum - that's depressing.
I do know that there's been a lot of work going on "behind the scenes" for a while. The announcement that schools must not transition children in secret from parents as well as the new review is, I've heard, partially as a result of the devastating issues raised in the interim report from the Cass Review which confirmed the disastrous state of GIDs along with what's been exposed via court cases (Appleby, Bell etc & the CQC judgement). There was a throwaway comment about what's happening in schools which I believe is an indication that finally questions are being asked about the nature and motivations of some of the groups that the DfE have funded for schools.

Sorry but I have noticed a trend. If they don't fit the classic "pretty" girl or the classic "don't even know what word to use for boys this young so won't try" boy

then they go NB.

They are always small and a little chubby with short hair.

I'm going to put out there what I always think they were thinking 'I'm not a pretty girl, so I must not be a girl. A girl is someone who likes frilly skirts and flowers, I don't so I must not be a girl' with an element of 'shit, best not call myself a girl or I'll get told I'm not pretty enough'

Because I had very bad acne as a girl, and got told on two occasions; once by a male classmate in sixth form, once by a random woman at a bus stop that I have 'too many spots to be a girl'

I can only envisage this idea that if you are not pretty you can't be a girl has increased, not decreased, given this trend towards identity politics.

I genuinely think this is what's going on and it's based on observations and reflections.