Was anyone else teaching or working with children in the decade 2000-2010?

[BadSkiingMum]

I am resolutely gender critical and one of the things that makes it so tricky for me to believe the 'born in the wrong body' idea is that I was a primary teacher for about ten years (from 2000 onwards) and the question of gender identity never arose. Ever.

To give a little context, I was a full time class-teacher for many of those years (across four schools), spending the whole year with 30+ children (so knowing them extremely well) and then taking on management positions where I was involved in reviewing the attainment, progress and wellbeing of dozens of other children. Yet a desire for a child to identify as a different gender to that of his or her biological sex was just not apparent; many children were facing problems such as poverty, broken families, refugee status, learning disabilities, involvement with the social care system, being a young carer... I worked in schools where a significant proportion of children could be described as disadvantaged; in other schools I also taught the children of surgeons, diplomats and bankers. Huge amounts of time were spent in school on initiatives to support children's wellbeing. There were undoubtedly children who had mental health needs and, at the time, budgets were good so services such as school counselling or play therapy were available for some children where there were particular concerns. As a teacher I worked alongside those other professionals and read their reports, yet the issue of gender identity was never, ever mentioned. Other children were receiving support from CAMHS (even a very well-known clinic in London) and the lack of feedback on this topic was the same. Nor was it ever raised in training sessions, professional development meetings or online teaching forums, where I spent a lot of time.

This lacuna is very puzzling to me, as that same generation of children is now in their mid-twenties and a narrative of having 'felt wrong' from an early age seems to be prevalent. If this was so much the case, why did it never arise? Not once, in the many hundreds of children with whom I had contact? Never from colleagues in other schools? I am confident that it would have been discussed, albeit anonymised. Schools were certainly making time and resources available to explore and support wellbeing, so surely it would have emerged? Or are personal histories simply being re-told to suit current identities?

However, for the sake of fairness, it is important to note that, at the time, mental health was generally viewed by schools in terms of how it was impacting upon a child's progress, attainment and behaviour, rather than being an outcome in itself. I think that shift in perspective has been beneficial - I think that children and young people certainly do get more support than hitherto which can only be a good thing - but I also wonder if a certain 'pathologising' of emotions has taken place...

So, arriving at my original point, were you teaching around the same time and were your observations and experiences similar to mine? If not, when did you first notice gender identity politics becoming apparent in schools?

Just because they didn't talk about it, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

I was a young person during this period and I DID have several friends who were questioning their gender, throughout both high school and university. They wouldn't have talked to their teachers/ lecturers about it because they would not have understood.

I was also a primary school pupil just before this period, and I questioned my own gender during that time.

Had there been support in place for me I would have felt more confident to explore it properly. As it was, I would have been laughed out of the school, so I buried it all and was confused for a long time.

There would have been others like me.

Just because you couldn't see it doesn't mean that no one was having these feelings.

What do you mean by 'questioning my gender'?

@locke360 could you say more about what questioning your gender entails?

I don't think many young people were questioning their gender at a time when gender (as in, "I have a gender identity") wasn't a thing.
A few may have felt they should have been the opposite sex. Many more will have felt the stereotypes of their sex were oppressive for them. The latter are surely gender non-conforming rather than trans.

nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender_questioning#:~:text=Gender%20questioning%20is%20a%20gender,might%20be%20transgender%20or%20nonbinary.

I'm not going to elaborate further than this because the tone on these forums is generally not entirely friendly to this sort of thing, and it's also extremely personal.

I'm sure people can do their own research if they want to.

How did you learn you had a gender? I'm much older than you and there was no such thing as gender identity when I was growing up. I'm interested to find out how 10-15 years ago someone would find out about gender identity. Was sexuality involved in your distress? What I'm seeing is quite a few young lesbians who have taken the trans route and then desisted — Keira Bell is the most public one, but there are a number locally.

I can't imagine questioning my gender because I don't feel I have one.

