Are your children GC?

[Bitebite]

I’m very pleased to say that one of mine is vocally GC and the other two are privately GC. I count myself as quite fortunate because I know there’s no guarantee of family unity on the gender topic.

DS (20) is at an ultra-woke university where they are falling over themselves to be as “inclusive” as possible. He finds the whole thing perplexing but doesn’t actively speak out against it because it is not a hill he wants to die on. Shortly after he started, he was required to attend a training course and people began introducing themselves with their names and pronouns. He was confused (honestly, I have no idea how he avoided this before, may have been because he was at a boys’ school that focused almost exclusively on rugby). So he said, “Er, hi, I’m MiniBiteBite. And I’m a boy, er, soon to be man”. Later he was elected as Men’s Officer, but was told he needed to use the full title “Men and Minority Genders” and was then sent a message reminding him “don’t say identify as because they are if you see what I mean”, which he didn’t…

DD (17) is fully GC, a fan of Posie Parker and quite outraged at her peers’ willingness to give away women’s rights. As far as she knows there is only one other GC girl in her year, the rest are agitating for mixed bathrooms (it’s an all girls’ school!), pronouns etc. Her year group started a petition to require the school to collect and use chosen pronouns and the headmistress shot down this idea saying it would be too stressful for the teachers to remember it all. My daughter cheered. She is infuriated by her peers’ inability to see the full picture: her friends were talking about how nice it would be to have an all-girls nightclub so they could dance without getting unwelcome male attention. She pointed out that with self ID, any man could enter their imaginary nightclub. The friends thought about this for a moment, and then all piled on with transphobia accusations. Luckily, she has enough confidence (and social standing) to stick to her guns.

DD (15) is probably the most infuriated by woke culture. She has been accused of cultural appropriation because she wore a hair braid, racism because she asked her Indian friend to pick up her violin when she was going to the music department … and her response has been to distance herself from those making the accusations. She’d have no friends at all if she avoided the “be kind” brigade, so she just puts up with the trans stuff and regularly pours out her frustrations to me.

I’m really interested in what the family dynamics are like in other families. And how you think it happened that your kids ended up with such different views to you?

Yes, one at college,one at uni. A few years back,when I first mentioned the threat to women's rights,Dd1 would go very quiet and I'm sure that she was trying to compute that with the things her pride progressive flag flying,'be kind' school had taught her. She's obviously looked into it though,because when a friend mentioned that her 13 year old daughter had a trans child in their class,Dd1 pointed out that under 18's cannot change gender I've never discussed that with her,so I'm assuming that she'd done the research herself. She's studying a life science at uni,and grew up on the farm,so won't swallow any twaddle.
Dd2 says very little,but suffers no fools. I can't imagine that she and her friends would be taken in by such nonsense.Working with horses and livestock means she definitely knows there are only two sexes and I wouldn't like to be the person who tries to persuade her otherwise.

My dc are GC. 17 and 15 like yours OP.
Has caused bullying for eldest so younger keeps her head down at school I think.

Wow, more GC young people than I expected. I find this encouraging (I agree with PP that GC views are synonymous with free speech, critical thinking, pro-women). I’m also heartened to hear about younger kids who are bored of the subject.

@CatSpeakForDummies “Anna likes gendering herself” is hilarious. Humour is such a good weapon against dogma.

I recognise your username @whiteroseredrose ; possibly our DS's are at the same university. Fear of being cancelled is real. My DS keeps his mouth shut about many topics and thinks carefully about who can be trusted enough for him to let his guard down to have normal conversations.

No, he said he would be quite happy to be called a penis person. So I assume not gender critical. Although he thinks women's sports should be female only. So on something's he is ok.

There are a lot of trans kids/ kids who think they are trans at school at the moment. And unfortunately DS does think people can change sex with enough operations. And doesn't realise how major the operations are.

I am treading carefully incase he decides he is trans. More because he doesn't quite fit the mould.

He is gay, and is strongly into human rights. I am happy that sometimes he will look at two sides to an argument.

Younger one doesn't think about it. (Primary age,)

My grown up children are all gender critical, all their friends are GC as well. They don’t know anyone who isn’t GC. One is a student nurse and the lecture about men giving birth was met with derision by nearly all of the large class of student nurses.
I find that very reassuring.

DS1 (17) was edging towards TWAW/TMAM recently, and referred to LGBTQI...+ (he knows all the letters. I don't). He's gay, and was happy for them to all be grouped together.
I'm not sure what's happened but he now believes LGB should be separate from the T+ and said TWANW (and TMANM) unless they've had surgery. I did ask how we'd know and he said he wasn't sure. But he'd have a relationship with a post op trans man. He did agree that, even post op, TW probably shouldn't be in women's spaces.

