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

You can tell who they are because they are very likely to be (current) prisoners.

Some movie buff will come along and get the quote soon.

I am going to bed quite soon so it will likely be best to not quote me until the morning. It's really hard to keep up with quotes here.

Go back and look. It is in this thread and is likely used all the time in these threads.

I'm still catching up but ugh! Jade is tediously taking up thread space being IMO deliberately obtuse.

And I'm not dignifying Hows with a response either, because IMO Hows is also not a genuine poster.

Again, your answer is indicating that your support is conditional.

Everything that the light touches… Yawn.

Ok — if you’ve been unaware of any cases of men convicted of violent or sexual crimes but having those crimes reported as women’s, I can see why you might dismiss the problem in good faith. Now you are aware, I imagine you will start to notice it.

Well that is a bit of an anti-women hate rant.

You tell us. You are the one telling us that their numbers are irrelevant because supposedly they transitioned after placement in prison.

There is a huge difference between reading something from ChatGPT and understanding the MoJ statistics. It looks more and more like you read the ChatGPT and believed everything it said without question.

This point has already been covered.

The policies proposed by Stonewall et al do not try to ascertain whether somebody is 'genuinely trans', and the trans umbrella now covers too many different groups to objectively define what that would mean anyway.

My goodness, the quality of debate in this thread has deteriorated.

"Show me where I said that."
"So you're saying ..." something that no-one has said.

Actual debate listens carefully to what the other person says, tries to understand, and then agrees or disagrees, preferably with reasoning. It doesn't just try to win an argument, but to look for points of agreement.

I know it gets difficult when it feels as if everyone is piling on, but that will happen sometimes. Then it helps to slow down and think carefully before replying. Not every post has to be replied to instantly.

I'm not just saying this to you, Jade, but to everyone still arguing. Myself, I'm off, though knowing me I won't be able to resist coming back.

Comprehension fail…

If you think the police have been recording gender AND sex, you have been misinformed. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that somebody has been gatekeeping what it means to be trans.

So my post which included the 2023 prison statistics for rates of sexual offending was conveniently reported and removed because I made a comment about another poster.

So I'll re-upload the image, because it's important that people can see that trans identified males are 5 times more likely to be imprisoned for sexual offenses than the rest of the male prison population.

Yes. They are DBS checked.

And they cannot be for publicly accessible single sex spaces, hence robust safeguarding principles mean that male people are excluded from those single sex spaces. All male people.

I don't think users of services are DBS checked?

false equivalence Hows. Most people don't care if they're "misgendered"

💅

Do pronouns affect this male teacher’s ability to do their his job?

They are He is teaching mathematics.
They aren’t He is not doing a typically gendered role (whatever that means) within a school.

Im sorry, I don’t understand the issue of the child having a right to express her thoughts using her own words on its most fundamental level.

if someone a female student uses the correct title and mispronounced your name, you would respectfully correct tell them to lie.

If they the female student continued to miss correctly identify the male teacher as a male when you his wish is for her to pretend he is not male but female then you he would likely perceive their her action as malicious rather than a choice of not repeating something which is not true

so Ms Mr is his titlr and Smith is her his name.

and your DD says that she he is “obviously male” (I’m guessing DD Rather than OP coming to this decision themselves herself)

why does it matter to her when the adult male in a position of authority demands she tells a lie about his sex?

Why?

Ms Mr Smith is male and should never going to be in the female changing rooms for PE or the female pupil toilets.

Ms Mr Smith is going to teach her his classes while demanding his pupils lie about his sex, take her his marking home and hopefully do the rest of her his job to the best of her his ability.

You seem to have great offence that Ms Mr Smith appears to not be is [(edit) not ] female at birth yet demands the child in his care tells a lie to bolster with his self image.

but does it hurt you when your child is taught to lie?

does it hurt ms Mr smith’s teaching when he demands your child tells a lie during school time?

does it hurt DD to be forced to lie about the adult who has been employed to as her teacher?

you asked what you can advise your DD to do.

tell her to respect her teacher as her teacher respects demands that she complies with his demand to lie while in the class.

tell her to talk to you

or her form tutor or head of year if she is unhappy so what if their judgement clearly comes into question if they support the male teachers demands

tell her to be kind and to shut up and to accept the male adult should be given priority and all of the power and to do what the adult male demands

It doesn’t cost her anything to shut up and just do whatever she is told to do whenever she is told to do it.

and surely you’d rather your child were kind and a not question the male teacher and to always give into the demands of males who feel that they should be the one deciding on what she can say

than knowingly bully another person by speaking the truth about his sex or asking for her needs and rights to be taken into account too.

she she doesn’t agree with Ms Mr Smith?

