Urgent help please! Trans lesson in primary school

[CantSayNothing]

Evening ladies of the feminism board

I am in urgent need of your help. I have been a lurker on these boards for a long time and read the intelligent and rational arguments and counter arguments put forward by countless posters (some of whom are regrettably no longer around) about the explosion around the transgender issue in recent years.

I absolutely believe in biological sex being fixed and real and anything else is personal preferences, personality, presentation. So far I have been a quiet, petition signing GC supporter, but I fear I am going to have to put my money where my mouth is and come out, as it were, with a bang.

I've had notice that my daughters primary school is planning to run a course of sex education lessons next term (she is year 6) which I have no issue with in theory. BUT one of the lesson plans has completely floored me.

Called: Gender Issues Relationships, it reads like an absolute trans gender woo manifesto with enough red flags to decorate the entire school in bunting .... 'assigned female at birth' ... 'gender identity' ..... 'in the wrong body'... 'discuss the difference between transgender and transvestite' ... 'clothes appropriate to the opposite sex' ....

They will also be 'introducing the idea that intersex people have anatomy that is not male or female, in the same lesson.

The clincher for me is the link they are recommending the teacher uses to introduce transgender children ... a 7 year out of date BBC news article by Victoria Derbyshire about two very confused little 6-8 yo boys who preferred to play with dolls and hello kitty therefore obviously should be actual girls. The srticle helpfully suggests contacting mermaids for more support :

bbc.in/1yQCpRw

My initial response to this lesson plan is "absofuckinlutely not!"

I will 100% not give consent for my daughter (who has already expressed some gender confusion and mooted the idea of being non binary and then reverted to her biological self after a while of dressing slightly gender non confirmingly) to have her confusion endorsed and promoted in this way, even have her signposted to organisations that have supported so many children in extraordinary acts of self harm.

But i also feel very strongly that this lesson should not be presented, to impressionable 10 and 11 year olds, by an authority figure like their teacher as though this ideology is in any way based in fact rather than stereotypes and confusion at all.

I feel it could sow some very dangerous ideas for their teenage years, coming on the back of a set of 'sex, friendship, and healthy relationships' lessons and given the same weight and authority.

I want to go and speak to the headteacher / safeguarding / whoever i need to, ideally to get this lesson removed from the course, if not at minimum highly amended so that it focuses more on:

'you all have these wonderful biological male/female bodies that can do amazing things, which will be going through some unsettling changes pretty soon, and it is normal to feel confused about where you fit in and question your feelings and emotions.

'You can like what you like, wear what you want, style your hair and makeup however you like, take part in any hobbies, have feelings for people of the opposite or same sex, but this does not mean that you are "in the wrong body" ... you are your body, and your feelings are all ties up in the same self '

Please please could someone (Or many someones) help me take this apart so I don't get tongue tied and incoherently babble about gender stereotypes being pushed at our children at unprecedented levels in society and no bloody wonder there's an explosion of young female children wanting to stop the noise.

Thank you so much

You know what I mean tho don't need to twist it into something so negative

It's dimensionscurriculum.co.uk. You have to sign up though to get samples of the content so don't know if you can without being a teacher/school

Absolutely. Please let's keep this thread on track.

Good luck.

Exactly this. IMHE a significant number of girls hate puberty to the point of real unhappiness, shame, embarrassment . Girls who are earlier to reach puberty become the butt of bullies, harassment and mocking by their not yet puberty classmates- particularly boys but not exclusively.
it Is horrible. I still look back on that period in my life with a sick feeling and real horror at what was done to me even by friends - that was over 45 years ago.

At the time there was not the added pressure of social media or the promotion of gender - it was common for girls to be described as “Tom boys” in a fairly normalised way without it being derogatory. No one had any notions that they were somehow different or special (e.g. being born on wrong body) only that they weren’t expressing themselves as “feminine”.

just leave kids clear that puberty is shite. It will pass eventually. It is entirely normal to not want to express yourself in the increasingly narrow gender stereotypes society is piling on young people these days. Explore that…find out what makes you comfortable in what you do and how you do it and with whom. But stop pushing the whole idea that we “have” a gender . Challenge the whole concept of gender to free kids of the tyranny it brings and unhappiness it causes.

