Gender Ideology in a Special Needs School

[lifeissweet]

I've just taken a parent around an SEN school. The child needs this school and it is the perfect place for her.

As part of the tour, we were shown a big display board entitled 'diversity'. On it was a massive trans flag and a big 'Trans rights are human rights' poster plus a lot of work by the pupils about being kind and inclusive to 'gender diverse people'. There was nothing about Gay rights (apart from a few pictures of drag queens) or disability rights (which is ironic) or women's rights...

The Mum looked at it for a long time and said 'I don't get this. What is this?! Why are you teaching this?'

After the visits she says she doesn't want her DC going there if that's what they teach.

As I said, she needs the support this school offers. This is the only school in the city that would meet her needs and this has put her mother off.

I plan to feed this back. I whole heartedly agree with the message that everyone should belong and be inclusive, but this was one area of diversity - and not an uncontroversial one.

Why? Why are they doing this? I am going to have to do quite a bit of work to convince this family to look past the indoctrination of their child and let her have the education she deserves.

Because other parents and students value it.

It was one of the questions I asked when looking around a sn secondary school for my child.

This was a couple of years ago but at the time I felt it was a valid concern that my child who has autism understood clearly what sex they are and what physical parts of their body attributes to that.

Safeguarding for a child with limited understanding and speech is more imperative in these schools so I didn't give a duck if they didn't like the questions.

I hope u are able to convince the parents to come back as the right school is very important

I hope you are able to convince the school that the parents have valid concerns that their child could be confused and encouraged down a path of irreversible physical damage which they later regret.

It is an important safeguarding concern for the parents of autistic daughters at the moment.

This maybe true, but why risk alienating the ones who don't appreciate this message?

I mean, I could have sold it as a positive if there had been an over-arching message of everyone belonging and being included, but it wasn't that.

It was photos of drag queens and information about pronouns and 'Trans women are women'

It was about one thing (+ drag queens, which I also have an enormous problem with. What is their 'special community'? That is not representative of either the trans or gay communities, it's borderline offensive) - and it's something that many parents are really worried about. Especially around Children with autism or other special needs.

“Inclusivity” turns out to not be inclusive AT ALL - excluding those who know sex is real, and ignoring age, disability, race, belief & sexuality.

In our send school, where the pupils are mostly all diagnosed with autism, we actually have to do a lot of work around different cultures and diversity of skin colours and disabilities. The vast majority of our children are able bodied though May have some gross and fine motor difficulties, but don't use wheel chairs for example. They actually need direct teaching about the wider world.

So no, I don't get it either.

I think this can be a particular issue for children with SEN and intellectual disabilities. They may need much more support and explicit teaching about who is a man/woman/boy/girl than a child without SEN. They may also need explicit teaching about staying safe and people not necessarily being who they say they are / something not being true even if someone said it. For example: "This man is asking you to come and look at the puppies he has in the back of his van. Do you think you should go? Why (not)?"

For children and young adults who struggle with understanding that people may have ulterior motives and may want to cause them harm, why is it a priority to teach about trans people who may not look like (say) a woman, but who you need to accept as a woman because they say they are a woman?

I didn’t send my child to any of the secondary SEN schools in my borough for a similar reason. He is a now a teen and still gets pronouns mixed up due to a speech and language disorder, so to introduce this ideology would completely floor him - he wouldn’t know what to think. He is also very trusting and wouldn’t have the ability to challenge any of this. The school I saw (and this was 4 years ago) had a big display with about 30 flags of different ‘genders’ they had got the children to colour in. I was actually gobsmacked. Like the school you looked round OP, no other forms of diversity were on the display.

I always wondered about how gender Identity is taught in special schools, alongside biology. I can imagine it might be confusing to some children to on one hand be told that only women can have babies, and then to be told that men (trans men) can have babies. it must be a minefield and extremely difficult to teach in a clay that is simple and clear.

Good for that mum.

She clearly recognises that the psychological (and then potentially physical) damage gender ideology will do to her child far outweighs the benefits of going to that particular school.

Until more parents challenge this, more and more children are going to be damaged and confused.

She's right to protect her child.

It's directly a worry to have such garbage taught, but then you also wonder, what other kinds of bs have they fallen for? And do they really respect the line around what it is appropriate for schools to teach and not teach without the parents being in on it?

TBH, I appreciate the difficulty of your position op, but I don't think you should try and convince these parents to send the child.