DS2 (15) is very GC. He said recently "I'm a boy. What I mean by that is I was born with a penis. That's all." He's fairly GNC, bisexual and has never thought LGB should be grouped with TQ+.

My older children are all GC, the oldest ferociously so after working on campus rape prevention projects. The youngest, the only one who is Gen Z rather than Millennial, is TWAW, blue hair and rainbow dungarees, but had her eyes opened recently when she shared a training course with a transwoman who talked like a tedious and slightly creepy middle aged man because that's what he was. She has been useful in explaining gender ideology from the point of view of a sympathetic person.

What I find fascinating is that the blame was put on women, and not the men. As if the men could be innocent bystanders in it!

The possibility was not addressed that some single men (i.e. without girlfriends who could be blamed for their actions) might have been among those who attended the club while posing as trans.

Text of screenshot

Lick Events, Tweet 1 - If you were one of the girls that brought your boyfriend to the club last night and lied about them being trans to get them in - Don't come again. Thanks.

Lick Events, Tweet 2 - you're ruining it for people that are actually trans and you should be ashamed of yourselves - not bragging about it

My DS (15) says he just steers clear of the drama llamas changing their pronouns every week and keeps his mouth shut.

No idea. We don't discuss it. His best friend's sibling is trans and we all use preferred pronouns and name of course. It hasn't come up yet at his sport club (athletics). There's one kid at his school who is trans and he sounded neutral about the change there. He's heard my cousin express distress at his daughter's determination to save up for private mastectomy.

If he comes home with a trans partner or friend I hope he can see that I'll be welcoming as I would be to anyone else. He's going to study computer science so he will encounter a lot of gender fluid people. He will work out his own views in time. He knows that because of my work in heakthcare I think medication and surgery are no joke.

My preteen DD is “naturally” GC if you like, she doesn’t follow the debate but brings a very honest stance to the situation. She says she knows her friend who’s now a boy isn’t really a boy, that the friend knows this too, and that the friend didn’t go in the boys dorm on a school trip for obvious reasons, duh. She is very feminist and has a laser eye for sexist situations.

my older teen DS is very philosophical and tries to see all sides of an argument, and he has sympathy for people who feel they want to be the opposite sex. I’ve had some very interesting chats with him about it and I have realised from these that gender stereotypes and signifiers do play a part in my own life and in society, even when being rebelled against, and it’s helped me develop my thoughts. But at the same time he’s also suspicious of beliefs that aren’t based on evidence and talks about the social contagion aspect.

I’m grateful that I’m not being thought-policed in my own home like some parents are - but having a preteen girl and older DC almost at university age, I’m also aware either of them could be swallowed up so I’m not smug. I don’t expect them to agree with me and I encourage free airing of ideas so I hope I have at least planted the concept that you don’t have to lap up dogma and should question things and apply your own reasoning.

one thing I find interesting is that DS says the gender types at school are unpopular and niche and get mocked by others. He says they are seen as silly deluded losers and that’s partly why he doesn’t see the issue as the threat that I do. Now I don’t support bullying and I don’t think people should be mocked for being trans. But I also think it’s reassuring that kids can see that gender ideology - not being trans, but the ideology that you magically are the opposite sex by saying so - is not divine truth, whatever their teachers say.

Oldest daughter is GC but absolutely keeps it quiet. She is planning to go to a university which will particularly require her silence. Despite being silent she has suffered friendship issues and unpleasantness for not enthusiastically participating in gender identity related things. The majority of her friends, male and female now identify as non binary. She is frequently questioned on her identity and sexual orientation. Her friends really want her to identify as something she isn’t or say she is bisexual or at least questioning in order that she fit in better. Her friends are middle class, academic high achievers.

Other two are also GC, but move in different circles, I think they are not particularly vocal about it but probably feel their positions are less precarious if they wanted to be. Their friends are from more working class backgrounds and neither of them plan to go to university.

Not quite the same but DS is 8 and recently I had to try and explain the concept to him.

He listened, had a quick think and asked me how you could change your gender if girls could do and wear anything and boys could do or wear anything.

It's amazing how much having to explain to kids clarifies your thinking.

I have four kids aged 11-17 and they all think it is all absolute horseshit. They are openly GC and tbf so are most of their friends and the school. But, we live in a very deprived area and most people are concerned with surviving rather than all this trans indulgence. It's not a priority when life is hard.

As far as she knows there is only one other GC girl in her year, the rest are agitating for mixed bathrooms (it’s an all girls’ school!), pronouns etc.

Lol. I can't imagine they would be so keen on mixed bathrooms if there were actually boys in the school.

Her year group started a petition to require the school to collect and use chosen pronouns and the headmistress shot down this idea saying it would be too stressful for the teachers to remember it all. My daughter cheered.

