How much longer is this going to take?!

[TimeForNowt]

Mermaids employing fetishists

Cass report

PMQ

News article after news article

The list goes on.

And yet I have a 9yo daughter - autistic, gender nonconforming, the exact audience for this genderist pile of shite, and I'm not convinced anything substantial will have changed when she's in secondary school or even college.

Where girls are still wearing binders, and trying and failing to opt out of sexism with a name change and trans flag lanyards.

How long are we going to have to wait? Labour will be in power in the next couple of years. How will I keep my perfectly healthy and whole daughter safe from this gender dogma?

I'm tired of waiting.

I sympathise, OP. I can’t believe how many people are still saying it’s about being kind to a tiny number of men who are suffering terribly from unhappiness about their bodies. Even if that was true, what about the totally unnecessary suffering being inflicted on children being encouraged to believe they need body-changing drugs and surgery?

No one here wants anyone to stop existing. We’d just like them to stop pushing into our spaces and lying to our children. Not a lot to ask, is it?

Trans people existed long before the gender identity ideology that's emerged in maybe the last decade or two.

Many on the gender critical side acknowledge this and the fact that trans people are not the same as the gender identity ideology. Trans activists argue differently, that gender identity ideology and trans people are effectively the same thing. An example of this can be seen in this thread. This means that in their view the existence of trans people has to fit within the context of the gender identity ideology. Where does that leave trans people who disagree with the gender identity ideology? If social media is a guide, as outcasts and subject to abuse by trans activists.

In other words, trans activism uses trans people as a tool for its own political purposes. You can get the impression that if trans people weren't available, then another group would be used. Once you see it in these terms you realise that what we're seeing a manifestation of something broader.

I'm that parent too OP. School must think I'm mad, one daughter diagnosed autistic the other waiting for assessment and has not been in school nearly three years. Yet there I am sending them alternative guidance, checking their policies, asking questions and about to write again because two teachers introduced themselves with pronouns. I respect their belief in gender identity ideology just as I would a Christian, but I wouldn't expect a Christian teacher to introduce themselves and then say a prayer. Equally a teacher who believed in astrology is fine but I wouldn't expect them to say Hi I'm Ms Learning and my horoscope is ....
I was browsing another school in my area and am trying to find a parent who goes there because in their trans policy they state "we do not seek permission to change a child's name or pronouns", massive safeguarding issue.

Agree with other posters educate her now, instill the facts. No human can change sex, sterotypes are sexist. You don't need to give her a lecture just call it out when you see it.

I don’t think the statement you are responding to itself makes sense @nauticant, which means that your response seems a bit incoherent.

’Trans’ needs to be defined- are you talking about the umbrella that is so wide it even includes people such as me, who would never use the label? Is it a much smaller group? If it is a smaller group, how are the members defined?

The umbrella itself is a pretty modern invention as is the catch-all label ‘trans’ that is used for it. Also being able to ‘identify as’ anything according to how you feel, rather than as something which is objectively verifiable, is an even more recent modern invention too.

At the end of the day, human beings are not Tinkerbell and they will not cease to exist if others do not validate them.

It would lovely to have a ‘That Parent’ support thread. It’s really starting to wear me down.

@WandaWomblesaurus She has a stock response for anyone who asks her about her sexuality.
"I am a child." she says.

This is a genius response. It needs to go on AIBU to reach more or the Staffroom. Totally chucks the question back at questioner with an inbuilt safeguarding challenge.

I feel like this too, OP. I've been engaged in this battle for years now, and it keeps looking as if the tide is turning. Every time some new mad thing reaches public attention (like the Mermaids trustee), I think, Oh, this is it. This is the end. This will peak trans everyone. But nope, it just carries on rolling along. There was a piece in the Metro today by some handmaiden headed "I’m a proud feminist – the transphobic bullying of Eddie Izzard is not in my name". It's had 2,000 shares. I'm just staggered at how it's possible to be that stupid. How can you possibly even begin to have a rational argument with someone like that?

Enough already with the "you don't want us to exist" bollocks.
Biological women exist and they are discriminated against as a sex class. They have sex based rights. If whatever the TRAs want doesn't threaten our sex based rights AND doesn't threaten the safeguarding of children, knock yourself out. Tell men to make room for you in their spaces or lobby for third spaces (not disabled spaces).
And trans identified women ("transmen") are welcome in our sports if they haven't doped. And are welcome in our spaces and healthcare. I'm happy to have literature that says "women and transmen" about women's healthcare. Non-binary is just narcissistic bullshit

"I am a child".

