Year 8 trans child - in secret

[WoollyMammoth1]

The recent news article about the trans child at a primary school made me think of sharing a similar story at my DD school, big difference being is that's a secondary school.
DD is in year 8, there's a child in her year that identifies as a girl but is a boy. No one at school, besides staff knows, DD doesn't know either as whilst I feel bad withholding the information, I don't want her to keep this secret at school.

The child has a sibling at the school, who calls him by his girl name. They change in the disabled changing room and use the disabled toilet.

I found out through social media, the parent came up as a possible contact, their profile is open and there were many pictures of her children when younger making it very clear. Absolutely no doubt.

When I first found out, I researched and found there is little I can do. The child's rights seem to trump all others.

DD and the child started building a friendship last year, but this went sour. Which I am glad for considering the circumstances.

My issue here is the deceit and secrecy. Non of the year group know the child is a boy which is such an obvious safeguarding risk, and once they find out they'll feel betrayed. Any friendships are based on a lie. And I feel like I am condoning the situation by not saying anything, esp to DD.

The child lives further from school then most other kids, likely to try and ensure there were no other children at the school that might know them.

It feels wrong to keep things quiet, esp for my daughters, and other girls in her year's sake, so hoping that someone here may have some good ideas in where to go from here.

(Long term Mumsnetter, name changed for this post)

You seem to have forgotten that trans men and boys exist again.

No. I don’t forget this. I am in fact, reminded every single day.

But you have a tendency to forget they exist. You give advice to female children and adults from a male transition perspective. And never quite understand the brutal effect of medical transitioning on female bodies.

You seem to have forgotten that trans men and boys exist again.

They aren't appropriating the female experience, they are trying to identify out of it. They can't, but there is a big difference.

The cognitive dissonance! On one hand thinking that people can’t know what it’s like being ‘trans’ if they aren’t, but on the other thinking that someone can know what it’s like to be a woman even if they aren’t one 🙄.

A person may feel a sense of gendered incongruence while expressing themself anywhere within or indeed outside the culturally constructed aesthetic/behavioural scale that has 'masculine' and 'feminine' poles.

Know that this is not the point of this thread. But is this the reasoning behind the view that any bloke can use the women's toilet. No need to even attempt to pass?

Onto the point of the OP. Schools owe a duty to all children. To gender exploring children it's to ensure that they are not brainwashed into believing they are trans and all the harms that comes with that, to the other children is not compelling them to go along with lies that harm them.

None of this has any place in schools.

We get that you THINK you're female/a woman, Butterfly. I'm sorry that it's not true, as it clearly means so very much to you to believe it and be perceived as one. It must indeed be distressing.

But you need to listen to women and girls on this subject, not monologue at them.

@ButterflyHatched I'm pretty sure on a thread some months ago you were open that your "gender incongruance" was a gap between how you saw yourself, how you saw other boys and men, and how you saw girls and women.

FWIW, on that thread, your explanations of what you saw of yourself in women rather than men was very aligned to gender stereotypes and not the way many women see ourselves, but honestly, that isn't the point.

The real point is that whether the trans person's perception of their own and others' gender aligns with gender stereotypes or not, it is still simply a subjective perception that is not the true reality or experience of the people the trans person is projecting on to.

And fundamentally this is the reason we should be pushing back on transing, especially transing kids. Because it's treating projections of a person about a life they have never and will never have as if they were some sort of objective reality about the people who actually are that sex.

"The complexities of gender ..." I'm still trying to get to grips with them.

I wonder what sense you take 'gender' to have. If 'gender' doesn't refer to sex, or to culturally determined collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, what on earth does it refer to?

--As far as I can tell, and to be honest, it looks like 'gender' is just an empty term you throw into discourse to confuse interlocutors and (being charitable) very likely yourself.

Perhaps to clarify (for yourself and us), you might like to try explaining what, in your 'gendered incongruence' is incongruent with what. When you have this sense of gendered incongruence, you must be feeling, of two things, that they just don't match: they are incongruent. What are these two things, and in what sense do they fail to match?

(You may think, or wish to say, that one of the things that may (fail to) match may be your gender, indeed. If so (and if not, then what?), along the way so to speak, you might like also to have a go at explaining for us a sense of 'gender', non-conterminous with 'sex', in whiich someone might have or be a certain gender. Otherwise we might conclude 'your gender' is just another empty phrase.)

[It's plain I think you confused, @ButterflyHatched. From what you have said it seems your life may have been made difficult by this confusion. I'm sorry for that. I'd leave it be were it not that exposing such confusion for what it is seems currently necessary to obviate possibilities of others, particularly children, blighting their lives by falling into similar muddles. (I don't think you're particularly to blame for that, btw; not your fault. I do think your 'dealing with it', as you expressed earlier upthread, might be helped by you getting to grips with your confusions, though -- difficult (and perhaps overly late in the day) though that may be for you personally.)]

'Perhaps to clarify (for yourself and us), you might like to try explaining what, in your 'gendered incongruence' is incongruent with what. When you have this sense of gendered incongruence, you must be feeling, of two things, that they just don't match: they are incongruent. What are these two things, and in what sense do they fail to match?'

Excellent. I am looking forward to this answer.

Because 'gender incongruence' seems to mean: A human who feels that they don't fit with their own concept of male people, if they are male or vice versa and therefore believe that they fit with their own concept, which doesn't reflect reality at all, of what they perceive the other sex must 'feel' like.

