URGENT help needed please re college socially transitioning daughter

[ConcernedmumofTIF]

I just typed out a whole long post and it disappeared! I'll start again.

I did post about my daughter a few weeks ago under a different name. I am a long term user but name changed for this for anonymity.

TLDR: my daughter is autistic with health issues and mental health issues and has expressed to college she wants to be called a male name. She has told me she wants hormones and double mastectomy. College is socially transitioning her and are using the male name in her official EHCP review documents. I asked them not to but they are ignoring me. What do I do next? I have to reply TODAY as they break up for Christmas this afternoon. Should I raise a saeguarding concern or should I wait and see what happens with the finalised document? (And does anyone know if I can appeal it if they include this other name in it?)

Longer story: she first expressed a non binary identity 2-3 years ago and we talked amicably about it, she knows I am gender critical and I explained why I hold my views, and why I wouldn't use the male name. She seemed OK with this and we have a very close relationship as I am also her carer and she wants me to handle lots of things for her - we talk a lot and spend time together daily doing cetain things she likes as a daily ritual.

Since then, she has obviously become more radicalised (evident in the way she talks about trans although interestingly she was unaware of the Tavistock, or Cass Review, or much of the key stuff) and has said she now identifies as a man, but also as a lesbian (but in a queer way, apparently) and wants hormones and a double mastectomy.

I am deeply concerned that college socially transitioning her is legitimising these desires and also isolating her from us as her family by being all "we will support you when your parents won't".

I have the Bayswater Group guide on safeguarding and have also put my daughter on the waiting list with a therapist who understands the dangers of all of this but they can't see her until March.

I just don't know what to do. I feel sick seeing this other name on offical documents and knowing the damage that is doing. My daughter is vulnerable - autistic, disabled with mental health issues and I think also OCD which I am about to contact the GP about as it's only recently I have realised that some of her rituals are more likely OCD than autistic. I feel college have a duty of care not to just socially transtition her.

Please help me work out a good course of action.

This is the college safeguarding policy https://www.activatelearning.ac.uk/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/07/Safeguarding-Policy.pdf

I've also looked at other relevant policies and nothing specifically covers social transition though there is mention of not tolerating "transphobia".

I do understand this perspective, and I can’t imagine how incredibly hard it is - as connection is the most important aspect here.

my point is that if the schools and colleges said a blank no,(citing the law) a parent who was allowing different names at home would be seen as more onside than the school to that young person. Even if their ultimate aim to steer their child away from the ideology.

The school (and all the other services) is creating a wedge between the parents and the child. A wedge that further pushes the child towards an ideology. Further weakens the parent’s nuanced methods of maintaining connection whilst simultaneously aiming to steer within boundaries.

this is exactly what trans charities have aimed for. Get the schools and professions on side, peel the child away from their parents.

the EHCP is a legal document too - the child’s legal name should be on it. It would be possible to explain this and blame it on the law.

Which is why the college is at such serious fault here. And it must be pointed out to them as they have socially transitioned the child on legal documents.

There’s clear guidance in kcsie.

This thread and article is incredibly important here

theres a truly awful post by a mother who lost her connection to her child as her ex and the school supported the transition

if services had a unanimous agreement (as they should now, post Cass) there might be more opportunities to help a child navigate this distress more carefully

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5461660-parebts-who-questioned-affirmative-approaches-felt-threatened-by-childrens-services?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

Safeguarding concern.

Also they are breaching data protection.

There is no such thing as a Trans child. This is a young person with mental health issues.

OP, re this thread and article...

I appreciate it doesn't help the immediate situation but hopefully reading this kind of thing helps to demonstrate that you're not alone 💐

I didn't actually join Bayswater, mainly because my daughter never got as far as identifying as the opposite sex. She spent a lot of time thinking that she might be and is still at significant risk of her school and the LA coercing her into believing that she is.

I appreciate I'm not at the sharp end in the same way that you are but one of the hardest parts in all of this for me is that there seems to be an assumption that once your child turns 16, they need to be listened to without scrutiny of any kind. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that "her voice is important here". Yes, of course it is and yes of course that means listening to how she views the world. But it feels like far too many professionals are forgetting that a 16 year old is a child and that autistic children are at greater risk than others when it comes to this whole subject. That's precisely why the KCSIE guidance calls it out and precisely why it's a legal requirement for schools to embed this understanding in their safeguarding.

The article in the linked thread explores this legislation and also brings in other laws/guidance that schools are meant to follow e.g. Teaching Standards and the Nolan Principles. Your daughter's college is demonstrating a failure to adhere to these too.

Sending love OP. I was there with my DD (also ASD, also had male pronouns/name on her EHCP) and yes I deal with all of the things that you do for her. Kids with autism really are a few years younger than their peers in terms of emotional maturity.

The thing that helped my DD was connections and activities that had nothing to do with the trans stuff. Holidays, theatre, stuff together - she wouldn’t do sporty healthy things but I think that would have really helped. She’s sort of through it now and out the other side but I’m always scared that activists could pull her back in. I hope your DD escapes too.