That is OK.

DD is entitled to her beliefs just as [(edit) Ms Mr ] Smith is, DD just needs to realise that she can only express these beliefs once Mr Smith decides to be kind and agrees she can speak

Totally different and a complete non issue. You don’t have to become Mrs X when you marry, you know.

Are you saying eating during Ramadan is harmful?

It’s you who set up the ‘DiscoBob sees harm in it’ test for when compulsion is fine, not me.

I think compelled speech against conscience is wrong. Jehovahs Witnesses believe calling someone Rev is wrong and I wouldn’t compel them to in school. Even though I see no harm in the title. I don’t think GC beliefs are more tendentious than JWs’ or less deserving of the protection of the same principle.

It’s fine if people use chef differently too. It’s not the DiscoBob test there either. I Googled school chef to check I wasn’t going mad, and no, you’d be amazed how many of us there are merrily transgressing in our nomenclature.

I got a bit lost at the use of data for LGB in the US being applied to incarceration figures for men who identify as trans in the UK as if it were somehow relevant.

Again, the issue is not how a person sees themself, it is that they adopt language and concepts that have preexisting meanings specific to the opppsite sex.

So in appropriating this for themselves they do not just express their own identities, they also rewrite other people's identies.

If a man has the right to say he identifies as being the same as me because of sonething he just thinks I am, surely I have just as much right to say I don't identify as being the same as him because I am in fact not that something he thinks I am?

Readers Note:

There is an archive version of the link to Allsopp's Bang to Rights below.

https://archive.ph/Lpi4w#selection-463.0-527.352

This is a critique of the validity of that article. It is not a reliable 'debunking' of the UK prisoner statistics where male people with transgender identities are shown to not have the same level of committing sex offences as female people or less than female people in the UK prison.

My observations are in brackets.

From Allsop
This is a fundamentally malicious and bogus argument:
it is fearmongering and smearing the innocent majority of a group based on the crimes of a handful of its members; a propaganda technique applied to marginalised groups throughout history;

(Official and neutral statistics that show a trend is a legitimate discussion point, considering we are and have been discussing safeguarding principles. This is not propaganda, this is showing an understanding of how risk has been based on historic and current facts.)

From Allsop
it has no credible moral, ethical or legal basis; human rights aren’t dependent on the crime stats for a minority group, just as they aren’t dependent on whether you live in a ‘high-crime postcode’; the vast majority are law-abiding even from the worst possible angle on the data;

(This is not relevant as far as I can see for invalidating official prison statistics. The issue is whether a group of male people still commit a particular group of crimes at the same rate or more or less than the general male population of the UK)

From Allsop
some of the rights they want to remove (legal gender recognition under the Gender Recognition Act 2004) are unrelated to crime, safety or gendered spaces;

(This is not relevant as far as I can see for invalidating official prison statistics. The issue is whether a group of male people still commit a particular group of crimes at the same rate or more or less than the general male population of the UK)

From Allsop
it is a classic “won’t somebody think of the women and children?!” moral panic, often using arguments like “even one case is too many, can’t be too careful!” which are deployed highly selectively to deny rights only to the minority group, not to everyone else;

(It is about safeguarding. Remembering that access to single sex spaces is not just about protection from sex crimes, but also a range of other specific needs unique to female people.
It is also very important here to remember this whenever some one tries to leverage in 'deny rights' - Article 8 has restrictions available to it.

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-8-respect-your-private-and-family-life

Article 8 protects your right to respect for your private and family life.

The EHRC link covers what this means. Including these restrictions:

Restrictions to the right to respect for your private and family life
There are situations when public authorities can interfere with your right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. This is only allowed where the authority can show that its action is lawful, necessary and proportionate in order to:
protect national security
protect public safety
protect the economy
protect health or morals
prevent disorder or crime, or
protect the rights and freedoms of other people.
Action is ‘proportionate’ when it is appropriate and no more than necessary to address the problem concerned.)