Hi OP - are the other parents aware of this? I was presently surprised that when this issue came up at the school my children go to, at least half the parents in the class contacted the head after the lesson plan went out (not the exact one you have shown, just a similar topic) and this resulted in the lesson being radically altered.

Good luck OP - this is an important issue.

I certainly wouldn't have liked to have the material you have posted thrust at me as a ten year old. Basic facts about how puberty changes the bodies of both boys and girls would have been sufficient.

Differences between transvestites and transgender, at that age? No, but fine for a discussion for older children say 14/15 plus.

Then there is the complete muddle about 'intersex' which is no longer a term used.

It generally seems a scrappy piece of work.

That's very heartening Iknowitsheresomewhere.
Parents really have got to be the gatekeepers in terms of protecting children from age inappropriate material and pressure from adults weaponising them for their own interests.

Well done OP for pursuing this.

BTW, us 'old fogies' have often seen a lot of life and some of us have quite racy pasts. Sometimes that is why we urge caution, because we see where rushing headlong has got us.

@Pickabearanybear they are just being themselves that's the point. No one said I was making them have surgery or have puberty blockers or the like. They just prefer to dress 'like a boy' and have a unisex name instead of their (traditionally) girlie one. That's it.

Differences between transvestites and transgender, at that age? No, but fine for a discussion for older children say 14/15 plus.

I didn't think that talking about transvestites was politically correct?

Totally agree.
My aunt refers to herself as a butch lesbian.
She has very short hair, she wears traditionally male clothing, male aftershave, a job in a male dominated area, downs pints, sits with her legs spread but she’s still a woman. She’s the life and soul and totally at ease with who she is.
Young people should be taught to celebrate being themselves. Their real, authentic selves. Not a completely unachievable, imaginary version of themselves.
Pretending they can be something they absolutely cannot be is so damaging.

But you don't need to be trans to do that. Why cant girls wear what they like as a girl?

op

Also worth looking at the Tavistock website as of the head teacher comes back with false suicide stats etc you can show them.that even the GIDs services say its extremely rate.

@Looneytune253

Keira Bell sadly hasn't found it easy to "just go back to being female again" I think, mainly, that is what is one of the most concerning aspects about children believing that they can change sex.

Speak to Safe Schools Alliance who should be able to direct you to the government guidance etc. I’m sure that the Department of Education has stipulated that schools may not teach this ‘born in the wrong body’ pseudo-science nonsense. Schools also have a legal duty to present both sides of a political argument, it is literally illegal for the school to teach trans ideology without also teaching the opposite view.

I would get my facts straight and then write to the headteacher requesting a meeting and setting out the ways in which their proposed lesson is illegal and inappropriate. I would then politely but firmly absolutely bollock the head for breaching the guidelines and lying to children, because I’m an assertive person who is very protective of children re brainwashing. If you have a more gentle personality however it may be better for you to keep communications in writing.

I would also keep my child home that day as an unauthorised absence because if your school ever thought that lesson plan was ok, they are not going to suddenly become competent.

@ Looney
i was a teenager in the 1960’s and a student in the 1970s . We had gay kids (though they weren’t called gay then) at school and college. I don’t remember them being persecuted or bullied . At public school it was pretty much standard, a lot of boys at Uni were still good friends with their sexual partners from school, though they’d mainly moved on to getting a girlfriend if they were able.( Gender inbalance could make this difficult ).

The main problem in society and in education was more seen as older men and women entering relationships with younger people, possibly under the age of consent . Come to think of it, that was still the case until the everything is permissible lobby started drifting that way.

What it reminds me of is all the girls in the 70s and 80s (when I was a kid) who wanted to be boys, called themselves boys names, wore boys clothes etc and then simply grew up to be women who accepted themselves and their personalities.

Because parents accepted their kids and waited it out without a fuss. And maybe some did grow up to transition, but many would not have done.

I feel rejecting sex stereotypes is probably a fairly common development stage (given how many “tomboys” (I know some here don’t like that word) were around then. Maybe some of these kids now call themselves non binary/trans. I suspect it’s the same thing and with certain boundaries (nothing that you can’t come back from) we will see similar patterns for girls as we always have.

i can’t say how it is for boys but there was always a degree of homophobia aimed at boys who liked “girly” toys (no change now) and it was typically easier for a girl to dress boyish than a boy to dress girlish- misogyny and homophobia?

