Aberdeen teacher complaining about being blocked from teaching LGBT+ to 7 year olds

[poodlemum01]

A primary teacher residing in stonehaven, and seemingly registered with aberdeen council, has posted on the 'scottish primary teaching' facebook group her anger at not being allowed to deliver LGBT+ lessons to her P4 class (which in Scotland will be ages 7-8). She gets support in the comments from John Summers Campbell - the drag queen teacher. Did he not have some kind of legal action / bad press against him at some point? My mind vaguely recalls a tribunal or something....
I'm sure her employer will be delighted at her using her real name, having trans flags on her personal profile, publicly critising them, making the school and SLT pretty much identifiable, allowing other teachers to slag them off and call them bigots. Any Aberdeen residents on this thread?

’Trans gender’ ideology is full of gender stereotypes. Because there is no actual way for anyone to know anyone else has ‘cross gender’ feelings.

And to tell young children that men with penises are women and should be in places where young girls undress leads to safeguarding and boundary issues. I mean adult human females have been abused and vilified for protecting boundaries in line with the law. Erosion of these boundaries started with well meaning LGBTQIA acolytes and ended up attending to erase sex as a protected characteristic.

Of course the fact you can’t consider any of this is the problem why you’d support promotion of a belief system that does widespread harm.

Teachers can’t promote their own agenda to kids. Do their job and follow the curriculum. Simple.

I might be missing some detail here but there are so many different things that a teacher could be saying about LGBTQ that I’m finding it really difficult to say if the teacher is BU or not.
I have ‘taught’ five year olds about LGBTQ in the sense of saying that “marriage is between two people” rather than “marriage is between a man and a woman.” In that lesson there were visuals of many different types of couples getting married. I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all. Obviously, there are other things that teachers might say that are not age-appropriate. Do we know exactly what the teacher was planning to teach?

I have no issue at all acknowledging that LGB people exist 😊 . I do, along with many other people, take issue to the promotion of trans ideology by some teachers in some schools and there absolutely is an agenda there. I'm afraid it goes well beyond "people exist". But I'm sure you already know that 😊

The fact that you use the term ‘cisgender’ tells us all we need to know about your beliefs.

Absolutely this.

Teacher A: “some people believe that you can change sex, which we all know is not possible”
Teacher B: “ a transgender person is someone who was born in the wrong body so is given special medicine to become the opposite sex. Some transgender people are non-binary, which means they don’t have a sex.”

I wonder if this particular person was teacher A or teacher B? I can hazard a guess…

Teachers are sticking to the curriculum.
In Scotland, LGBT-inclusive education is part of national education policy and Curriculum for Excellence. Scottish Government guidance states that LGBT-inclusive education should be integrated across learning and teaching, be age and stage appropriate, and help pupils understand equality, diversity, prejudice and discrimination.
A teacher covering these topics isn’t going off on a personal crusade or teaching their own beliefs; they’re delivering the curriculum and following national guidance issued to schools. In fact, local authority schools are expected to engage with the national approach to LGBT-inclusive education.
It’s also worth noting that parents in Scotland do not have a general right to opt their children out of learning about equality, respect, diverse families or anti-bullying. The current RSHP guidance only allows requests for withdrawal from certain sexual health elements, not from wider learning about relationships, equality and respect.
People are absolutely entitled to disagree with Scottish Government policy, but it isn’t accurate to claim that teachers who discuss LGBT people or diverse families are failing to “stick to the curriculum”—they are doing exactly that.

Lurking??? Ever consider that it may have been one of those primary school teachers who was a member of that page who brought it to light??

The teacher in question was planning to deliver a lesson on Pride. The history of it. The meaning of LGBTQ+. All in an age appropriate way. There was no agenda. They weren’t specifically focusing on teaching children what to believe about trans people, simply the definition of what it is, as is protected by law. I think if, as a parent, you feel so strongly that trans people don’t exist and that they ‘can’t change’, then you can push your ‘own agenda’ on your own child :)

It is promoting an agenda when children are told they can be born in the wrong body because they play with opposite sex toys, and that they can change their sex.

There is no such thing as 'cisgender', that's hatefully misogynistic. There is male and female. That's it.

All you need to do is read what is going on in schools with the trans social contagion to see the harm that is being done.

It's more about Trans Ideology than anything to do with being gay.

That’s even worse then, to be honest. It’s a private group. To think that a primary school teacher would break the rules of the group, breach the trust of the group, and post it on a page like this says more about that teacher than it does about the teacher who planned the lesson. Makes it seem like an even more terrible witch hunt now and something that’s planned with the intention to hurt another teacher’s career.

If it was simply LGB on its own I don't think it would be anywhere near as huge a problem. It is bundling LGB with T that is the real issue here.

Exactly. It's a cult, it's brainwashing. Those cult buzzwords indicate someone who has been programmed, and not using critical thinking and thinking for themselves. I often say that people who use the term 'cis' or 'cisgender' are too far gone to be reasoned with.

I think you’re conflating a few different issues here.

I’ve never seen any Scottish Government guidance that says children are “born in the wrong body because they play with opposite sex toys”. In fact, teaching children that boys can like dolls and girls can like football without that changing their sex would seem to be the exact opposite of reinforcing stereotypes.