From Allsop
in many cases the statistics they use are irrelevant, selective, biased, decontextualised, misinterpreted and presented deceptively;

(These prison stats are not irrelevant, selective, biased, there is no decontextualisation, they are not misinterpreted and stating the raw stats is not presenting them deceptively. They are accurately collected and have been reinforced by being accepted as accurate in parliament and in court (ie. no judge has said, 'these statistics are inaccurate'. They have accepted them as being accurate. So, Allsop just saying this, doesn't mean any of this point is true or an accurate characterisation of the MoJ prison stats)

From Allsop
these often aren’t even actually crimestats — they are imprisonment stats, which is not the same thing at all when you are trying to claim that a group is “inherently” more criminal; the connection between crime and punishment is tenuous and complex…

(This doesn't even make logical sense. The only point any one using these statistics should be making is that they don't show in any way that this group of male people show a female pattern of crime - either in rates or in the nature of the crime itself).

From Allsop
…and marginalised groups often have much higher rates of incarceration due to systemic bias in every stage of the justice system, and wider society; one cannot take such numbers at face value without adopting (e.g.) blatantly racist beliefs. Prison stats can (and do) vary dramatically (e.g. due to changes in policing), demolishing the idea that they measure “inherent” qualities of a group.

(And this is where we keep pointing out that this is a flawed 'theory'. What does seem to be a logical deduction looking at past cases that in the UK, and Australia, this group get leniency. Quite the opposite of this point. There is no evidence in the UK to suggest that the UK justice system has a systemic bias towards this group of male people. At all. )

Male patients on female wards are not DBS checked.

Maybe focus in the relevant bit:

Exploiting census data
One of the difficulties with discussing statistics for trans people in the UK was the lack of reliable population numbers. When the 2021 Census collected these data for the first time, trans advocates predicted that transphobes would misuse them for propaganda. And so it came to pass…
The following image has been circulated recently by anti-trans accounts (along with various others of similar intent):
Press enter or click to view image in full size

An anti-trans meme / infographic that visually misrepresents prison statistics with respect to census data
Firstly, the title is misleading — this is based on prison data, not crime data, with all of the accompanying problems discussed already. We’ve already seen that incarceration rates for marginalised groups can be ten times higher than the baseline.
Conversely, criminologists find that cis women are treated more leniently than men. It is estimated that there may be as many at 64,000 woman paedophiles in the UK, with reports rising recently to around 600 cases per year, yet only 103 woman sex offenders in total are in prison at the time of this dataset. Studies in the US show that 21% of child sexual abuse is committed by females, despite them only being 1% of the sexual offenders in prison. Surveys indicate prevalence rates of female sexual offenders six times higher than official data. As we saw previously, the UK justice system simply ignored some kinds of sex crime by women until recently.
There is a critical distinction between offending and conviction — the graphic claims that 395 men per million commit sexual offences of any kind, yet surveys find the number of college men who admit to rape is staggeringly high — in the region of 40,000 to 160,000 per million. And that number doesn’t even include any other, less serious sexual offences. Over a million people are victims of sexual assaults per year in the UK. The graphic is wrong by a factor of at least 100x in this regard.
The graphic also maliciously misgenders trans women by calling them “men who identify as women”.
Despite being dated 2023, it uses the figure for sexual crimes of males (11,660) for June 2021 from the <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/5bIVF/assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1006269/Population_30June2021_quarterly.ods" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">government data. But the figure used for women (103) does not match the government data for females, which says 119.
It does not cite any source for the number of trans women sex offenders, or any breakdown of the types of sex offence. The most likely source I have found appears to be a Parliamentary answer in January 2022.
The graphic also visualises rates (of groups with wildly different sizes) using icons (normally used to display a tally of actual individuals) which is highly deceptive: it portrays 92 trans individuals as if there were 1916 of them, but 103 cis individuals as if there were just 3 of them. “Lying with visualisation” is another form of “lying with statistics” even when the numbers themselves are (somewhat) true.
To exaggerate the apparent crime rate, it also uses the smallest possible population estimate for trans women, only including those with a specified binary (man/woman) trans identity. Many binary trans people opted not to provide this information (and almost 3 million people did not answer the gender identity question at all). From the census numbers it therefore appears possible that there could be up to twice as many trans women than the number used in the infographic — which would correspondingly decrease the incarceration rate.

