Advice please - TIM teacher just arrived at DD’s school

[KnottyAuty]

DD reports that the new teacher has asked to be referred to as she/her and Ms Smith. They are obviously male. DD isn’t happy about the power imbalance of potential behaviour points and detentions for non compliance.

I’ve got no idea how to advice DD how to handle this but obviously know from reading here that using this language is a safeguarding problem. Ms Smith should follow the same rules as all the other male teachers. If everyone must use this language, then it looks like the school is unable to tolerate GC beliefs.

Suggesting that DD respectfully avoids pronouns doesn’t seem workable as using the teacher’s name will include “Miss”….

Is there a gender neutral way of referring to a teacher like “Professor”?!

What do I advise DD so she can work within her GC beliefs? And what should I write to the school to say about this?

eta clarification

Freedom of belief does not involve coercing others to comply with one's own belief system. One can be respectful of others without such coercion. Trying to force others into role playing along with your personal fantasy is not in the least respectful, and certainly not in the context of a school environment. This is a breach of appropriate child-teacher boundaries.

The parent definitely needs to bring this issue up with the Head.

No it isn’t. People state their pronouns when they join the organisation and everyone addresses them as per the same. By policy all our emails have to state our pronouns with the email signature.

I have met a very senior person who was obviously male but dressed in female clothing and wanted to be addressed as she/her. Everyone at the meeting complied with it. I don’t see how anyone else’s gender is my issue. I don’t want anyone to police me and I am not going to police someone else and their beliefs.

Yep. 'Just do what the male teacher requests' on this specific issue is an example of everything we're raising our daughters to know about social conditioning.

Of course I would. People cannot change biological sex.

You may be 'happily obtuse' to the deeper implications of going along with this sort of practice, but fortunately others have more understanding and not prepared to do so.

Any person in that situation who feels they are being coerced into going along with something is being policed.

Do you think Jehovah’s Witnesses should have to wish colleagues Happy Christmas? Because that’s probably the closer correlation. Maybe a Jewish colleague required to wish people Happy Easter.

What about making the people whose first language isn’t English happier? Or those who are autistic and would find calling a man Miss very uncomfortable. Or a girl who simply doesn’t want to call a man in make up ‘Miss’. Why should she have to be uncomfortable and unhappy, rather than him?

I haven't read the whole thread, I'm GC and wouldn't be happy with this, but could she use Mx which I believe is considered a gender neutral title?

The clothes? A gendered (and gender is appropriate here I think) dress code for staff?

No, Ms is a title for women. Calling a man by one title for women instead of another title for women is not a compromise.

Not is Professor Smith a solution. School teachers are not professors.

I intensely dislike the Miss/Sir convention anyway, and managed to get through 16 years of school without ever calling a teacher anything to their face. Talking about them to other teachers is more tricky but probably won't need to happen often.

So @Happilyobtuse is every member of staff at your organisation compelled to declare their preferred pronouns to everyone?

That's a legally and morally dangerous place to be. Not to mention transphobic - not everyone is ready to do this, and your workplace policy would force them to make a choice they may come to regret.

In response to the lady who asked would I do the same for a transman, yes I would. Did put more but it got deleted, forgot we have to censor our thoughts, however a big clue is it was to do with Biology.

You are ok to use female language to address men, but not when they use toilets labelled with the very words you are happy to use to describe them?

If you destroy the meaning of words in one context, why do you think those meanings remain when it does matter to you?

I agree that it's bad for the children, either way. But I have less antipathy for a man who is suffering from mental health issue than one who is playing out a fetish.

But you are policing everyone who does not comply. You said so yourself. You are even suggesting people lose their job over it.

You are saying -out loud- that girls should be compliant and that their compliance should be policed.

How regressive.

I'd suggest adults making those decisions as equals is different to a teacher mandating children's speech.

I am not just right 'in one sense'. MN doesn't permit hate speech. Only allowing posts after they have been checked by the moderators would be totally impractical. So MN has gone for a system where anyone can report any post, and MN deletes those that their moderators deem to contravene the posting guidelines. Compare this with the ineffective moderation on TwiX, BlueSky, or Reddit. It is very unfair to MN (the organisation) to label it as "[allowing] blatant hate speech".

By the way, it is also unfair when some people tar every Mumsnetter with the same "transphobic" brush.

This may be a suitable compromise.

I simply don’t understand why anyone thinks obliging others to use the wrong words and to deny the evidence of your own eyes is respectful, and yet that’s what’s happened repeatedly in this thread.

Your name belongs to you. But that’s all that belongs to you. Titles, pronouns - they are part of language which belongs to everyone and isn’t for individuals to change the meaning of if they fancy it, in a highly disrespectful way.

As soon as you start using female words for someone male you sow the seeds that that person is, in some way, female. It’s an attempt to hide the truth. Again, there’s nothing respectful in that.

This is one of the points though, that it seems some posters are dismissing.

The 'it is just courtesy' argument is fully one sided. The courtesy only goes one direction, towards the male teacher.

If the male teacher is not insisting that students use female language for him and is giving student's the option or an acceptable alternative, it would be a different discussion. But that is not happening as far as we know.

I hope that Knotty comes back and tells us that the teacher will accept another neutral title as an alternative. That would be a better outcome.

Instead, we have pages and pages of posters dismissing the harm to others and doing so with the reasoning of their decision being one that centres a male person because it is the 'kind' thing to do.

Well it is the policy in local government! Like it or hate it! People are free to change it if they change their mind. But yes everyone does have to state their pronouns as it is often hard just by looking at someone to know what they identify as.

It's a safeguarding risk as it's telling girls their perceptions and observation of reality are less important than a man's desire they lie.

I've c and p the definition of emotional abuse in KCSIE below. Requiring girls to use wrong sex pronouns all the time to validate the man fits this definition. What's in it for them? What if they don't want to? What if the can't use non-standard English easily (e.g
Many children with SEND)? What if they are subject to coercive control and denial of reality domestic abuse at home?

It's abusive to impose wrong-sex non-standard non-reality based English purely for validation of a man (at best, AGP is real)

In the case of convicted child kidnapper and rapist Andrew/Amy Miller the judge particularly commented that the child may have got in the car with this male rapist and kidnapper because he was presenting as a woman. Maybe that girl had been drip fed the lie that trans identified men pose less of a risk than other men and that to correctly sex him would be rude or bigoted.

I think 'Teacher' as a form of address is fine 'excuse me, teacher' etc

KCSIE c + p
26. Emotional abuse: the persistent emotional maltreatment of a child such as
to cause severe and adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may
involve conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or
valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may include not
giving the child opportunities to express their views, deliberately silencing them or
‘making fun’ of what they say or how they communicate. It may feature age or
developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. These may
include interactions that are beyond a child’s developmental capability as well as
overprotection and limitation of exploration and learning or preventing the child from
participating in normal social interaction. It may involve seeing or hearing the ill-
treatment of another. It may involve serious bullying (including cyberbullying),
causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or
corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of
maltreatment of a child, although it may occur alone.

Ah there's that lovely word 'complied' again.

Gavvvllllaaaa 🤣. Sorry couldn't resist

So you organisation forces gender ideological beliefs on everyone?