School guidelines on gender identities/trans out this week

[ArabeIIaScott]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22733965/schools-banned-letting-pupils-change-gender-parents-rishi-sunak/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12208907/PM-says-children-not-allowed-switch-identities-schools-without-telling-parents.html

These are the only two articles I could find so far.

'Schools will be forced to tell parents if students are questioning their gender under new Government guidance to be published this week, according to a report. '

And of course, a female body cannot be created through surgical and artificial hormones. So, even with those surgeries and artificial hormones, a male’s gender identity of ‘woman’ is still their own perception of dealing with life with a surgically and artificially hormonally modified body.

Never to be the female experience of dealing with a female body.

Do you believe that growing up in a very specific body configuration is the sole factor that defines womanhood? As in, is the sum total of womanhood a specific set of childhood experiences related to 'being embodied as' and 'perceiving being perceived as' a female human that forms and trains a particular neural connectome over around 18 years, and that the shape of that resulting data structure is inherently and essentially female?

I agree entirely with RosesInTheHospital. Being a woman is about being female. A person can be female in billions of different ways, being male is not one of them.

This.

Yep. It's not terribly complicated.

All the rest is just thoughts, feelings and ideas. Which can be very powerful but can also be very mistaken.

I’ve been thinking about those posts and agree it’s sad and we can do better with ensuring children don’t need to conform to stereotypes

Generally pp on these threads will know that and I’d say it better now except some dc probably still feel similar

The answer can only be a boy doesn’t have to like football, a girl doesn’t have to like dresses and long hair and changing sex isn’t possible

I see that a person ardently arguing for the sterilisation of children has pissed all over the thread

anyhoo, do we know if the actual guidance has been released yet?

“Do you believe that growing up in a very specific body configuration is the sole factor that defines womanhood? As in, is the sum total of womanhood a specific set of childhood experiences related to 'being embodied as' and 'perceiving being perceived as' a female human that forms and trains a particular neural connectome over around 18 years, and that the shape of that resulting data structure is inherently and essentially female?”

I also find it remarkable, absolutely remarkable that someone can post this on a feminist board and not expect to get the answer of ‘yes, having a female body is ALL and the only thing you need to be a woman’.

It is very clear that some male people will spend their lifetime justifying their decisions. They will try to break down ‘womanhood’ and rebuild it in whatever way they believe they can to include them.

But the only answer is yes. “growing up in a very specific body configuration is the sole factor that defines womanhood”.

Great post.

And I don't think it's better for gender non conforming kids these days, not in all schools. In some schools if you're gender non conforming you're pushed down the trans pathway with the terrible, physical, lifelong impacts that can have, not to mention the psychological harms.

I think sex role stereotypes in school are far far worse today (I have children in both primary and secondary) than they were in my day. There's not a single girl with hair shorter than their chin (a 'bob') in either of my daughter's year groups. In my day, half the girls had really short hair. No one thought this meant they were boys.

I had a terrible bowl cut for a while... I don't know what my parents were thinking. I survived though.

We really need to stop pushing non conforming children down pathways. In any way.

I drop you can’t change sex in sporadically, but you can do what you want etc to dc

The trouble is school teaching is very powerful in its authority.

No. It's now Thursday and they're not out.

5pm Friday do we think?

Well, on the other hand, it has been an experience where we can directly see just how a poor school experience that is allowed through policy can shape and lock in identity for children.

I know that current school policy would have a huge likelihood of dealing with the bullying of boys and girls who are either gender non conforming or physically developmentally delayed. I don’t believe those policies need to change.

But we have seen just how affirming a gender for a child who has been bullied can lead to the very treatments that sterilise them. I didn’t read once about the extensive exploratory therapy given to that poster. Just the idolised hormonal treatment that they strongly advocate for other children.

Personally, from knowing a friend who has taken the same drugs for other reasons and longer than the now recommended six months, who now fractures her bones by merely lifting something heavier than an saucepan 25 years later and many of the other horrendous side effects of the drugs, I think any person dismissing these drug’s side effects in anyway is too heavily invested to be credible.

