Finally: Gender questioning children: draft schools and colleges guidance

[WarriorN]

Gender questioning children: draft schools and colleges guidance

consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/

The link to the guidance has been included in my school's end of term staff bulletin. Pretty pleased with that! I fully expect the school to do absolutely nothing to adapt existing school policies which it contradicts (e.g. staff and students can be reported for not 'recognising someone's gender'). Their approach is very much to put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away. There are three hardcore TRA teachers and me and a hardcore Catholic RE teacher on the other side. Most staff are bewildered and range from the unthinking 'be kind' to the quietly sane but too scared to say anything - unfortunately this category includes the Head and most of SLT.
I look forward to the fireworks in January....

If any school that's been practising this deception thinks they can keep their heads in the sand and ride this out once loving, decent parents find out what's been going on behind their backs, then their senior leaders had better buckle up.

And if any such school seriously believes the way forward for them is to go to court and publicly defend their right to deceive loving, decent parents, well all I can say is, bring it on.

It's quite incredible that we have adults saying this out loud - in the face of all laws, guidance and evidence about the harms that happen to children alienated from their parents. There's a reason children in care are so closely monitored - because the state makes a poor parent and children alienated from their families do poorly in all aspects of their current and future lives.

Yet we see lawyers, politicians, journalists and teachers all enabling this mentally vulnerable group of young people to become alienated from their families because transactivists demand it.

It’s bizarre. Why are they? I wonder

Maybe it’s the inability of some adults to change tack

And also money in some cases in terms of earnings

I can understand how some lawyers might perceive a court challenge as a useful way of generating publicity and business. I will be gobsmacked if any school sees it that way. But then I've been gobsmacked quite a few times lately.

It's hard to admit something you've embraced so vociferously is wrong - especially if you've harangued and punished others for trying to point out hazards. It's why I think we should accept golden bridgers with minimum fuss (tho I struggle with Ofsted & the DfE as their culpability is so massive).
But the ease with which so many teachers just ignore all the facts mentioned above is so worrying.
Tbh, I'm beginning to wonder whether they're not dissimilar to victims of romance scams who, despite all the evidence and warnings from families, banks and even the police, openly lie and continue to throw tens of thousands of ££ at strangers on the internet who they've never met.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4966231-to-think-some-romance-scam-victims-are-simply-stupid?page=1

Sorry - that's a bit of a derail.

In the case of RMW it could be fear. If this guidance is successfully adopted then single sex toilets will become universal in England's schools. How soon will it be before we demand the same for adults? RMW would then be excluded from RMW's chosen toileting facilities

Yes of course - fear is massive isn't it? And the realisation that an identity that requires complete compliance from others in validating as demanded, might change.
Because if we acknowledge that children have the right to single sex spaces, sports, accurate facts and language, then why are adults denied this?

Teachers though! I know this is anecdote, not data but the vast majority of teachers I've come across have been straight talkers and clear thinkers with finely tuned bullshit antennae, otherwise I don't imagine you'd last very long in a classroom. That's why I'm so flummoxed by what I'm reading and hearing.

It’s a house of cards I guess

You take one out and the whole lot collapses

That’s building stuff on a lie. Full compliance required or else the falsehood is exposed and the ideology defunct

Teaching is increasingly a very young profession. I think the average length of a teacher's career is 5 years. Certainly the most vocal TRA teachers at my school all fit the stereotype we've all seen of young, white, middle class, dyed hair etc etc who see trans children as the next big social justice cause. Even SLT are generally now very young and have been fast tracked into positions well beyond their ability (imho). It's us grouchy middle aged middle leaders who attempt to spoil all their sjw fun, but we're usually ignored and labelled trouble makers.

@Floisme. Name-changing behind our backs happened to us. We were furious and made them back down, with the help of specific advice from a therapist who said that this was not in DD's best interests. She was then 13.

I was even more astounded because this is a private school, and I don't think DD is paying her own fees so quite how they thought this would pan out, I don't know. She's still there, but I am fairly convinced they will not ever do something similar again. FWIW, she only uses her non binary name at with her friends even now, and seems relatively happy with this.