The thing that helped my DD was connections and activities that had nothing to do with the trans stuff. Holidays, theatre, stuff together - she wouldn’t do sporty healthy things but I think that would have really helped. She’s sort of through it now and out the other side but I’m always scared that activists could pull her back in. I hope your DD escapes too.

Same here. It took us a long time to get to the point when she would join us and we needed several back up plans. I remember one skiing holiday where my husband and I had already agreed in advance who was going on holiday with everyone else and who would go home with her if she didn't feel she could go. Whilst at the airport gate she said she couldn't do it, so we calmly put the plan into place. Whilst I was queuing up with the others to get on the plane (on that occasion I was the chosen "winner" of the holiday), she and her dad appeared in the queue. It's only recently that we have felt more confident making plans for holidays. Mostly the connections and activities have been much smaller - more everyday stuff, like playing card games or chatting about all sorts of different things on car journeys. Even that took time. She's been slowly rediscovering her enjoyment of various hobbies in this time too.

We've shifted from a time when she couldn't leave the house - sometimes couldn't even leave her bedroom - and was regularly violent at home to a much better place now. I now understand that this is a far more common experience than I had realised when a teenager is in crisis. It's been an emotional rollercoaster to say the least but we're getting there. We still do have setbacks and her mental health is still fragile (she really struggles with the nuances of friendship and feels like she has no friends 😞), but the direction of travel is positive. Making space for those connections has been an incredibly important part of it.

When we get posters like the ones on this thread (and worse still when those kind of opinions impact your child IRL, such as the what is happening to the OP's daughter right now), it really does highlight how some people are either utterly ignorant or nefariously determined to sever these connections and frame loving, caring parents as harmful.

Edited for clarity.

She’s over 16 so you need to stop burying your head and listen to her. Rather than being angry about the name, the approach I would use is to accept her non binary identity and stress she can dress, use her preferred name etc without hormones or surgery. It’s not a case of either or, meet her half way. You pushing against her non binary is making her strive to push further down the path. I know a lovely young lady who at 16 was like your dd but now at 25 is a happy, intact female speaking gay woman, and not even got short hair, it took her around 5 years to work out her true identity

@AidaP

I was struck by your post, and agree with you that parents should offer love and support while their children try to figure out who they are. Best not to push, or allow them to be pushed, into decisions too early.

As you point out, such a tiny proportion of people - 'way under 1%' - are actually trans, and yet very many children and young people experiment around this. How do we stop the majority, who won’t be what you call actually trans, going too far either socially or physically/medically in their experimentation and taking decisions that are irreversible before they realise that they are not actually trans? How do we identify them?

I should add, this young lady still uses her adopted (now legally changed) name as she hated her traditional overly feminine birth name. She chooses a suit to formal events over a dress but a female suit etc. The key thing was all the adults supporting gave her validation (using new name and they pronouns) BUT shut down any talk of surgery or hormones, I spoke at length about it with her at one point (I’m a safeguarding officer) and this middle ground worked, and does for many “confused” young people. I know fully transitioned people too, I know how hard the surgeries were (4!) for female to male and i didn’t hold back on describing the pain

By knowing how the system actually works for u18.

For u18, before the transphobic ban on blockers looked more or less like this:

1. Child comes out trans, starts social transition in whatever form works best for them.
2. Series of rapid assessment to get a baseline decision, this is held by multi-doctor panel, all of which are experts in the field.
3. Puberty blockers for multiple years while regular assessment and observation continues. Those are safe, used for decades now, and the moment you come off them your puberty kicks back in with no lasting negative outcomes, it's literally a pause to prevent harm.
4. If the multi-year observation supports a diagnosis, then it's possible to start HRT before 18 years old to ignite the correct puberty.
5. That's that. Surgeries for U18 statistically just do not happen. It's technically possible, but just doesn't and is not part of WPATH recommendations in normal circumstances. There are exceptions, extremely hard to meet ones - and rightfully so.

Safeguards were always in place. Of course then there are very rare examples of a child and then young person who literally spent years lying to the doctors but... That's just risk with every treatment and condition, and we do not stop treating other conditions, like depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, because patient may be lying about symptoms, standard that some demand to be applied to trans care, for some reason.

But unless you are trans or actually know someone who went through the process, but get the view from lying media, you would likely think you can just get something medical because you want it. Even for adults it doesn't work like that, and to get sex affirming surgery (privately as NHS wait is 10years+) you need to meet strict criteria, get multiple opinions (it can cost you 2k on opinions alone), and be on hormones for 1year+ under watch of a private endocrinologist.

And then it's worth adding that trans related care has LOWEST regret rade of any medica/cosmetic procedures, firmly study after study points it at below 1%. Nothing else medically comes even close to that outcome, even successful treatment of deadly cancer has regret rate of 13 to 40%. And that's when it literally saved your life from cancer. Hell, breast augmentation is between 5-9%.

