Introducing the issue to daughters, from a GC perspective

[Babyboomtastic]

I've got primary school age daughters. Neither of any real knowledge of the trans debate, or of trans in general. They are just starting to wake up to the sex inequality around them, and I try to encourage them to read about strong female role models, those that have fought for equality etc.

I know just how captured by trans ideology. Many kids end up becoming by the time they're teenagers, and are wondering what I can do before they reach that age.

We're doing a lot of reading of the famous five at the moment, and George is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare but also a talking point, in that no George definitely can't be a boy, but that it's also no wonder she wanted to be one when the boys were having adventures and she didn't want to stay and make house with Anne!

I'm wanting them to be gently introduced to the issue from a gender critical perspective, not to brainwash them, but so when trans is introduced in school they can look at it critically rather than just believing everything they're told.

Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations?

My children are older teens so we rode the crest of this through high school.

I would say that the key thing is to keep talking to your children about what they are learning in school and as they get older what they are reading online.

I raised my kids with an understanding of historical sexual inequality and the importance of women’s rights through topics like the suffragettes and discussions our how different life was for my Mum and my grandmothers.

For GC issues the I addressed things as they came up. My method was to ask lots questions about what they had learned and help them think through the issues past “be kind”, to “what is right, what is fair, what logical”.

Be aware that it’s hard for kids (who might have trans friends) to find a balance between what they understand intellectually and the fact that they wish to avoid hurting a friend’s feelings.

Keep discussing it, be open to challenge, work through issues calmly and with empathy. Always be a safe place for them to ask questions and discuss thorny issues.

I didn’t do anything in particular in terms of reading particular books except for making it clear why a boy shouldn’t feature in Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, which DD had been given for her birthday. That opened a lot of doors to making sure she knew what was what and at 15 she is pretty gender critical - lots of open convos at dinner. When she started at a co-ed secondary there was lots of playground wittering from the girls about how you identify (very much not the boys), but she’s now at a girls school and so far as I can tell the topic simply never comes up. I think with kids it’s dying a slow death.

I think it can be quite hard to interpret what young people feel about this because many of them are more than happy to go along with it without remotely believing in the underlying premise.

So they'll be perfectly aware that their non binary friend is male or female but will also believe it's completely harmless and indeed, kind, to play along with it.

It's like the seven year old who knows deep down that Father Christmas makes no sense but still goes along with all the letters and carrots.

Probably the best way to explain your own beliefs is to first show understanding of how they might feel and the world they live in. Praise them for being thoughtful about how their trans/NB friends might feel.

I do think generally, as GCs, we don't take enough account of the fact nobody actually believes that sex isn't real, or any of the other stuff. We think we can convince with logic and obviously, when it comes to legal cases etc, that's how you have to argue.

But usually the people who are "pro-trans" aren't doing so because they're convinced by the arguments, they're doing it because the milieu that surrounds them is telling them that you have to follow this line to be a nice person. The more ridiculous the actual premise, the nicer you are for going along with it.

I had previously assumed that as you say “no one really believes people can change sex jist because the say so” until a conversation with a teenage girl who genuinely thought that a “trans boy” dating a girl was a heterosexual relationship.

Genuinely believed it.

That teenage girl should be asked whether the couple in question need to use contraceptives.

@HPFA

But usually the people who are "pro-trans" aren't doing so because they're convinced by the arguments, they're doing it because the milieu that surrounds them is telling them that you have to follow this line to be a nice person. The more ridiculous the actual premise, the nicer you are for going along with it.

Really well put.

I think there's a similar dynamic is progressive "allies": The more ridiculous the actual premise, the more open minded and free from rigid prejudices you are for going along with it

My kids are very young and transgender hasn't come up but they do talk about who is a boy and who is a girl and want to know why someone is a boy or a girl. Like they'll think it's because of the hair length or what colour baby blanket they are given. I'm just super clear and factual - George can wear what she likes and cut her hair short if she wants but she has a vagina so she is a girl.

My experience with my own DD (13) when she was in primary school just a couple of years ago, was that the trans thing was well and truly past its peak even then. The kids of her age were very dismissive of it all, especially the girls. They also very much disliked unisex toilets, and were vocally angry at going to eg. chain restaurants which had changed their loos from male and female to unisex. They universally agreed that girls and boys could have any haircut they liked and play with any toys they liked but that did not make them the opposite sex. It was quite refreshing, actually.