Gender identity data, 2021 Census, England and Wales
The breakdown by age also suggests a larger population of trans people as younger generations, free of Section 28, feel more able to come out — which could also affect the apparent incarceration rate, especially since violent crimes are strongly skewed towards young people:
Press enter or click to view image in full size

Percentage of population with a trans identity, by age, 2021 Census, England and Wales
It also uses numbers excluding children under 16 for trans people, but total population numbers for everyone else, further distorting the proportions since about 17% of the population are under 16, and young children would be under the age of criminal responsibility. Thanks to ShantiPixie for pointing this out.
So, the data have multiple likely biases, several of which change the result by a large factor in the ballpark of 4x, 6x, 10x, meaning the graphic could be misleading by a factor of 20x, 30x, 40x or even more.
Even setting that aside, what do these numbers mean in a practical & political context? Firstly, you are more likely to encounter a cis woman sex offender than a trans woman one — even using the heavily biased figures above. Secondly, 99.9% of trans women are innocent; none of this statistical scaremongering remotely justifies any restrictions on rights.

Readers Note continued:
There is an archive version of the link to Allsopp's Bang to Rights below.

https://archive.ph/Lpi4w#selection-463.0-527.352

From Allsop
History of Hate section - This is sparple. I cannot see any relevance - the MoJ statistics are not relevant to this equivalence at all. It is there for emotional manipulation.

Lying with Statistics - More false comparisons. And Allslop again misuses the the plight of black Americans and indigenous people from around the world falsely to further his political cause. I consider this racist because the situations are not comparable when you consider the leniency being shown.

Then he says:

"The argument above applies even if the statistics are technically “correct”, because it relies on decontextualising these numbers to ignore the centuries of systemic racism underpinning them.

“Lying with statistics” is a well-known phrase precisely because one can be dishonest without actually fabricating the numbers; decontextualising is just one of many deceptive techniques. We will explore more in the examples below (a mixture of prison, conviction and prosecution stats)."

No... I think it is clear though that Allsop is 'lying with this comparison'. But let's see in the next section, eh.

The “Swedish Study” section - not relevant because we are not discussing the Swedish study here.
"MoJ 2017: the proportion of sex offences" section

It brings up points made by a heavily invested male with a transgender identity who has no expertise in criminology and wrote yet another 'medium' article. These are the points made.

-that there might be more prisoner in UK prisons than known. So therefore the rates would be lower for the sex crimes.

-The claim that longer sentences 'skew' the data which is a flawed premise for invalidating the data because the same thing can be said for the male and female population too. Therefore there is like for like there. But they also then try to bring in this discrimination, when in fact, we can see there is leniency in giving custodial sentences. Even to those committing sexual offences.

-And that the proportions are 'meaningless' to draw conclusions about a population.

Well... um.... Gellman themselves did a set of calculations that does not show at all that male people with transgender identities have the same or lower rate of committing sex crimes than female people in the UK.

"According to Google, the UK’s adult population is 54 million, give or take some change. The best estimates of the trans population is just under 1%, with a more or less 50/50 split between genetic males and genetic females (I use these terms here to disambiguate the necessity to divide the adult population in half for the purpose of estimating trans vs cis population).

That makes around 270,000 trans women in the UK. I’m not going to consider trans kids here because…. that’s just creepy to even think about.

So we have 129 trans women out of 270,000 in prison. That’s 0.047% of the entire trans woman population in prison… at all.
76 are there for sex offences, so that’s 0.028% of the entire trans woman population in prison for sex offences.

Now let’s check that against the cis figures:
3812 cis women equals 0.014% of all cis women. 125 is 0.0005% of all cis women in prison for sex offences.
78781 cis men equals 0.2% of all cis men. 13234 is 0.049% of all cis men in prison for sex offences."

So... still not seeing why it is being said that male people with a transgender identity have the same risk profile or lower than female people in the UK.

Let's compare 0.028% vs 0.0005%.

Yep... still not even close. I mean, I guess they can be said to be both % less than 1%. But then so too are the %s for male people.

It would be safeguarding failure to change policies based on this.
Of course, the Census data shows 48,000 male people who declared they were female not 270,000. So, are those dismissing the MoJ data then saying that male people LIED on the Census? A crime?

Allsop again leverages in groups suffering systemic discrimination falsely at the end of this section as well.

Not seeing this article being relevant at all to showing that male people with transgender identities have the same or lower risk of committing sex crime than female people. Which is what needs to be shown to include that group into female single sex provisions.