A very specific body configuration!

Yes, there are two of these, male and female

I don't "believe" it, it's just how it is.

It doesn't need "perceiving being perceived as". This is just disappearing up your own existential wazoo.

A bunch of genderists advised me that I can run equal pay audits on perception of gender which just had me rolling around on the floor.

How do we do that, pop round the building to have a perceive of everyone? Ask them how they perceive they are being perceived? That's a Fourth Road Bridge job isn't it, because by the time I've perceived all the perceiving of perceiving I'm sure the perceiving of perceiving I might have perceived at the beginning may have been perceived differently by then.

And where do we put the perceived cats in this equation?

Forth Road Bridge! Not Fourth.

What is the Forth Bridge analogy?

The phrase 'painting the Forth Bridge' has come to mean working on an interminable task. This is because it was believed that as soon as the maintenance crew had finished painting the entire length of the 2.5km bridge, they would need to start again at the other end.

“And where do we put the perceived cats in this equation?”

They should be very cheap! Just some food and a warm bed surely?

Or are they not really cats at all and they actually know this and expect human remuneration, but force the world to contort to their version of the world?

If the guidance that comes from the Dept of Ed and then the next Cass report can ensure many less stories such as this ( even one is too many to have) then it will be successful.

The clinical experts who are not personally invested in transitioning children (and Milo was a child still) have all pointed out the commonalities of those seeking transition.

Trauma (sexual, familial or bullying), certain issues such as ASD, ADHD plus a few more. Now usually female.

It is fucked up to the extreme that medical care has been based around males in this ideologically driven sector. And I don’t believe we will ever get even an acknowledgement from the male people who are driving this agenda. Not one who is driving or supporting this medical treatment campaign can ever acknowledge it.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4832887-and-anotherformer-influencer-regrets-transition

It doesn't need "perceiving being perceived as". This is just disappearing up your own existential wazoo.

A bunch of genderists advised me that I can run equal pay audits on perception of gender which just had me rolling around on the floor.

How do we do that, pop round the building to have a perceive of everyone? Ask them how they perceive they are being perceived? That's a Fourth Road Bridge job isn't it, because by the time I've perceived all the perceiving of perceiving I'm sure the perceiving of perceiving I might have perceived at the beginning may have been perceived differently by then.

@ButterflyHatched
What are 'quite male characteristics'?

I did sort of explain that in my post: It's about your attitudes and your lack of empathy or concern for women.

Some men seem to enjoy making women feel uncomfortable in a way that only men can. You believe that you pass, and that this entitles you to enter women's spaces, regardless of the discomfort felt by the women in there. Making women uncomfortable in this way is something that only men can do, because no woman would produce the same discomfort among other women. If you were really behaving like a woman, you'd recognise that your presence makes them uncomfortable and stay out.

You appear to want to use those women as props for your own validation, which strikes me as a very male attitude. Any woman would understand the discomfort of expecting a space to be female-only and a male walking in. Obviously you are not familiar with this because you have never been in a female-only space - your very presence means that there is at least one male present.

Yes. And males who enter spaces for only female people under the guise of being a female haven’t worked out that many women will either over do the ‘acceptance’ bit and fawn over those males and fend off other women’s concerns. This is socialisation and comes from fear. Even if that is internal fear of not living up our need to be ‘kind’.

or other women will just quietly get on with it and either never come back or just tamp down the discomfort.

There will be a few women who will be genuinely accepting. But even then when you scratch beneath the surface that reaction is either socialisation, personal investment or a compartmentalised reaction to an individual rather than to a belief that all males should be able to do what that male did.

Again, it must be painful realising that as male person, they can never tell what is the truth. Women do distort their answers away from blunt truth to comfort others they see as vulnerable. They may bend it significantly.

Who wants to live like that? Never knowing if a woman’s reaction to you was ever honest?