Under the Children and Families Act 2014, OP's child became a young person on reaching statutory school leaving age. The significance of that is that all the rights in relation to the EHCP pass over to the young person, in particular the right to be consulted about amendments to the EHCP and the right to have their wishes taken into account. The fact that OP is carer makes no difference, the young person always has the right to override that. The college therefore has little choice but to follow OP's child's wishes in relation to EHCP documentation.

Child comes out trans, starts social transition in whatever form works best for them.

And therein lies the start of the problem. Social transition is not a neutral act. The very act of doing it puts that child onto a pathway of ever more affirmative actions and interventions. And all of it is predicated on the unproven and unfalsifiable idea that we all have a gender identity that can differ from our sex: "true trans".

Interestingly though, when I went through the draft with my daughter, when she saw the mention of trans in it she said "oh. They've put that in there have they?" and was surprised. She didn't ask them to do it.

Urgghh. There are so many other red flags and holes in that whole comment from AidaP that it would derail the thread to unpick them all.

However, a good one to specifically call out is the idea that can you ignite the correct puberty.

What a dangerous load of nonsense. There is either puberty or no puberty. Taking cross-sex hormones after completely blocking puberty will not ignite any puberty whatsoever. It will simply lead to a mimicry of secondary sex characteristics in the body of a person who will never go through puberty. The important brain development that takes place during adolescence won't happen because instead of allowing puberty to happen, their endochrine systems will have been impacted by a flood of hormones that aren't supposed to be there in those quantities.

"Thankfully" Wes Streeting has decided to approve a trial where the impact of stopping a child's brain from developing will be measured as a dataset. Currently just 226 children but he did say ages ago that there wouldn't be a cap on numbers allowed into the trial. Mengele would no doubt be proud of this dedication to human experimentation. I imagine the majority of these labrat children will go on to take cross-sex hormones so at some point in the future the data which shows the impact of doing this can be lost along with the current data from the 2000+ children who took puberty blockers under GIDS analysed later too.

This post contains so many untruths I'm tempted to report it but won't because it demonstrates the level of deception that extreme transactivism deploys in order to persuade children that their uncomfortable developing bodies are flawed but a sex change is the cure.

Socially transitioning children is not a neutral act as the Cass Review pointed out.
Puberty blockers have been banned by this and the last government because they're considered unsafe for children.
We don't know the evidence about their long term safety as no data on outcomes has been kept - hence the proposals for the controversial "trials"

The only correct puberty for all children is that of their biological sex.

That's just a few of the inaccuracies.

We're not allowed to comment about this poster's previous deleted posts - suffice to say they suggested a powerful agenda that's not supportive of parents trying to safeguard their children

Boom. That's your route in..... to both a sensitive conversation with your daughter and to challenge this falsified information on a legal document.

This (link ⬇️) article that I wrote nearly 3 years ago goes back to my own experience of when an organisation (in this case it was CAMHS) transed my daughter in paperwork without her asking for this. I've shared it before on other threads but not for a while now. Thankfully, it was the start of a long and positive journey towards sanity (within the CAMHS system, sadly not the school or the LA) where we're still seeing the benefits today. Those benefits have transposed across into the SALT and OT teams. At a simple level, that's what unlocked the conversations with these teams that I referred to above, even though none of it is actually in the EHCP itself.

https://www.transgendertrend.com/teenage-gender-identity-crisis/

All of this.

On balance, it's a good thing that this post is wedged in the middle of this thread. I hope it stays there.

Well said!

I've mentioned some positive developments with the school in this article. Although that didn't fully realise itself, there are still people at the school who (I am as certain as I can be) are centring on the common sense side of things. In my experience OP, finding these people and keeping them on the journey with you is key.

I appreciate you're right in the thick of it in terms of building new relationships with the college but I really do recommend starting it. There will undoubtedly be people who will understand and help. Most professionals will remember what they know about children with autism if given some space and nudges to do so.

As OP I am happy for it to stay. I want sunlight on these vampires who seek to destroy our children with their lies.

Ironically, your own comment may end up being deleted..... Whether or not it does may well depend entirely on whether the poster self-IDs as described 🙃

But, yes.

Echoing others who have already pointed out some of the inaccuracies in this. This is a load of dangerous twaddle.

Picking up specifically on the quoted 1% regret rate. If even life-saving cancer regret rates are higher, is it really plausible that they would be lower for surgeries with such high complication rates?

The supposed low regret rate makes sense in the context of an industry that keeps NO outcome data. However, more data from other countries is becoming available which puts desistence/ detransition rates as high as 30-60%. This still doesn’t account for those lost to follow up- so real figures could be even higher
https://segm.org/gender-dysphoria-diagnosis-desistance-germany

This is one of the most disingenuous and dishonest things I have read on Mumsnet, and I include entirely made up stuff on AIBU. At least that’s sometimes entertaining. This is tragic and borderline malevolent.