My son’s school insisting he calls NB teacher Mx

[Justme56]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/01/my-sons-school-insisting-he-calls-non-binary-teacher-mx/

‘Confusion about the rights of staff to have their identity recognised, is undermining the rights of children to be protected from dogma’

What would the non-binary pronouns for clergy be? Parent and Sibling?

If a Mx teacher is neither male not female does that mean they can't supervise in single sex situations (e.g. changing rooms) or does it mean they can supervise either?

🤔

When the child can see and hear quite clearly what sex the teacher is, the teacher ‘not wanting to declare their sex’ is a load of swinging bollocks. At that point it becomes coerced speech requiring a child to indulge an adult in the adult’s expression of their poor mental health (at best), or of their crackpot ideology, or of their fetish (at worst).

If they want a title that doesn’t reveal their sex, they can go and study hard for several years and qualify as a doctor or a member of the clergy. Or join the Armed Forces, that might be easier.

Oh, silly me, they could just identify as a Dr, Rev or Admiral. That would be easiest of all.

It's absolutely nothing like Thomas and Tom.

Mx isn't a name! It's a clear statement of gender ideology.

No, no. You have to be a member of the Party to be 'Comrade'. The default in Soviet Russia was 'Citizen...'

Ooops. Unfortunately, you either had to be "Grazhdanin" or "Gradzhdanka" ("Citizeness"). Back to the drawing board.

Good point. That also comes to play with regard to school trips. e.g. I was there as the obligatory female on a school hillwalking trip - just a day trip.

Damn. Thought I had it all solved there. Back, as you say, to the old drawing board.

In German you have "genosse" which is like "comrade" (not sure if you have to be in The Party for that) but then German is a gendered language so you'd have to call a female comrade "genossin" (it is quite clever sometimes how the NBs have workarounds in German)

Heh - though I am female, I am a Bachelor of Science not a Spinster of Science.

Seems apt!

How about "Tutor" as a title for teachers?

Yep I remember the ridiculous frothing about that in the 80s (it was seen as a thing that only bra-burning hairy-legged probably-lesbian feminists insisted on, and invoked a frankly bizarre level of rage in some men), and now it is totally mainstream.

So I couldn’t get worked up about Mx now.

“Ms” signifies “you don’t need to know whether I am married”.

”Mx” signifies “you must pretend that I’m neither female nor male”.

Not really comparable.

Exactly. The Ms comparison is totally irrelevant.

Mx in the classroom is like demanding to be called ‘President’ or ‘PM’ when you are not Trump or Starmer
It’s forcing others to knowingly lie because you insist that they do so and your own feelings must be privileged above everyone else’s. So unbelievably entitled.

My experience of this in school is that the other kids police it very heavily because they think that’s the correct and progressive thing to do, and are being told so by the school. And so a kid who disbelieves in the concept and says so, or who accidentally forgets the ‘right’ words to use, would be cancelled as mean and bigoted for not using it by the other kids. Awful unnecessary stress to bring to the classroom. Awful imposition of entitled and highly privileged middle class values of a very specific type on a school of children from all
backgrounds. Enormously selfish adult behaviour individually to insist the kids do this and enormously weak school employers to have allowed this to be the requirement.

In my day at school we studied The Crucible and 1984 at school and learned to be wary of authoritarianism, this is so sad to see kids getting these hard lessons in who’s really in charge.

Thanks for this. Do you means Mux as in "mucks" or Mux as in "Mc's (like in McSweeney, McDonald and so on)"?

The problem is that Mx, like Ms, violates English phonotactic principles. The language abhors a schwa (the upside down e - /ə/) in a one syllable word because it cannot carry word stress, which is important in English. If you think about it, the words "the" and "a" which are pronounced one way when unstressed are pronounced completely differently when stressed. A lot of the weirdness comes from this, I think.

Another reason is that Mr and Mrs are abbreviations, so there is something actually to pronounce. This is not the case with Ms and Mx.

I use Ms much, much more in writing (it's my default if my correspondent has not expressed a preference) and on those very rare occasions I actually have to say it, I tend to use "Mizz" to distinguish it from "Miss".

Edited to give clearer example

But I have a sneaking suspicion that the real reason people choose difficult and unpronouncable honorifics or odd pronouns is to keep the rest of the world off balance and gain a tactical advantage in doing so. Pronouns are, as someone upthread pointed out, rohypnol.

To be fair, there are problems with calling women Miss/Mrs and men Sir. Sir is historically a term of respect/power and Miss (in particular) and Mrs ( to a lesser extent) have been used as terms to diminish women.

Some schools get around it by using given names. So Sarah, Ellie, Peter etc. There is pushback on this because some consider it doesn’t demonstrate respect. My mother was a teacher for very many years. Her view was that if she ever needed Mrs xxx, rather than first-name to affirm/demonstrate respect, she had lost the respect of the children.

it is interesting that when her school changed to first-names, it was the male teachers who had most objection.

Maybe suggest to the school that they change to this method. This would replicate future workplaces, which rarely now use title/family name.

A Mx with a Scottish surname would be a bit of a tongue twister.

As I've said previously, the kids at the school where I did cover had no difficulty with the 'Mx'; it was the expectation that they always use 'they/them' instead of 'he/him' that proved to be a problem.

Yes, I'm fully aware that 'they/them' has actually been in use as a gender neutral pronoun for many, many years. The issue is those who have decided that they are 'non-binary' taking offence when they are correctly sexed/described.

I'm trying not to out myself here - but I've no doubt that the chap at the school where I worked thought that he was with like-minded people, given that a previous HT had had a rainbow crossing painted to the entrance of the school.

By the time I did my supply stint, there was a new HT and the crossing had been left to flake away.

Absolutely. I’ve been Ms since the 1980s as a teacher and single parent (of children who attended the school I taught in). Though of course always called Miss! when a child wanted attention, Mrs by people who couldn’t remember and occasionally Sir as I’m quite scary. Did I care? Not one bit.

"They" is used as a gender neutral pronoun in English in very specific, limited conditions. If the person is unknown ("there's someone at the door. Go and see what they want") or if they are indeterminate - if "they" could be anyone ("If anyone has a question would they please ask them at the end."). It is really counterintuitive and confusing to use "they" about a person standing right in front of you.

100% of people with disorders of sexual development are one sex or the other.

There's no such thing as "intersex", other as a misleading synonym for DSDs.

People with DSDs have asked repeatedly that transactivists stop coopting them.

Judge Judy gets called Sir pretty regularly. She very rarely even flinches 😂

I love that your school uses Ma'am. The asymmetry between Sir and Miss embeds sexism into every interaction with a teacher.