Perhaps it helped that my parents were somewhat hippyish and brought their children up identically, regardless of sex? We all had long hair and played with lego.

I do have a relationship with the concept of gender, the regressive stereotypes that wider society, away from my family, has forced upon me. It is a difficult, painful relationship. I don't identify with any of it though, that would make me feel quite disgusted with myself. In fact it is really important for me that I, and my children, are not defined by regressive pink and blue boxes at all.

@locke360 I was genuinely interested in your personal experience of what questioning your gender meant to you when you were going through it. I don't have a gender identity and I have trouble understanding what it is so am slightly fascinated by those who explore it or question it.

This is very much my experience too, although I’ve been teaching since 1990. I’ve also worked with CAMHS extensively as a Senco. Their main work was based around eating disorders and self harm around the start of the century, with diagnosis of ADHD and ASD following. More recently, they are working more closely with children with significant mental health illnesses who also declare themselves trans. Sadly, many of the therapists affirm their declaration. Which surprises me as they didn’t affirm anorexic children who said they were overweight!
I find that the odd chat with individual colleagues starting with innocent questions - ‘I heard that a man was allowed to play rugby on a girls team, surely someone’s got that wrong?’ Gives me an idea as to what their opinions of the subject might be. Often, it turns into them having a quiet rant about the ‘madness’ of thinking someone can change their sex.

Fascinating discussion. Quite terrifying that there are all these teachers pointing out that this explosion in children believing they've been born in the wrong body has happened in less than a decade yet nobody in education is allowed to ask why / what's happening? We explore and question eating disorders, self harm, suicidal ideation, tourettes etc and consider aspects of social contagion - clusters of these actually inform our practice with children / teenagers in schools.

But children wanting to change sex - ssshhhh. The trans bullies (because that's what they are) are waiting to trash the reputation of any adult who dares to raise the issue of child safety /wellbeing.

Enraging and fucking dangerous.

I was a teacher in inner London secondary schools during this period.

This did come up, once. A child joined us in Y7 who wished to be known by a different name and firmly felt that they were not the sex they were born. This was in a VERY liberal part of north London, and every effort was made to accommodate the child and make them feel confident and happy. We felt that this was the right thing to do, but there were lots and lots of fraught staffroom discussions; child used separate changing and toilet facilities without issue, but once boyfriend/girlfriend situations arose, it became very difficult, as we also had a duty of care to other children who entered into romantic relationships with the child with no knowledge that they were trans. It was tough for everyone.

The situation was very, very unusual and there was no guidance, even from that clinic. Nobody had a clue or had come across a person so young facing those issues before.

I taught from 1978 to 1998 and I never came across this once - all kinds of secondary schools in the UK and abroad.

Thanks for your contributions, it is really interesting to hear from others who were teaching or working with children around the same time.

From what I remember, the key causes of concern amongst primary school senior leaders and headteachers in that decade prior to 2010 were neglect, physical abuse in the home, older pupils being drawn into carrying knives, bullying, truancy, absconding from school and theft (either in school or outside). Plus of course classroom behaviour.

There does seem to be a similar pattern to other phenomena that spread via social contagion during that period, such as self-harm , although social contagion would have been a bit slower via web-pages, blogs, forums and face-to-face contact rather than the warp-speed of social media...

Looking at the responses, 2016/18 seems to be when the exponential increase in numbers occurred. What was going on in the social-media zeitgeist around that time - was that when Twitter suddenly became the platform that everyone was talking about?

I think I taught in the same area for a while. If it was going to come up anywhere, it would be there - lots of very liberal families and incredibly child-centred - but I encountered nothing whatsoever.

Taught 2009-2015, primary. Two young adult DCs. First encounter was at DS’s secondary school, c 2015. Boy transitioning to become a girl at an all boys school. Social transitioning and then hormones. I remember feeling admiration for the school’s sensitive handling.

I think I would feel differently now. I think schools supporting social transitioning is collusion with a really damaging set of messages. And damaging not just to those ‘transitioning’, but also to all of their peers. The adults in authority in education and health are telling them bodies are wrong and stereotypes are reality. Awful.