The head sounds sensible and so do your kids!

My teenage daughter is definitely a feminist, she's learning from me! To the extent that I think husband rolls his eyes occasionally and feels rather outnumbered.

However the current headteacher is known to take a more pro-trans stance including sacking a teacher a few years back for being openly GC to a trans teen in the classroom.

A few times DD has said things that are very accepting of self-ID, changing names and pronouns. I've asked what does "identifying as" actually mean? There is no answer beyond things I can demonstrate as sexism, like only girls can wear long hair, skirts, only boys like football, and so on.

I'm trying to encourage critical thinking rather than indoctrinate, but it's entirely reasonable that she hears my viewpoint, and her father's, as she develops her own.

This is interesting.

I notice a lot of adult men who say trans women are women but I don't for one moment believe they also think trans men are men. I suspect they are the kind of people who mentally divide the population into "men" and "not men", and the "not men" category includes both women and trans people.

I was going to say I think adult women believe this TWAW/TMAM stuff more than adult men, but actually I don't think that's true. I think nobody believes it, but the women pretend to in order to be kind.

I think even in children the desire to be kind is stronger in girls than it is in boys, but more of them probably believe this stuff because they've been exposed to it -and not real life - for longer.

I suspect that with age, scepticism grows but girls and women's ingrained obligation to be kind stays.

My friends daughter aged 14 was saying they had a gender neutral loo at school. Which the girls don't use. She said at least there are still girls and boys loos as well.

But hey, it doesn't affect us so why are we so bothered? What could possibly be a concern to us?

My DD thinks I'm a dinosaur and we have argued a lot about this in the past. She's 16 and we now avoid the subject. I did think for a time (around 4 years ago) she might tell me she's trans but thank fuck she never did. I do think if I had been more accepting then she might have but now she's back to looking, dressing like herself rather than wearing baggy mens clothes.

My ds thinks it's utterly ridiculous and unfair. And also weird - he doesn't understand why men want to go into womens loo's or changing rooms or dress up as women.

12 year old DD who is surrounded by kids at school requesting different pronouns and getting their names changed on the register. She thinks this should be fully supported. I'm fine with all of that until these kids start getting railroaded into thinking that they need to make medical/ surgical changes to their bodies. So far it is all girls wanting to explore how it feels to be a boy. She hasn't come across the bigger picture issues of the erosion of women's rights. Definitely some conversations coming up.

My DS14 and all his friends are GC and very outspoken about it, particularly my son who gets enraged about it. My DS12 is less outspoken but holds the same views. I am very proud of them both :)

My 8-year-old DD is GC (when she thinks about it, the topic comes up)

Her best friend has decided that she's a boy because she likes football and wants to wear boys clothes and doesn't like long hair. We've had lots of talks about how that's a bit ridiculous because she's just a girl who doesn't like football, wants to wear boys clothes and has short hair.

I don't want some militarize her with feminism, but we have a lot of discussions about how unfair things like the gender pay gap are. We've even talked about abortion rights (as age appropriately as possible) and men in women's sports

My DD knows her own mind. I'd say she's GC but it's not a huge issue among her friends or peers. I'd say that embracing this at school is amongst the younger end of teens and once they get older drops a bit.
My SC are older and it seems to have mostly passed DSS by and DSD is aware and sympathetic to people with gender dysphoria but is perfectly able to have a rational discussion about any aspect of this issue.

Both of mine are GC, although I don't tend to call it this we just understand reality and basic science.

My eldest has been called Transphobic after being asked if he would have sex with a transwoman and saying no because he's straight.
It seems some kids are trying to 'catch other kids out' to check if they conform and are 'being kind' and if they don't they call them transphobic.
He's explained to his close friends what is going on, some resist but then later on in the conversation understand that it actually doesn't make alot of sense.
Some don't want to talk about it, he feels this is through fear of saying the 'wrong' thing.

From what I can gather by both of my children they both say that with the children caught up in this it's their entire life.
They don't think about much else.
They walk around with flags.
Have badges on their uniform and it's mostly what they speak about.
I have seen some very disturbing behaviour from a specific child that is caught up in it and is blatently watching alot of rubbish online and taking it as fact.

My child's friend also told me how exhausting she finds it all, that in some lessons the LGBTQ+ kids always redirect the lesson back onto themselves when they are having lessons on completely different topics they somehow make it about LGBTQ+ and themselves.
My daughter doesn't talk about it at school through fear of being labelled transphobic and this child doesn't know my views but she kept on bringing it up to me, how exhausting she finds it all.

I feel extremely sorry for kids these days.
It's like all the grown ups have jumped ship.
My school know my views on it I have made that very clear.
I wish more parents would speak up too.