I suspect it's like any other field.

Let your political extremist lobby with no conscience, no safeguarding training of any kind, no training at all or interest in equality or impact on any other group save the useful one, a strong personal agenda and a difficult relationship with facts enter school freely.

Let them teach staff their own version of the law, not mentioning that they've re written it to say what they want it to say. Make a lot of emotive and scary noises about the extreme vulnerabilities and dangers and the risks of being sued.

Heavily weight the dice with that nice and good people think and do this, and nasty old fashioned bigots think that, and make sure they know what's acceptable and what's not, and that it's going to be socially and possibly quite actually dangerous to careers and livelihoods to not be in their gang.

Then let the lobby kindly offer to write policies for busy people because they are the experts, and let those busy and naively trusting schools think they're being helped in going straight to the right, objective answers by the objective experts in the field. Usually without checking for example the social media feed of the trainer. Or checking their actual qualifications.

Then let the lobby throw a lot of stuff into social media and online making it clear that anyone with doubts or saying anything other than this is a nasty, old, ugly, frigid, extreme right wing bigot who shags Trump and eats kittens and goes to Tescos wearing headscarves and Jackboots. And encourage and support the disposal of anyone who dares say anything.

Bake for about eight years. Sit back and enjoy your political capture safeguarding disaster on toast. Many of the captured will be well intentioned people. Who have been fed limited, careful information and taught to reject anything but that information. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prevent may need eventually to help and advise on undoing this.

I think politics plays a part too. Work used to take me regularly into a state school in a very Tory area and the staffroom was noticeably Guardian reading and left-leaning. I was surprised by how strongly many of the teachers expressed their Labour supporting political beliefs. Gender ideology is in the bundle of beliefs that 'good' progressive people have. Stonewall had all the right political associations and was an organisation that teachers could feel good about. It was very successful in exploiting the vacuum that the government left in schools.

Gender ideology is in the bundle of beliefs that 'good' progressive people have.

This. It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical and incoherent. That interrogation never happens because it's not progressive to question any of it.

I'm so sorry that happened @AttillaThePlum. We trust schools to take care of our children, day in, day out. We have to. And so to discover that your trust has been betrayed and abused must be a terrible thing. I hope things work out for your DD.

Teaching is increasingly a very young profession.

Yeah @MsGoodenough I remember noticing (and this was several years ago) that a lot of senior leaders appeared surprisingly young, and also that they often didn't stay in the school very long, so that there was constant change in senior management teams.

It's quite possible to have a whole senior management team (head, deputy etc) under the age of 40 in some primary schools.

@MsGoodenough I hadn’t considered the implications of teaching being “young”. I’d argue it is the inexperience that’s as much of an issue as age though. To be a decent teacher requires lots of effort and focus on classroom practice in the first 5 years and therefore there isn’t much time to be thinking about wider issues in any great depth.

The reaction of some teachers to the guidance has made it pretty clear that plenty haven’t spent any time at all thinking about the interplay between (and various rights of) parents, teachers, children and wider society.

I do think this is another factor which is ignored. Keeping secrets from parents is not in the child's best interests if they're still living at home - it's forcing them to live a double life which will entail enormous mental strain and almost constant fear, I'd imagine, of being 'found out'.

Either the parents are a sufficient safeguarding risk that the normal protocols involved with removing children should be invoked, or they're not, and should be told.

Imposing this burden on young children is abusive in itself in my opinion - you're creating, as an adult, this intensely stressful situation for the child to live in.

That's atrocious. I think I'd have been tempted to sue for an extremely large sum of money equivalent to several years worth of fees but I suppose that would be stressful for your child.

This is one of the ways the gender zealots have been winning, few parents want to put their child through a court case no matter how slam dunk it'd be. Because they're the primary safeguarding adults for their child and the ones who love them the most and care most about their wellbeing, not the teachers.

Either the parents are a sufficient safeguarding risk that the normal protocols involved with removing children should be invoked, or they're not, and should be told.

I really think this needs to be the standard response to absolutely everyone suggesting schools keep secrets with children.

Agree, that nails it.