Sobering. Very sobering.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/2716595-TransAgenda-BullShit-The-I-am-Spartacus-Thread This is a thread in site stuff from 2016. I think it was started in reaction to another thread being deleted. That first thread was the one that really made me realise there was a developing problem in society with gender ideology. The number of children being referred to GIDS was growing hugely by that time, as I mentioned upthread, and the ratio between male and female children had flipped. I'm sure some people would say that previously GIDS only saw a tiny fraction of the children they could have done and once they got extra funding and more people became aware of the issue through social media, thus lessening the stigma and ignorance, they finally started to see the true number. I am far more inclined to believe that this is social contagion. Why else would we have seen huge increases in gender identity issues in two main groups, teenage girls and middle-aged males? Where are the middle-aged females transitioning to a male identity?

My Twitter account dates from around that time and it was a hot topic on Twitter even then, but in the last six years the number of openly gender critical accounts has definitely grown. For once, the UK has been in the forefront in a good way.

It terrifies me that had I been born much later, I might have been pushed down the trans route, when really I liked boys clothes because they seemed more comfortable and practical, I liked boys bikes because they looked more exciting, and my friends were boys because of geography.

When did Instagram and TikTok start? What were the BBC up to 2015-18?

The BBC put out a programme called I am Leo, I think, which seemed to uncritically portray a trans-identifying child, aimed at very young children. Don't know when that was, but several years ago.

From the Teen Vogue article upthread:

she loves her female-coded body but doesn’t always feel it accurately represents her

So genderism really is about social stereotypes. It's truly regressive.

I was in teaching from 2001 until 2017. I was young, liberal, approachable, taught gender as part of social sciences and biology. I had one child in 2016 decide that they wanted to transition. Over the summer this became non binary. Two years later they returned to the gender assigned at birth and have remained so.

Interestingly, the child was not from an English middle class background. Their parents were extremely distressed by it and had no clue what to do.

I've been teaching since 2000, in inner London primary schools. In that time, I have taught one Y4 girl who said she wanted people to think she was a boy. She went by a shortened version of her name commonly used by males and females (think Charlotte to Charlie) but had been called that by her parents since birth so it wasn't really her decision. She had hair long enough to be tied into a ponytail and because there was no school uniform, wore jogging bottoms and t-shirts like most of the boys did (the girls more often wore leggings). 'Charlie' never said she felt like she was a boy, just that she preferred to be treated as one, like her older brother. The only time it could have mattered was for swimming lessons when she wore trunks (Speedo style as specified by the pool we took them to) instead of a one-piece swimsuit. She was prepubescent so there didn't seem any point in making a big deal about it. The register just had the children's names on it and the children were all taught together so the swimming coach would have been unlikely to know that Charlie was a girl. Equally, the coach probably only knew Sammy was a girl because she wore a one piece swimsuit. I don't know what happened when Charlie went to secondary school.

A Y2 boy taught by a colleague recently wore a pinafore to school instead of shorts or trousers. He was very clear that he was a boy but preferred the feel of the dresses as he didn't like the way fabric on shorts/trousers rubbed. He has a very 'male' name - think Bruce or Trevor - but the dress-wearing was very much to do with his sensory needs. He's 7, was happy to tell classmates that he thinks dresses are more comfy and after the initial questions from peers about being a boy but wearing a dress, everyone carried on regardless. He wears shorts for PE, just like everyone else does although his are extra baggy so they don't rub. It will be interesting to see if Bruce/Trevor continues to wear a dress for school when he goes to secondary school.

Actually I think it's slightly better now than it was 15 years ago, when DD was born. It was nigh on impossible, even in expensive shops, to find anything outside the pink & sparkles/blue & camouflage binary.

I ended up getting a few bits from some Scandinavian kids clothes company because they were the only place I could find that did gender neutral clothes in nice bright colours.