So I would not worry too much. Just keep telling them sensible things every so often, and it’s unlikely they will encounter much gender ideology at primary. The primary PSHE curriculum doesn’t have to include trans stuff at all, and certainly not before Y5 even if teachers want to add something wishy-washy about it. It’s worth checking if the school uses an outside LGBT provider to do any bits of PSHE; but increasingly schools are stopping doing that at all. In DD’s school they just had their very sensible class teacher doing the (actually very sensible) compulsory sex education and anatomy bits of the primary PSHE curriculum, and nothing else.

Oh and at DD’s secondary the trans thing is also visibly receding. She says it’s considered very much still a thing with the sixth-formers, where there is still the odd “rainbow” nonbinary person who insists they all use pronouns and so on, but this has almost completely disappeared in the lower school.

Something that is a massive help with this is that there is now a nonbinary drama teacher, who they all regard as unspeakably cringe and embarrassing. So the good old maxim of when the adults take to doing something it becomes ultra unfashionable amongst teenagers is still very much the case!

I think this aspect of gender ideology is understated IMO. It’s still present in universities but very much less popular than it was, and noticeably on the decline. It’s very definitely on the way out lower down the school system, just because it’s regarded as something now really out of fashion that they associate with the previous generation of kids and think is therefore “cringe”.

I've tried to consistently stick with the line that people in the olden days used to think women shouldn't vote/own property/get a university education but nowadays there is no reason that boys and girls can't do/like/be good at/be interested in exactly the same things regardless of their sex.

There are some physical reasons why boys and girls differ but this doesn't affect what they're interested in or good at. Being good at Maths, or sensitive, or boisterous, doesn't make you a boy/girl, it's your body that does.

As they get older you could try looking in more detail at e.g. not being allowed to study Medicine, and why that might have been, who that might have benefited, what the harm might have been. It's really interesting to think about. And are there any equivalences today? What do they think about those?

I actually don't have hard-and-fast reasons for a lot of it other than the general idea that prior to female contraception being widely available, many women quite often did spend a lot of their time having kids and bringing up kids, so people saw that either as their 'job' or their 'choice' or their 'preference', when really what choice did they actually have and in what context were those choices made?

I've been thinking about this a lot.

Something that dawned on me recently is that trans ideology is almost more logical to a child than GC views. In the sense that, young kids don't really know the realities of biological sex, they just think in terms of "girls have long hair, boys like football" etc.

So I've gone hard on counteracting that, showing examples of people who don't conform to stereotypes (e.g. taking an interest in women's football etc). So that the logical thing isn't "well, if a girl loves football then she must be a boy".

And also reinforcing that what makes boys and girls different is their body parts. And, now she's getting older we're talking more about inequality etc.

I'm hoping the rest will quietly take care of itself.

Plenty of people online really do seem to believe that sex is a terribly complicated concept and that it's often not possible to work out what sex someone is. I suspect many of them are American. We are the ignorant ones for not educating ourselves on biology.

But the logical thing was never that if a girl liked football she must be a boy.

What happened more commonly was people thought if a girl like boy things, or a boy liked girl things, they’d be gay. Which, to be fair, could happen as children who are persistently gender non-conforming are much more likely to be gay.

Which simply highlights the homophobia of gender ideology.

What really did it for mine was the bullying my younger DD had for not being "girly" enough. Apparently playing rugby, liking Doctor Who and wearing a tshirt with a dragon on meant, at 10yo, she Must be a boy.
Shes now 12yo, and doesn't mind everyone knowing she is lesbian.
But the whole thing made it clear that stereotypes are just that

.

I mean that in the sense that it’s more logical for very young kids who know boys and girls are different somehow but don’t yet know why.

There have been studies on this, the cognitive schemas children create based on what they see around them.

A common one being that girls have long hair and boys have short hair. It confuses them when they see a boy with long hair, because that doesn’t fit the schema.

And I think this is what makes young children vulnerable to trans ideology. If someone says: Freddie has long hair because he’s really a girl it makes sense to them because it fits that mental model they’ve created from observing the world around them.

