‘Trans children more likely to be white and privileged’ says head

[hholiday]

In The Times today. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/trans-children-white-privilege-katherine-birbalsingh-73d578v7q

There is no statistical evidence of the headteacher’s claim in the article (it’s anecdotal, based on the fact she teaches at an inner city London school and says it’s not really an issue there). And the Cass review and others have given other explanations for the transgender trend among young people, eg autism. But I thought it was really interesting it was being discussed at all - and so bluntly. It would be interesting if this view does get looked into a bit more, as I suspect if there’s one thing likely to bring the transgender movement skidding to a halt among kids, it would be the idea that it’s something for the rich and privileged.

It's possible to be white and privileged AND disadvantaged in some ways. My anecdata (parent in middle class area & working with children often with SEN and extreme disadvantages) is that the typical "trans child" is white and middle class. But also female and usually autistic - both clear disadvantages when teenage! There's also an overlapping subset where there is some kind of trauma at home - divorce, suspected abuse or even just extreme pressure.

The trans kids in care are obviously documented too but I suppose statistically looked after children are a small percentage of children.

A lot of my peers say "it's the kids who used to have eating disorders a decade or two ago" which rings true from my own experience of being a teenager in the 90s.

Personally I grew up poor and didn't suffer with bulimia or anorexia like so many of my wealthy peers. It would be interesting to know what the protective factors might have been. For the children with extreme disadvantages that I have known through work, I suspect they don't have the mental bandwidth to think about special identities. They are also quite excluded from culture which is where a lot of the propaganda comes from currently.

My dc goes to a special school for children with autism and behaviour difficulties and their closest friends are all transgender. They are definitely not middle class but all are in care and/or vulnerable at the extreme end.

Having said that, I am sure there are middle class white privileged children too.

I can't read that whole paper. Can you post the relevant part which says that over 80% were white British? The abstract doesn't seem to say this clearly: all it says about ethnicity is "For 2%, sex assigned at birth was unrecorded, 83.4% were White British and 36.6% had an unidentified ethnicity."

83.4% plus 36.6% adds up to 120%, so either these aren't referring to the same cohort or there's a misprint in there.

Can you post the relevant part which says that over 80% were white British

'83.4% were White British'?

The trans, non binary and militant trans ally teens I know as Dc of friends, family and acquaintances ) are either :
Victims of abuse, girls abused by father (3 young people)
Autistic (and not known to have been abused) 4
Adopted (to middle class family) after horrific abuse 1

Non-binary blue haired white very middle class allies desperate to adopt some form of victim status as validation - loads

Black and white kids from ordinary happy functioning working class and modest middle class families: zero

Anecdotal through and through.

Privilege doesn't equate to invulnerable.

Privileged children can be just as vulnerable as underprivileged.

The race thing seems niether here nor there, tbh, unless anyone has any evidence to suggest otherwise. Nor does class.

Which isn't to say that these factors won't affect how the issues play out, or present, or how well such children are supported or 'treated'.

Children who are of any ethnicity and any class may have vulnerabilities, and these may have a bearing on 'gender questioning'. The effect and consequences of that questioning may play out differently according to cultural and social factors.

Factors that seem to appear disproportionately in the gender questioning cohort:

Trauma history
ASD

My experience from working with young people. Majority autistic white females identifying as boys

Some are frightened of men so feel safer as a boy, some are lesbians but feel ashamed to be a dyke, some are just autistic and don't feel girly and are confused

Another aspect/cause relating to teenage girls transitioning to males could be linked to the explosion on line of porn and the objectifying of women and girls. It has always been this way but the internet has also fueled the accessibility especially with young boys being exposed far earlier. Also the rise of and accessibility of cosmetic surgery. Some teenage girls appear to embrace and strive for this perfection as you see in tiktok and insta hair/make up/clothes videos and others who find it frightening and confusing. As soon as my dd hit 12/13 and experienced unwanted attention from boys and men she began to withdraw. She found like minded groups online all heavily into the trans umbrella. She cut her hair, wore the baggiest dullest clothes attempting to make herself as invisible as possible and still does.

Fighting identity politics with identity politics.

Entirely on-brand for Birbalsingh .

There are certainly some aspects where a trans identity is declared, especially some of the more imaginative areas like ‘non binary’ and any of the BBCs 100+ genders (cloudgender, tetrisgender etc - although that’s gone mightily quiet recently) might have been called ‘navel gazing’ in the olden days. Quite a stereotypical middle class activity. Kids like the girl who glued herself to the floor in Kathleen Stocks Oxford debate.

Obviously traumatised, distressed or nd girls or young boys and male adults who have by their own admission watched too much porn or too many Doris Day movies (some of the older ones) are not included in that thought.

Julie Bindel wrote a substack about the large number of tifs in Blackpool (she's also written about grooming gangs there).

https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/why-do-so-many-girls-in-blackpool

The article is behind a paywall now but the bit you can read gives a taste of it

But it is also a town mired in deep problems. It is one of the poorest in England. It has three times the national average of children-in-care. And, in a way that I believe is linked, it is home to well over 800 high-risk convicted sex offenders. It was from Blackpool, too, that the highest number of sexual offences were referred to the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales last year.

