Drag queen storytime should be allowed in schools for ‘inclusivity’, says teachers’ union

[ChristinaXYZ]

I cannot understand why any teacher continues with his or her membership of the NEU.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/05/drag-queen-story-time-allowed-schools-teachers-union-neu/

"Drag queens should be invited into schools to help challenge the “heteronormative culture and curriculum”, the country’s biggest teaching union has said.

Members of the National Education Union (NEU) voted to support initiatives like drag queen storytime at a conference in Harrogate on Wednesday morning.

Drag queens and LGBT+ authors visiting schools challenge the “heteronormative culture and curriculum that dominates education”, the approved motion stated.

NEU members agreed that the Government is “creating a hostile environment” for trans people by blocking Scotland’s gender reform plans to allow people over 16 to change their legal sex by signing a statutory declaration.

This has “encouraged the far-Right to organise further attacks on drag queen storytime and has created an atmosphere where hate crime can thrive,” they said.

Shelby Millard, a teacher at the conference, told delegates: “The fact that Rishi Sunak has used Section 35 to stop the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Act is sickening.”

She claimed that he is “supporting the far-Right attacks on drag queen story time”."

Much more on the Telegraph linked above.

Alternative trades unions for teachers and lecturers include Affinity https://workaffinity.co.uk/ or if you just want the backing of some legal advice Edapt (not a trades union , edu-law specialist, not quite the same) https://www.edapt.org.uk/ . Teachers in my family have mostly recently switched to Edapt but if their schools were particularly tough or employment likely to be less stable they'd have gone for Affinity.

I wonder will we all look back in 20/30 years time & wonder how the hell all this happened. But common sense prevailed & we managed to stay on the right side of history & safeguarded our kids?
Am I very naive to hope the brakes will be slammed?

Picked up by The Times. Looks like the comments made about Sunak have been drawn to his attention, going by the no10 response:

Schools must support drag queen story time, says teaching union

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/773af654-d3b3-11ed-b1cd-5223fe349502?shareToken=396d75f37499407d23153c9df45089ab

Someone needs to email Rishi's office this thread. Plenty of mum's opinions & I'm sure many more would be happy to email. I'm in Ireland & our Ministers have acknowledged they are getting a huge amount of emails & phone calls daily from concerned citizens. It is the correct route.
Make your voices heard before it's too late.

Rishi himself has two little girls, I'm sure he would not like them sharing a swimming pool changing room or toilet with men. You all need to remind him he needs to safeguard & advocate for his daughters & all your daughter's.

Hopefully by proper action in the UK Ireland will wake up

Saw this on twitter. How the hell does drag time story hour benefit neurodiverse children or any children?

At my old school we had a quarter of the school pupils with EHCPs and one trans pupil, yet the library had a display of books about trans/gender questioning children, the corridors had books on display and it wasn’t until Year 5 where the class book was about a child with autism. There was nothing else about disability inclusion- despite numerous families being affected by disability in some way. I never saw any books about LGB families and race issues where confined to general geography books and Black History Month.

This is not what inclusion should look like. Other groups are actively being ignored and the SENCO once told me (when I asked about getting books about children with ASD) that often parents didn’t want their kids to know they had autism (as clearly those books would only be for the autistic kids, not general use-eye roll). Despite every class having kids with some form of disability it’s like “let’s not talk about that- here’s some books about boys and dresses”. It doesn’t make sense.

Some of the teaching unions are full blown batshit.

Back in the day when at school we used to laugh at the striking Teachers and say yes NUT fits those teachers so well, they picked the union name so aptly.

In my experience the NUT representatves in my school were obsessed with conditions - to the extent they would come round on parents's evening telling you not to spend more than five minutes with each group of parents; and saying " don't mark that, don't do that assessment" and so on. They were always agitating.

I know many staff have come out on strike when they don't really want to; they are doing it for reasons of peer pressure; some have called in sick on strike days so that they get paid.

As a teacher it upsets me that yhe neu say this sort of loony lefty madness. No wonder many parents think we get paid enough
Imagine a teacher with views like that! I don't know many.

This will make it harder for the gov to give in on pay when neu is the largest union and the one in the room.

Lots of school union reps are frustrated politicians; they tend always to be vocal in the satff room and are forever pushing it. They don't really represent their members so much as a political manifesto.

Yes exactly so. Not representing the members interests. Nasuwt is left too, but not so extreme!

I remember going to see drag in a panto on school trips when I was a child and loved it, although I didn't really get any of the more adult jokes! So far, I seem to be fine and it didn't make ma trans, disturbed or in any way a pervert. Well, that I know of anyway.

Drag in panto is not overtly sexualised like drag Queens though! Half have their Willie's on show.

Also no one said it will make the children perverts. It will make them think gay people are different and overly sexualised, which is not true.

Absolutely. This seems, of late, to be the only 'inclusivity' that matters...