@Looneytune253 - May I ask, genuine question, what you think makes your son different from a girl who wears trousers?

Or my sister who was a bridesmaid when she was about 13 - refused point blank to wear a dress and ended up in a top hat and tails… we have photos of her playing the bands dumb kit at reception.

WTF?? do jog on with you inaccurate twaddle. People like you are damaging young's kids and will one day have to answer to a whole load of mental health issues from fucked up young adults who don't know what's happened to them.

As a year 6 teacher, there's not a chance in hell that I would ever teach that

My niece came out at secondary school. She was tormented by her peers, her ‘friends’ abandoned her for fear of being made a target, she was literally alone.

She left in Year 12 after being physically and sexually assaulted by male students who were attempting to show her what a ‘real’ man cab do. The school were hopeless and painted her as the instigator, as if she wanted some entitled little prick to put his grabby little hands up her skirt or have her breasts fondled.

At 19 she identified as non-binary, but now at the ripe old age of age of 26 accepts she is a woman and as such has found her happy. This is something that a few years ago seemed impossible.

I have absolutely no doubt that had she been in school today, she would have self-identified as trans as an escape from the bullying and hostility she experienced by being a lesbian. She would have been no more trans than I am Alice in Wonderland, but I can see how easy it would be to go down this route.

Children need time to allow themselves to grow, without being pushed into a box that they are too young to understand the full consequences.

If one of my children thought they were trans, I would support their choices and respect their chosen pronouns and however they chose to dress, but I would fight with everything in my being to prevent them from having any kind of medical intervention until they were mature enough emotionally and physically to make an informed decision on their own.

It’s a strange sort of “accepting children for who they are” which is contingent on the child pretending that they’re someone else and everyone else having to go along with it. (Almost as if…it’s not actually accepting them for who they are at all…)

My daughter would eat pain au chocolat and watch TV all day and that would make her happy. Don’t we all want our kids just to be happy? Only, some things that would make our children very happy are not either very good for them; or being allowed to indulge in them to an extreme isn’t actually a very positive or constructive thing for their overall life and future happiness.

I have a close friend whose parents took the route of allowing him to do any thing that made him happy. If he didn’t like a teacher or a school, they took him out and found another one. If he wanted to eat only Burger Kings they allowed him to, even though it made him fat. If he wanted a chinchilla, five mice and three puppies, they bought them — even though they couldn’t look after them properly and they all died. If he had a belief he wanted validating, they validated it — even if he was wrong. If he did something wrong they pretended it wasn’t wrong at all and he was wonderful. As an adult, he’s unhappy and troubled and has all sorts of mental health and anger issues from the lack of good firm boundaries from his parents and from their failure to think about him as a child needing parenting, rather than just giving him anything he thought he wanted to make him happy. (He also doesn’t trust his parents one bit, because he says they never told him the truth, only just what he wanted to hear.)

What makes a child “happy” at 11 is not necessarily what is good for their life ahead. Encouraging a child to believe in an ideology that inevitably ends up in a lifetime of medical intervention and a lifetime of hiding and covering up and trying to pretend their bodies aren’t really what they are, does not sound like a great embracing of “who someone really is” to me.

Who on here really thinks the 11-year-old them was set in stone as a person and never wrong or misguided? At 45 there are some parts of my self and personality that are similar to my 11-year-old self; and lots of parts or aspects of me that are completely and utterly different and hadn’t even come into being at 11.

No 11-year-old is their own authentic true self. They have a lifetime of growing and changing ahead of them, and that’s normal and okay. It’s also okay for children not to be made instantly happy all the time abs to always get what they want. Sometimes what they want isn’t actually very wise or rooted in reality. That’s normal; and 11 is around the age when children begin to start realising that some things can’t just be magically changed by their parents or anyone else, and that that is also normal and okay, even if reality is frustrating and disappointing. That’s a normal part of growing towards adulthood; whereas being prevented from realising this and being accommodated in pretending that fantasy is actually reality is not actually good for long term personal happiness or development.

What is going to be the end result of bringing up so many children who are allowed to build their “identities” on pretending and fantasy about being someone else, rather than on adjusting themselves to reality, and learning about themselves, as a normal part of life?

@nightwakingmoon
Great post. I completely agree. I fail to see how we are the unkind ones here. We care about kids so much. Our bodies are us, we can't opt out of them.