Whichever poster that was upthread who taught their child to say this, thank you, I'm stealing it and teaching it to mine.

Whatever they grow up to be is fine by me but right now so they are, are children.

And that's the key - these are children and the number of organisations and individuals who stand by or actually participate in the gaslighting of children about changing sex and having wrong bodies is shameful.

I am 'that parent' and 'that teacher' in my own school. I'm also struggling with cfs and it's just an extra job I could do without. As a teen anorexic it is so important to me. I see myself so clearly in the teen girls caught up in this.

Things are changing.... they are....

www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/14/young-trans-people-accessing-treatment-outside-nhs-may-get-safeguarding-referral

I do hope you're right. This is the long game with evidence being needed rather than obvious forewarnings.

The conservatives are making themselves unelectable and labour will enact a lot of damage in this area and plain won't listen to women.

It just seems so simple to me. Listen to women, safeguard them, girls and children. State that TWATW and TMATM. Be real about AGP. Get this rubbish out of schools. This is not rocket science or extreme.

The conservatives are making themselves unelectable and labour will enact a lot of damage in this area and plain won't listen to women

This is a seriously worrying possibility.

The only hope I think is that the public awareness will be great enough by the time it happens that their hands will be largely tied.

@vinoandbrie

Transgender Trend sell a brilliant and cheap book on defying sex stereotypes. Inoculate your child now to avoid problems now or in the future.

Thank you I will.

I bought Rachel Rooney’s book ‘my body is me’ just a couple of days ago, I will look out the transgender trend book and buy that too - thank you!

TimeforNowt, FemaleAndLearning, EndlessTea and ValancyRedfern, I know it's really hard but please keep being "that parent".

I am "that teacher", which is crap too, but the powers that be are more likely to listen to "that parent" than "that teacher".

Thing is, to be clear, trans people - in the sense of men who change into women or women who change into men - have never existed.

[Even legal fictions don't properly exist; the clue is in the word 'fiction'.]

What needs to change is the lies (or 'mistakes', a little more charitably) claiming the actuality of this impossibility.

Of course trans people in other senses - people who sincerely want to be the other sex, or people who believe in gendered souls and so on - certainly do exist, and may well stick around for a while yet. We should remain sympathetic to such people, however misguided we may consider them to be.

I'm totally sick of it.
Everything they have done has diminished the safeguarding of children and women.
I hate them
Anyone of them that has colluded in this evil is scum

And every teacher, boss, journo who spreads these lies designed to endanger should get no free pass. Oh I didn't realise will no longer wash.

You endangered children
You endangered women

Don't you dare try to pretend it wasn't you.
We see you.
The courts and brave women will redraw The line that you should have upheld , but it turns out as always that you cared more for power than the vulnerable.

Interesting.

Because they maintain that trans people do not want to be the opposite sex, there is no opposite sex, nor any sex, and they don't wish to be, but are the opposite sex, or rather they are the gender they say they are. And they would therefore say the people you've identified as trans literally do not exist. People who are male and female exist, that's it.

Yes I understand OP.

I want to know who the decision makers are in school that is actively going again DfE guidelines and ignoring all the stuff in the news about this.

what I don’t understand is why, or how this stuff can be pushed in such a faceless way with so little accountability.

work on the assumption that at some point you'll have to have this conversation. if intelligent well educated Cambridge graduates have no clue how to answer the question "what is a woman" you should work on the assumption that your daughter will find it hard to be confident she is passing the test, as no one is prepared to explain the rules. This will make her uncomfortable and as we all know this discomfort is 'proof' that there is something wrong with her.

I would potentially recommend talking about stereotypes and sexist bullshit earlier than you might otherwise have done to try to offer some protection

On one hand I feel we are in a way better position now than we've ever been.
On the other I fear the Scottish Parliament. If the Nats get their way it will have a serious negative impact.

what I don’t understand is why, or how this stuff can be pushed in such a faceless way with so little accountability.

Because this is how our structures are set up. In some ways it has to be a bit like that - to administrate a huge and very diverse population isn't easy. And lots and lots of people are careless about the effect their words and actions may have. Many care more about their career than doing the right thing.

Politics and government are almost by definition accountability avoidant. They're set up to perpetuate themselves, retain and gain power. Of course there are plenty within the system who are good and honourable people, but they're working against unwieldy, bureaucratic, and clumsy systems.

I'm sorry; I'm quite cynical at this point.