To ask DC’s school about gender identity

[CanStopWillStop]

I am going to view a prospective primary prep school for DD.

It’s a very popular all-girls school so admissions are over subscribed. I have a list of pretty standard questions, however I also want to ask what they are teaching the children about gender or gender identity.

I also want to ask whether they would admit trans girls (born male) in the school.

There is no mention of this in the prospectus however DH thinks it’s a bad idea to ask.

AIBU to ask these types of questions?

If they require birth certificates then sanity prevails and that is one less question. Hurray. We were never asked for birth certificates though. Sex was "self identified" Just proof of address of parents.

I just dislike people like you punching down

Are you honestly trying to suggest that meeting the needs of primary school girls is 'punching down' on adult men?

I doubt individual trans girls in year 7 would affect any single sex academic benefits of a school

Of course boys affect the single sex academic benefits of a girls school both as individuals and as a group because it is no longer a girls school.

It's a fair question OP.

But when they reply, 'Oh it's single sex only', you'll then need a follow-up question to clarify whether their definition of 'single sex' is the same as yours.

Good luck!

@Lovelyricepudding obviously not, no. Because we are talking about schools here aren’t we, so do keep up. The poster is punching down on the tiny, tiny minority of kids who have gender dysphoria or are trans, and wants their lives to be harder and their education to suffer because they fall into a category they (and one assumes, you) don’t like.

Ridiculous. Imagine if she was saying it about ethnicity or religion. Actually religion would at least make more sense as it’s a choice - these kids have it hard enough already without people like you screaming at them.

@itsgettingweird

What I've never been able to understand is why a trans man would want to attend an all girls school.

They don't see themselves as girls. Where's the benefit of an all girls education for them

^^
In these cases the students were already at the school and 'came out' when they were about 14/15.

I expect it will be on the registrars & NHS databases rather than needing to actually see the bit of paper - I remember needing evidence that my daughter was registered at the local GP for infant school admissions* (and the NHS number issued at birth and has an unchangeable sex marker - adults who transition have to get a whole new NHS number to have a new sex marker - which is another can of worms but I think we can safely assume that no one in the UK has transed their child’s paperwork before the school admissions process begins at 3 and a half. At least not yet)

the only way I can see a single sex state school for kids admitting an opposite sex child is if the child was born elsewhere and has migrated here (some US states allow a child’s birth certificate to be changed and the US government are allowing x on passports so presumably they don’t care about biology) or an in-year transfer where the application is made directly to the school and the leadership team are all very pro trans. That would be a massive risk if complaints are made in future/anything goes wrong for the child or their classmates.

Private schools are going to be more variable but (at least in the smaller ones) they tend to be conscious about the bottom line and getting the fees in, so if admitting one opposite sex child risks losing more than one existing pupil from the roll then they are unlikely to consider it. Private school parents are customers after all, and there aren’t that many potential customers in the pool to risk pissing them off.

A school admitting a male with a gender identity to a girl’s school will be open to legal challenges (technically boys can attend a girls’ school in really limited circumstances but it’s a carve out designed for scenarios like ‘the head teacher of a remote mountain top boarding school for girls has a son of school age and there is nowhere nearby for him to enrol’ and even then he’d be expected to share sleeping/toileting facilities with his teacher parent and wouldn’t just be a standard student alongside all the other girls outside of the classroom)

*I’m applying for a local state girls high for my daughter through the usual transition from primary to secondary admissions process. Deadline is in a couple of weeks (still deciding on 2nd/3rd choices) but I will report back once I have submitted.

Where I live the admissions process is so cut throat that schools criteria/proof of residency has developed in response to parents trying to game the system (lots of private prep schools and tutoring for the 7 grammars and then sharp elbows for the high schools in the posher areas). There is no way parents round here will tolerate a male child taking a girls place at a school or vice versa, so it’ll be interesting to observe how this plays out.
As an illustration here is the residency info for one of the two girls’ grammars (very prestigious, very genderwoowoo, teeming with transboys, so female children. And rightly so, because once a child has been admitted to a single sex school for their physical sex it would be against the law to ask them to leave due to their gender identity/gender expression)

(obvs I won’t be sending my daughter to the genderwoo girls’ school! Her preferred school is very ‘Daughters of The (name) School Family’ and ‘Seven Years of Sisterhood’ which seems quite old fashioned but also is unapologetically female-focused, so I can forgive the fustiness!)