Whether someone agrees or disagrees with concepts such as gender identity, schools still have a duty to teach respect, prevent bullying and acknowledge that different people and families exist. That’s not the same thing as telling children they must identify in a particular way. Teachers are held to a set of pretty high standards. They have to remain impartial. Unfortunately the whole debate (which shouldn’t be a debate, trans people exist) is currently being weaponised by political parties on all sides. Homosexuality was only made legal in Scotland in 1980. Similar debates were being had around homosexual individuals in the years running up to that. Society doesn’t like change, or thinking about something that’s ‘other’, or outside of the norm. I am hopeful that in years to come we’ll look back and feel ashamed of how we allowed ourselves to be dragged into a culture war which debated the very existence of some of the most vulnerable people in society. We just aren’t there yet.

You also mention “trans social contagion”, but that’s a highly contested claim. If we’re going to discuss what is happening in schools, it’s probably better to look at the actual curriculum and guidance rather than assumptions about what children are being taught. From personal experience, I don’t see ‘trans ideology’ being pushed on children. I see adults who get their knickers in a twist about this and children who are thankfully a lot more accepting that people can be different for a variety of different reasons.

People can disagree about gender identity, but I think it’s important to distinguish between teaching children to be respectful towards others and actively persuading them to adopt a particular belief.

Additionally, cisgender” isn’t a hate term. It’s simply a descriptive word used to distinguish between people whose gender identity aligns with their sex at birth and those who identify as transgender. Much like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are descriptive terms, or “right-handed” and “left-handed”.

You don’t have to like the term or use it yourself, but describing it as “hatefully misogynistic” doesn’t make much sense. The term applies equally to men and women and isn’t derogatory towards either sex.

respectfully, we won’t agree - but thank you for entering into the debate in a respectful way without resorting to name-calling. Have a lovely day.

You don't know any of that, though.

The fact that another teacher got alarmed when they saw the lesson plan, and that the school then forbade the teacher from going through with the lesson, point to that lesson being a fair deal more agenda-driven than you make it look.

I just thanked you for being respectful, guess I can take that back.

I’ve spoken to people from across the political spectrum and with very different views on sex and gender. I don’t assume they’re brainwashed or in a cult simply because they use language I disagree with. If we’re interested in critical thinking, surely it’s better to engage with people’s arguments than write them off based on a single word.

You could argue that the other teacher also had an agenda, by that logic.

We’re making a lot of assumptions - myself included. And assumptions aren’t fact. I just don’t like the witch hunt element of this post, which is trying to incite others into reporting a teacher when they don’t know the full facts. That’s all.

@ThisTwinklyAzurePombear

some of the most vulnerable people in society

How so?

This is not Gay 2.0. Gay people were not seeking to take away the rights of the female sex (which also 'eXisT' too, by the way). The fact is trans are losing the war, each and every year polls show pro-trans standing decreases, and for the first time, LGB standing is now being affected, causing LGB to be alarmed. A pro LGBT organisation in New York City commissioned a wide reaching poll, and were devastated themselves at the results. It shows the T at the lowest standing ever. There were threads between themselves of what they can do, how to re-word their messages etc. They've all but conceded defeat. In 20 years time when this trans social contagion has died out, Sociologists will look back in horror at how people were brainwashed en masse to fight against the female sex's basic human rights and how children were brainwashed.

Males in a dress are not 'vulnerable', they are the most privileged, most powerful and most protected sacred caste there is. And if that male is in a female only intimate single sex space, where women, little girls and rape survivors like me are in a state of undress or attending to intimate toileting needs, they are predators. The only vulnerable group is the female sex. Foxes with a few feathers glued onto them are not remotely vulnerable, and have no place being in the hen house.

There is no 'gender identity'. You're either a man or a woman, a male or a female. Nothing else is necessary.

When people say trans people are a vulnerable group, they’re usually referring to outcomes rather than making a statement about whether someone agrees with gender identity theory.

For example, transgender people experience higher rates of bullying, harassment, discrimination, social exclusion and mental health difficulties than the general population. Many report difficulties accessing healthcare, employment and housing, and some experience rejection from family or their wider community.

None of that requires someone to agree with every aspect of gender identity politics. You can recognise that a group faces significant challenges and is therefore vulnerable, while still having questions or concerns about particular policies.

The same principle applies to many groups. Acknowledging that a group is vulnerable doesn’t mean every member of that group is vulnerable, nor does it mean their views should never be challenged. It simply means that, as a group, they experience a higher risk of adverse outcomes than the population as a whole.

Thank you. We agree then: everyone is just throwing assumptions around. Until/unless we know what was in that lesson plan, there's no way for anyone to know whether cancelling it was justified or not.

There's no witch hunt going on here, though. No name is given, nor any point of contact. When FWR go on a mission, you can't miss it. It's not happening here.

A great tweet from a gay man.

For example, transgender people experience higher rates of bullying, harassment, discrimination, social exclusion and mental health difficulties than the general population. Many report difficulties accessing healthcare, employment and housing, and some experience rejection from family or their wider community.

Sure, they are more vulnerable than the general population. My question was about them being specifically one of the most vulnerable people in society. I can easily think of groups far more vulnerable than them: asylum seekers, sex workers, poor single mothers, etc... Seems to me that if anything, trans people are among the least of the vulnerable groups out there.