I wouldn't start at a 'GC perspective'.

I would lay a firm basis of Biology. Humans are mammals, and mammals don't change sex. Some animals can change sex but we are not clownfish. You could broaden into science generally and talk about how some people got into trouble for their science (Galileo springs to mind) but they were proved to be On The Right Side of History. Also teach a bit of Logic: if A leads to B, it doesn't mean B leads to A.
Once that is established then move on to Religion. The buzzphrase in religion is 'some people believe ...'. Some people believe in Religion A, some people believe in Religion B. That's OK, you do you, etc. But you can only have more than one religion precisely because it's a belief; neither provable nor disprovable.
You then expand beyond the six major religions to include other Beliefs (don't mention you-know-what, we are merely laying down a framework here). You can explain that it's fine for other people to believe other things, but nobody should try to force their ideas on other people. Everyone is permitted to not-believe, as long as they do it politely.

I think it's important for kids to respect their friends' choices and if you try to get them not to, you will lose the argument and your kid's attention. So as people get older it's really important to have open and practical conversations about it without judging other people's choices or talking about it like it's the one true religion (either way). Now it's a good time to start honestly.

I have always tried to ask what it is that makes a boy/girl because I don't think it's behaviour or likes and dislikes. Talk about how one day it will be medically possible to change sex and then none of this will matter, but for now it is not possible and people are being tricked. And that women have been oppressed for centuries and it's a bit annoying to have men come along and tell us who we are and that they can be us by putting a dress on, all the time having had the advantage of being brought up male. But my kids are social justice warriors and that last bit is dodgy if people's friends are trans so be careful. The friends of my kids who are trans are lovely and unassuming and I would never want to hurt their feelings nor expect my kids to.

Talk about how one day it will be medically possible to change sex and then none of this will matter

I would definitely not talk about this - it is pure speculation and frankly in the realm of science fiction. What the OPs children need is fact, not fantasy, particularly not a fantasy world that has by-and-large been pushed by AGPs who need the world to believe in the existence of the “trans child” because middle-aged men in dresses with fetishises aren’t quite so appealing to the public.

I disagree. I think it is a useful way of triggering a thought experiment. It may well be possible in the future and thinking about that can help you sort out what you think about it (which is the role of Sci-Fi really).

I would never tell my kids something I say is fact end of story without backing it up so they wouldn't think my saying 'one day...' was fact. Maybe you would frame it differently linguistically but imaginary scenarios are one way of sorting out your own views and perspectives.

I think this only works at younger ages when they are still forming schemas of the world around them. From the age of about 8 onwards kids get very interested in bodies and rules - who has what body and who is allowed to do what - and they are much more clued up about bodily sex compared to “gender norms”.

My addition to the suggestions is: little and often. Keep conversations small and age-appropriate, but don’t ever stop having them. And be particularly aware that big transition points - switching to secondary school, the weird (maybe unwanted) body changes from going through puberty - are times when self assurance about these sorts of things can take a knock. That, as well as a need to fit in with peers, can sometimes make a child who was very solidly “colours are colours and anyone can wear pink, and people who say they can’t are just stupid” doubt this conviction and start to wonder whether being a boy who likes pink means they’re actually a girl. Speaking from experience.

Agreed. And not wanting to wear lip gloss and be sexy does not make you a boy. Boobs for example are so laden with sexual significance it's not surprising that these changes can trigger confusion if they're your boobs.

Talk about how one day it will be medically possible to change sex
I don't think talking hypothetically and playing at sci-fi scenario is terribly helpful at primary age. You seem to want them to engage in thinking skills before they have even acquired them!

I guess you would have to decide about that based on your own child. My child is fact driven, but also at a young age tended to lock in on misunderstood or part facts. Suggesting that actual sex change might be possible in the future could easily be grabbed and run with by a child that doesn’t do the subtleties of “might” and “not in your lifetime”. (Again, speak from experience: child was v v confused by a teacher who posited - as a badly presented thought experiment - that the moon landing was faked.)

Yeah so maybe it's an "imagine that..." conversation rather than a time travel one then. Still a useful way of thinking about whether sex and gender can be conflated now, where we are, but you're right, I could have phrased it differently.