If anyone turned up at my school to read to or with children (we engage 'reading buddies' from a large local corporate -all with DBS- who read with pairs and small groups of pupils each week) dressed in drag it would be deemed wholly inappropriate and they would likely not be admitted. It's not necessary. Our current cohort of reading buddies includes a couple of slightly effeminate young men and a middle aged woman who presents as a butch lesbian, but I seriously doubt any of our pupils consciously 'read' them as such; they're just lovely people, successful in their specialist field, who do this little bit of volunteer work in a school. My point is that we don't need all-out drag to be inclusive or to model reading. Inclusivity and awareness of diversity is taught in a myriad of ways, and definitely doesn't need to be as sexualised or explicit as drag.
For what it's worth, we're all NEU at my school, bar a couple of colleagues, and are also really great at safeguarding. I don't think anyone of my colleagues would think a drag story time would be a good idea. Organisations get 'captured' by vocal minorities; clearly seen in political parties and ideological groups, especially at local level: the Green Party, local Labour groups, Guiding, the WI etc, but it is not necessarily reflective of the general membership.

There are far more gay children than there ever, ever are any with genuine gender dysphoria. And yet they (gay and lesbian children) are made to feel like they are wrong for being attracted to the opposite sex, because it leaves the poor trans out. Not attracted to penis? Bigot! Transphobe! The drag queens in no way represent anything of any meaning whatsoever.

This, exactly this. They're not interested as others have said in butch lesbian,s the eldlery, the disabled, ....

What gets me is that the NEU exists because of subs, teachers are mainly women. Collectively, what are we playing at!!

People do not have to be in the NEU - unlike with the tax payer funded stuff like the NHS which we have to pay taxes for and have to use. THis, this is the choice of the public.

Because the teaching unions get in quick we cannot imagine any other way. When I was training we had one lecture given over to all three main unions (then the NUT, NAS and ATL) they each gave a talk. We were offered free student membership of all three if we signed up that day. All three then spent the training year bombarding you with missives and pleas and at the end we all dropped two and signup to pay for one. Never occurred to 22 year old me that there were other options. At 22 and a NQT keeping my head above water was the main thing not researching unions.

Affinty do cover teachers and lecturers. If you are gender critical then your standard union will probably not protect you anyway any more. We don't have to pay to put this crap in schools or to undermine free speech in universities.

Affinity are non-political are not in the TUC and defend free speech. They reference Kathleen Stock and they way she was let down by her union.

https://workaffinity.co.uk/defending-free-speech-in-universities-a-trade-union-you-can-trust/

https://workaffinity.co.uk/join/

I have no incentive or connection with Affinity - I just like trades unions to do the job hard pressed workers pay them for - and so many have their own political agendas. We could do with a hashtag #tradesunionslosingwomen as well as Labour. It might help a bit of a policy shift.

I live in Japan. The trans issue has not made much headway here, but then it is a fairly conservative society. I have yet to see any designated “transgender facilities.” Toilets are sex segregated into male and female basically. Some places with self contained cubicle toilets (restaurants etc.) have established unisex ones, but interestingly they always choose the male one to be turned into the unisex one! So there are two toilets, one female-only and one unisex, and women can choose either. I think that makes sense.

International schools are VERY expensive. You’d have to be nuts to come to Japan and pay for international schooling yourself.

Given the general pushback we are seeing on this issue, I’d just stick with the UK, frankly.

The NEU is being incredibly stupid on this issue. There are some serious issues with staff retention/turnover, funding, the COVID hangover and a hundred other issues right now. They badly need public support, and they are not going to get it (to put it mildly) by adopting hairbrained policies like this. I want to be able to support teachers’ unions generally, but it’s hard when they keep doing stuff like this. I thought teachers’ unions were basically about making teachers’ lives easier, not laundry lists of hard-left policies.

I remain confused at how encouraging kids to laugh at a man in a dress is supposed to foster inclusion of trans people. Or more generally how promoting "queers" as glittery weirdos is supposed to help anyone at all.

Drag queens are performers, they aren't an identity to be "included". You might as well start campaigning for more inclusion of clowns, or anthropomorphic football mascots.

A bloke who happens to dress as a 'normal' (for want of a better word) woman does not bother me, why the need to do the pantomime dame look though? How is that inclusive?

They've shot themselves in the foot with this whole thing:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11942927/Teachers-support-drag-queen-story-time-events-boost-inclusivity-schools-NEU-says.html

Just came on the say that the mood on the trans activists twitter has changed drastically in the last 48 hours.. Usually their content is full of TERF mocking & womanphobic language, plenty of screenshots of Mumsnet TERF posts etc...
I think they realise now had they been kinder to all us TERFs & not counter attacked our women's rights rallies etc they might not be in this position..

I just really don’t understand the fascination with having drag in schools- there’s just no logical reason for it, they shouldn’t be there. Simples