It doesn't need "perceiving being perceived as".

So much of the 'trans' experience seems to be about how other people 'perceive' the trans person. That alone makes the whole trans identity thing seem particularly unhealthy.

Imagine spending your whole life obsessed about how others perceive you.

It's hard to discretely define a female gender identity in the way I experience it. It's like...a constellation of statistically linked elements that together describe something almost intangible and linguistically elusive, but which your brain is able to derive a coherent pattern and meaning from over time?

I genuinely laughed out loud at that one.

It's still making me chuckle 😄

God knows what outfit Mermaids used on their genderbread spectrum for that!

And as if the word salad wasn't enough, we then hit the ground running with the normal gender stereotypes of not liking football.

God, this ideology can't be kicked out quick enough.

Mutilating children because of a desperate, personal need to inhabit extreme stereotypes.

And it will never work. You can't force other people to pretend humans can change sex, because you are hopelessly sexist. (Generic you).

Yes datun

No matter how many years someone has called themselves a girl or woman, without the female body, it is completely fucking irrelevant.

I don’t care if someone has believed they, as a male, were eligible to access female single sex spaces. I don’t care who told them they could. I don’t care because it is infantilising to blame others for what should have been an open discussion loudly and publicly in the first instance. That would have put all this fuckwittery to bed.

If you don't believe in Gender stereotypes, because gender is a social construct, surely you are by default gender critical. Rather than Gender Critical which is what the TRAs would call anyone who denies that people can actually change sex.

I'm a 2nd waver. Gender stereotypes can get in the sea and stay there. As a kid i wore trousers, i had the Clarks commando (boys) shoes because they had a compass in the heel and l wanted to be an explorer. I had a sewing machine and sewed clothes for my and my brothers teddies and soft toys, as well as his action man. My parents got me an action girl because i wanted to make ball gowns too and they looked stupid on action man with real hair and gripping hands (i was jealous that my bro had that one, i had the plastic hair and the stupid useless hands)

i played football. I played netball. I ran fast and didn't skip or do handstands, but i did play ponies with my firends. I had long hair and wore dresses sometimes. Then i had very short hair and still sometimes wore dresses (and sometimes small children said "why is that boy wearing a dress") and so on and so forth. Just like countless others. That's Gender Non Conforming only insofar that it doesn't conform to societal ideas of gender stereotypes.

PP had it right: boy in a skirt, fine etc.

Solid, well argued article in The Critic by Miriam Cates:

thecritic.co.uk/saying-no-to-school-transition/

"We cannot duck the issue by hiding behind the (misplaced) shield of parental consent: if socially transitioning children does not meet accepted ethical standards then it should not be done. To many this may sound harsh; it is certainly firm. I have been accused of being “unloving”. But the root cause of this tragedy is that, as a society, we have lost sight of what it really means to love a child. Giving a child whatever they think they want is not love. Love is wanting what is best for a child and telling them the truth even if it’s hard to hear. Love is setting boundaries that keep children safe, and then patiently and kindly enforcing them. Love is defending children against ideologies that mean them harm, even when as adults we may pay a price for doing so."

Love is defending children against ideologies that mean them harm, even when as adults we may pay a price for doing so."

Exactly. Foot down time.

And not just because one needs to deal with the children's behaviour in this.

But because every single activist involved is trying to separate kids from their parents.

And they have made good inroads. Capturing so many places, including all the unions.

Foot down.

No.

I had a terrible bowl cut for a while... I don't know what my parents were thinking. I survived though.

They were thinking "let's save mony on a hairdresser by using a bowl and doing it ourselves." My mum still finds this funny.

As a child of the 70s/80s you would also be dressed in hand-me-downs of neutral dungarees, plain tops and shapeless woollies knitted by your Nan. Ordinary people had less disposable income, and there was much less choice for childrenswear if you were flash enough to buy kids clothes new. Simpler times.

I'm heartened to hear teens are taking the piss with nonsense identities. Nothing like ridicule for showing the truth.