Current policy at my DDs SS school is that they only admit students biologically female at birth. They have said that they might need to review this if there was a test case somewhere that changes the legal foundation of their current stance, and stay abreast of LA guidance. They are fully supportive of female students who transition to male during their time at the school - although this tends to be more at the secondary stages than primary.

Ah you are saying 9 year old girls must be kind to boys and give up their single sex school because the boy is somehow suffering in a mixed sex school so wants the girls school to be mixed sex too? The girls' own education not being as important as this boys? And the girls must also be kind and give up their boundaries and get undressed in front of the boy because it would be hard for the boy to get dressed with other boys or in a private space?

Imagine it was religion and the girls were Muslim? They would now be excluded from that school.

Disproportionate suicide rate = this has been throughly debunked. Even GIDS acknowledged that there was no increased suicidality in “trans children”.

As for “being attacked” — when statistics have shown that in the U.K. trans people are actually statistically safer from violence than other groups — do you mean literally or metaphorically? There are quite a few cases now of women and girls being physically or sexually attacked — literally — by trans women or transactivists. Not very many the other way around. Unless you can find me some evidence that ten years old girls are literally beating up trans women? Or that people committing “attacks” (either literal or metaphorical) on trans people are women and girls?

What about metaphorical attacks? Perhaps large amounts of women are posting threatening comments like “die trans scum” with pictures of bloody axes and death threats on the social media of trans women? Perhaps there is a lot of this that I’m missing, because it normally seems to be the other way around.

I think this poster's lack of knowledge and understanding of the issues underpinning women's concerns have been amply demonstrated upthread.

I'm pleased you know so many transpeople who understand that female only spaces are sex based not gender based protections.

Women are attacked verbally and physically more than transpeople though so I'm afraid that excuse for not protecting some of societies most vulnerable (i.e. women) will not wash. The trans lobby have obliterated pretty much all women's services so there are no appropriate services for women. Not a race to the bottom - just a comment that women still have to find the energy to speak up despite their position in current society. The transpeople you decide could be making a difference if they chose to.

If they think you are bigots for asking do you really want any child of yours to go there? If they think only bigots ask these questions then you're entrusting your child to people that don't believe in free speech and will discriminate against a child for the parents' lawfully held views, and they might teach your child lots of things as fact that are actually debatable. Is that ok with you?

BTW Suella Braverman made it clear that she thought refusing to entrance to a male born child to a girls school, even if the child believes their gender identity matches the girls school, is a valid and lawful thing to do. So they can do that if that wish, if they don't wish, again they are showing you something about their attitude to gender that is very different perhaps to your view? Do you want your child to be taught be people who holds such different views to you?

To me it is like send a child to a religious school if you are an atheist - you know you are going to have to accept that there will be views and attitudes aired that you might not agree with. Make sure you are ok with that before picking the school for your child.

Every now and then on mumsnet you get a poster who is allegedly all for trans rights and then also says they are for single sex spaces, sport for females only etc.
I can never work out whether they are trolling or are just so spectacularly uninformed that they have no idea at all what TRAs are demanding and that apart from a group of wonderful transexuals such as Fionne Orlander and Seven Hex (who I heard was detransitioing) almost all trans people support the right to be the opposite sex in all ways.
they seem to think women are just making a fuss about nothing and try to act completely reasonable as if completely unaware that their views make them just as terfy as the GC feminists in TRAs eyes.
These people are either dense or wilfully ignorant so there is really no point in wasting time engaging with them.

Occasionally we do get posters who genuinely haven't thought beyond 'be kind' and what it means for women and girls. But even if they are willfully ignoring the point they perform a very useful function of providing a foil by which we can educate lurkers. I don't think they realise how helpful they are for that and how much they undermine their own position.

I’ve just had our year 5 sex education emailed to us by the school and tbf it’s bog standard puberty stuff for boys and girls with very tame images. With it being a girls school it focuses more on periods ect..

And the correct terminology through out. I’m pleased.