But I do look forward to the answer you get from BH, we might get some clarity.

You aren't going to stop bullying by letting an adolescent pretend to be the opposite sex. In many cases doing so will actively encourage the bullies.

You're also opening up the floodgates for every single slightly gender nonconforming kid to be subjected to an onslaught of unwanted "you must really be trans!" comments from their peers day after day after day.

Perhaps to clarify (for yourself and us), you might like to try explaining what, in your 'gendered incongruence' is incongruent with what. When you have this sense of gendered incongruence, you must be feeling, of two things, that they just don't match: they are incongruent. What are these two things, and in what sense do they fail to match?

Please answer this question @ButterflyHatched.

A person may feel a sense of gendered incongruence while expressing themself anywhere within or indeed outside the culturally constructed aesthetic/behavioural scale that has 'masculine' and 'feminine' poles.

This is just normal life.

“ I at least partially blame past misfires at translating the subject into the social sphere for general consumption by people who don't personally experience it.”

What? Like a male who doesn’t have any understanding or experience of being female ‘translating’ being a female to suit their own political and personal agenda? Did you mean that kind of ‘misfire’?

So true.

But that doesn’t make it special enough for some people in the world.

Butters won’t ever explain what this gender incongruence/identity means, no one will.

It looks like some people have no understanding and they’ve picked up phrases that they haven’t thought about. They don’t think they’ll get it and they’re not invested enough to care so nod along with others. I get that. (Ask me how a touchscreen works if you want a demo.)

For some there’s no benefit it making it understandable. Either it’s revealed as grossly sexist or it will be obvious it’s a personal belief with nothing to back it up. And if that’s how to make your own life liveable I can support that- but not when it affects others in a negative way.

and the personal nature of it means it can’t be applied widely- is it a discomfort with the body? A negative feeling about having a male body? A horror of periods and breasts in girls and women?How does this match up to a personality? What inner personality goes with a cock and balls? How is this different to the inner essence of a woman with a uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries? How do little kids who aren’t even aware of this level of biology discomforted enough to ID as the opposite sex? And where do long term trans people who make no physical changes beyond the superficial (hair, filters) fit in? How does a millionaire actor/comedian who claims to be a woman but has retained all their male physiology (?) have this incongruence. Do they?

Posters like Butters are fond of telling us what it ISN’T but less open about what it IS - despite their lived experience/personal authority.

Why?

Well, I can't speak for anyone else who is prepared to sacrifice their time and psychological fortitude to face the exhausting dogpile that results from posting a dissenting voice on this forum, but I've been asked to do this many times over several years on Mumsnet and whenever I've humoured requests to to do so it has resulted in a heady cocktail of amateur pop-psychoanalysis interspersed with periodic accusations of solipsistic hijacking.

This thread started with a long-term Mumsnetter trying to crowd-source advice on how to disclose sensitive personal details about a vulnerable child they Facebook stalked without facing recrimination for doing so.

Please don't do this.

Well, my bingo card is full, so I will leave final thoughts.

If you have a son who wants to be a girl, don't let him into girls' same-sex spaces and don't encourage him to lie about his sex. It pisses me off, it pisses off other parents and I will have no qualms complaining about this, because I care about all children, not just the special princes.

As a mother to daughters, I'm so over these not-a-boy moms and their entitlement.

Well you’re very happy to merail every thread you’re on in as you clearly feel your advice and experience is vital, but now let’s get this thread back on track, eh?

@Helleofabore: "I am looking forward to this answer."

@OldCrone: "Please answer this question @ButterflyHatched".

@ApocalipstickNow: "Butters won’t ever explain what this gender incongruence/identity means, no one will".

Yes, turns out you were right.

I suppose we should have sympathy. It must be hard being afraid even to think about the basis for your life for fear it may turn out wildly incoherent. It must be like looking into a kind of existential abyss (if that's not too amateur pop psychoanalytical).

Nevertheless, the decided lack of any attempt at analysis does bolster the contention of the popular fantasy of sex-change based on an appropriate sense of 'gender' being impossible and not just non-actual. And given the harms this fantasy is causing, it surely is important to keep pointing this out.

Which may mitigate any sympathy.

New article by Mary Harrington, today:

https://unherd.com/newsroom/new-study-trans-youth-not-at-elevated-risk-of-suicide/

So it turns out when folk claim that they have no problem with trans people existing, provided they don't use single sex spaces etc, that's a load of nonsense. Here we have a trans child who is not using single sex spaces etc or indeed doing anything that might be characterised as infringing on the rights of women and girls.

And still OP - supported by many other MNers - think it's perfectly fine to out her based on some online snooping.

It will fall on deaf ears I'm sure, but no - forcibly outing a trans child is a heinous thing to do.

It will fall on deaf ears I'm sure, but no - socially transitioning a young child is a heinous thing to do. 😑

It has been discussed earlier up the thread, but the problem is with the active lying to the child's classmates and their parents. Children don't exist to be props in other people's fantasies, and adults should not be colluding in wilful deception.

Not your call. Even if you were right, outing them would be a horrific and unjestified response that proves that it was never about 'protect womens spaces' for this 'movement'.

A child's class mates have no more right to know what genitals or chromosomes their classmates have than they do to know what their sexual orientation is or what they discussed when they last went to their GP, nor do they have any more right to know these things than any adult has to know about their colleagues' biological sex, sexuality or medical history etc.