Do they? I have my doubts.

My foster son has learning disability and attends a special school. He got in trouble at school for disagreeing with a teacher who said transwomen are women. He said but they can't really be a woman if they have a penis miss. Boys have a penis not girls. They just like pretending to be a girl. He got told off at school and a detention. I got a phone call home telling me his attitude was poor and discriminatory.

Good grief. This is appalling.

My ASD son refused to colour in a trans flag at the academic support centre he attends. He told them "I don't feel comfortable doing that because they are mean to my Mum and Dad"
We were both in the process of being terf hunted out of a tenants organisation at the time.

Regarding the display, I also think it's inappropriate. Equalities should be handled as a whole, with the message that everyone should be valued and included. The obvious place to start would be disability discrimination which the children will surely have experienced themselves. It's a short hop from there to understanding that other groups are discriminated against and that its always wrong. Absolutely no need to focus on trans issues to the exclusion of other groups.

It reminds me of the "Human Rights" training that caused such a furore amongst Muslim parents a few years ago. If you are going to talk about the equalities act in a majority Muslim school why on earth wouldn't you start with Freedom of religion and Islamaphobia and then cycle around to the need to treat other groups with the same consideration you would expect for yourself.

To be honest its something that has been foisted on people/society by a tiny minority with the pretense that if you dont agree you're a bigot/phobic etc etc so everyone just sleep walks along with it.

I dont know anyone who 'values' it in that way. More like sits uncomfortably with it.

Part of the problem too is that it's not really about getting along with others, with whome we may or may not share values. THey are not having these kids colour in all these flags in order to make them accept that people have different feelings and views about sexual attraction or sexual behaviour. Rather, they are giving the kids a model of sexuality and saying it is the correct one. And by extention, people who think other models are better/more accurate, like GC feminists, or Catholics, or anyone else, is wong and intolerant.

That's certainly not what they do when (if?) they talk about religious discrmiination - they aren't telling the kids they all need to believe in any particular religion or accept what all religious people say as true.

It's overstepping and of course parents shouldn't accept it.

Equalities should be handled as a whole, with the message that everyone should be valued and included. The obvious place to start would be disability discrimination which the children will surely have experienced themselves. It's a short hop from there to understanding that other groups are discriminated against and that its always wrong. Absolutely no need to focus on trans issues to the exclusion of other groups.

Completely this (where's the round of applause emoticon?!)
Leaving aside what aspect of inclusivity we're talking about, it's just staggeringly bad practice to focus on one and leave out others.
I feel for the child, and for his mother, who clearly don't have much choice apart from a rock and a hard place.
I would feed this incident back to the school in very strong terms.

The Head of the SEN school needs to protect the children from dangerous ideologies that can be extremely harmful to ASD kids.

Part of the problem too is that it's not really about getting along with others, with whome we may or may not share values. THey are not having these kids colour in all these flags in order to make them accept that people have different feelings and views about sexual attraction or sexual behaviour. Rather, they are giving the kids a model of sexuality and saying it is the correct one

This is true. The awkward thing is that the young women running the centre absolutely do not understand that this is what they're doing.

No they don't, but it's pretty normal in equalities teaching of all kinds now. It's a difference in approach which a lot of people are really uncomfortable with because it means accepting that there are others who may think very differently than you about things you think are important, and that it's not really the place of schools or the state to tell people what to think about those issues.

We really ceded this ground 20 years ago and now we are seeing the results.

it means accepting that there are others who may think very differently than you about things you think are important, and that it's not really the place of schools or the state to tell people what to think about those issues.

When I first started work in the kinds of jobs that have equalities training that was exactly how it was done.
We were told that everyone had different values and everyone inevitably had biases. We could never be truely rid of them but we could be mindful of them and take extra care not to let them effect the service we provide.

It's a difference in approach which a lot of people are really uncomfortable with because it means accepting that there are others who may think very differently than you about things you think are important

Current equalities teaching is very much not accepting others think differently to you. It i's about saying QT is most important, your a bigot if you don't also promote this, and should be condemned for blasphemy if you disagree.

The women a friend works as a carer with insist that they only see female doctors (the conversation came up because I said I prefer to see a female doctor) and at the moment these requirements are honoured for them. These are women who need a lot of medical care during their lives, and what this school is now teaching seems like a way of trying to break down those safety and dignity boundaries early for the next generation. To what end?

How do you know this? Do you even know which school OP is talking about?