Blackpool has a lot of former hotels and guest houses that, I imagine, were easy to convert into children's homes and also into HMOs and bail hostels for the kids who'd aged out of the care system and as somewhere to put former prisoners. So bad that the council passed a law relatively recently to make it harder to get planning permission for new children's homes. It's also cheap, so other LAs bus their 'looked after' kids there.

There are several council funded trans-charities there, and the number of GIDS referrals is four times the national average.

I suspect there are lots of different factors that make Blackpool kids vulnerable to GI. Just speculating briefly I can think of lots of possibilities; trans-ally SW, families absent, too cowed, uncaring or otherwise unable to pushback, ND children more likely to be in care. Masses of other things I won't put down or I'd be here all day.

Anyway, to get back to the OP, I read the article yesterday and thought immediately of this poverty stricken Northern town. It doesn't fit the head's take on the subject at all.

There needs to be research on this. We need less anecdata and more brave, qualified people with support from their institutions to stand up to the activists, the accusations of bigotry, and look into why this ideology has exploded. I'm constantly astonished at the lack of curiosity into how we have found ourselves in this situation. Okay, tp have always existed. Whatever, buddy! But not like this, not so many children and especially not so many girls.

‘Trans children more likely to be white and privileged’ says head

. . . like being a goth in the 90's

It is hard to miss that the leading voices of the TRA movement over the past decade have been in massive majority male, white, public school educated and very much middle class. The ones setting policy, being the public face, getting into influential situations for those cosy cups of tea, having influential friends, being women's officers etc yada yada.

This is an extremely diverse group, there is no one size fits all possible within it. But the evidence has been that some factions within the group have hugely disproportionate importance, influence and voice, and have both spoken over and utilised for personal gain the vulnerability of other factions. And actively suppressed and attacked the ones whose voices and 'lived experience' is inconvenient to the desires of the most powerful factions.

Sorry for posting that GIDS "research" that failed to shed any light on this and as others have pointed out, reflects the demographic break down in society. Was toddler wrangling early this morning and was so surprised to find actual published research from GIDS (who were notoriously reluctant to publish any accurate data) I completely failed to do more than skim over the details.

And that's at the root of all this I suppose - just as the data on the catastrophic impact of pbs and cross sex hormones has been deliberately hidden by the "gender industry", the analysis of the backgrounds of children has only relatively recently emerged as Cass and others have highlighted.

I'm uneasy at attributing too much blame to parents as the deliberate attempts to bully parents / carers into affirming their usually mentally vulnerable child is now well documented. We need to keep firmly in our sights the organisations and individuals targeting children and do everything possible to remove them from being able to influence parenting, healthcare, policy and practice in relation to children.

I’ve always thought children of celebrities have been a vulnerable group.It’s a difficult environment for parents to get right for their children, especially if the parents are insecure with have a strong desire for attention themselves.

If you read my post, you'll see that I mentioned that the figures didn't add up. It says: "83.4% were White British and 36.6% had an unidentified ethnicity."

How can 83.4% be white British and 36.6% have an unidentified ethnicity? That's 120% without even including those who are black, Asian or other ethnicities. That's why I asked for the detail of the figures from the paper.

I suspect that of those where the ethnicity was identified 83.4% were White British.

The total percentage should still add up to 100.

Right, of the 100% of children who's ethnicity was recorded, 83.4% were white British but only 63.4% had their ethnicity recorded.

That's one possible interpretation. So just over half (52.9%) are known to be white British,10.5% are known to be of other ethnicities (unspecified) and 36.6% of unknown ethnicity.

But it's really not clear if that's what they mean.

I think this too - you have two distinct groups. The children who have been either pushed into it or affirmed very strongly from white middle or upper class parents with money, and extremely vulnerable children such as looked after children. The former are more outspoken and more activist because they have the means to be. This also means their children are less likely to suffer harms or more able to cope with the harms through throwing money at it.

E.g. children of celebrities have a reasonable chance of forcing everyone around them to use wrong-sex pronouns because they're rich. Looked after children, not so much. Also, they'll get whatever healthcare they want, again looked after children will be reliant on the NHS at best and maybe not even that if they detransition, given how captured the NHS is.

My experience at my daughter's secondary is that having large groups of people of faith in the school community has been a protection against gender ideology. It so happens these are mostly non-white groups (though not all, there are Christian, Jewish and Muslim families who are white). I think there is something interesting to unpick there. I wonder if gender woo believers are mostly non religious. I think they almost have to be as it's a religion in itself, really.

It does add up to 100%. For 36.6% ethnicity was unknown therefore 63.4% did have their ethnicity recorded. Of those that had their ethnicity recorded 83.4% were white British.

Couldn’t agree more with your final paragraph especially.

Perhaps with celebrity or famous parents the children are looking for attention in their own way?

I've found another paper about the children referred to GIDS. This one is specifically about the ethnicity of GIDS patients.

Service user engagement by ethnicity groups at a children’s gender identity service in the UK - Ilham I Manjra, Ian Russell, Johanna K Maninger, Una Masic, 2022

I can still only access the abstract, but this one gives a much higher percentage of white children, and there's no huge percentage of 'unknown ethnicity' in this one, since the paper is specifically about ethnicity.

Across years 93.35% young people identified as White (higher than the CAMHS and national population averages); 6.65% as EMP.