My work insisting I refer to a 9 year old as they/them

[TheMadGardener]

I work in a British primary school. Just started new term. Long standing pupil, a girl, is starting Year 5 now so she is 9 years old. No issues until now although parents are quite "alternative/new age."

Headteacher has informed staff that according to the child and her parents this girl has decided to be non-binary. Staff are now to refer to her as they/them and she is now using a gender-neutral shortened version of her name (think Alex instead of Alexandra or Jo instead of Joanna).

I am extremely uncomfortable with this and will definitely not be using they/them - I will be referring to the child by her chosen abbreviation to avoid using pronouns (at least it's a shortening of her real name rather than a made-up name).

Serious question: I thought new legislation discouraged schools from getting on board with this sort of thing? Or is it only they can't let children do it without parents knowing?

I'm finding it very hard to keep my mouth shut on my actual opinions in the presence of headteacher. (Colleagues I've spoken to on the quiet all think it is bullshit too)

There are going to be times when these kids necessarily bump up against reality. The likes of TPA see this issue entirely through the prism of trans rights activism - solipsism. These children are not the only children with rights. They can’t pick and choose to go in opposite sex spaces, because those spaces are based on biological sex. The other children have rights not to have to prop up an ideological belief they don’t agree with. It’s not feasible that these children are never going to have to confront the reality of their biological sex.

Being a “non-binary” child has no meaning.

Navel gazing about your exact identity label and fitting yourself into a labelled box is not normal.

It’s all meaningless. Be yourself, do hobbies you enjoy, make friends with other people.

I mean you say gay wasn't accepted in the 70's and 80's but I can think of a couple of examples of homosexuals being represented pretty positively in TV shows from the UK

True, in the 70s and 80s I had at least a dozen friends who were gay. I worked in a large sociable workplace and in those days before mobile phones and computer games etc, work was where one could make many friends.

A few of them lived together as couples. Not 'all' together, obvs but ykwim.
I suppose it may have seemed unusual to some older people at that time, but if you were a young person then, it really was no big deal. Maybe I knew quite a few gay people because if you befriended someone who was gay then you naturally met others. One of those couples are still together over 40 years later.

Maybe in the 50s 60s it was waaaay less accepted.

The idea that teachers calling a 9 year old "they" is what leads to the above scenario is exactly why we can't have a reasonable conversation about gender. Absolutely mental and detached from reality.

Harry doesn’t feel as if she’s a human being. We must pretend there’s no such thing as humans and pretend she’s a dinosaur and what’s more we’re being howwibly crewooool if we don’t go along with it

My grandson identifies as a dinosaur and I do go along with it, but then he's 20 months old. He's also quite convincing sooooo. . . .

Educating children with gender ideology is exactly what leads to bad outcomes.

It’s normalising something that isn’t true, confusing for them and asks for them to lie too.

What a load of nonsense.

You need to educate yourself, start learning to think critically, and pay attention to the specifics.

for example, OP isn’t trying to get one over on a child (why on earth you’d think that demonstrates a disconnect from reality), being non-binary isn’t a protected characteristic, I could go on and on.

Step back from drinking the Kool Aid and start living in reality.

This child does need protecting from the actions of the adult, but I think we're talking about different adults she needs protection from. Children need protection from the adults who indulge the fantasy that biological sex - every cell in their bodies - can be pretended to be something else. There are 2 sexes, and we (reasonably) have words for each one. A child can be respected as non-binary in their presentation and preferences, but don't conflate this with the fantasy of changing sex and insist that we play along by changing our words to fuel this fantasy. It's child abuse to encourage such a belief, and its also desperately unfair on the people surrounding the child who have to tread on eggshells for fear of being labelled a transphobic bigot. If she continues with her gender dysphoria into adulthood - and very few do - she will be a trans-identifying woman, but still a woman. Let's stop pretending to children that we are sex alchemists; it's not fair on them, it's untrue, and it leads to TA entitlement, rage and hate when biological reality rears its head.

Well said

What if the parents were to want the OP to refer to their child as “His Royal Highness” and today he’s decided they feel like a king: should she just stick in her lane and do that also?

come on

Of course being non-binary is normal. It’s on the spectrum of how closely the individual identifies with the steps of their sex.

What it does NOT mean is that the individual is neither sex, NOR does it mean that others have to change the way they think about or communicate about that individual.

Telling other children to pretend and lie about another child is bullying those children.

Pretending to a girl that she is not a girl, but some nebulous special thing is bullying that girl.

Steps in my first para should read stereotypes

The concept of non-binary was expressly rejected by the Court of Appeal in the Castellucci case. It has no legal status in the U.K.

The protected characteristic is gender reassignment where you must be proposing or actually moving between the 2 binary genders recognised by the Gender Recognition Act.

So trying to claim non binary is covered by the Equality Act is legally and factually inaccurate.

In order for a belief to be protected under the Equality Act it either has to meet the definition of a religion (not all belief systems do) or meet the Grainger “worthy of respect in a democratic society” test.

You are ignoring the impact on other protected characteristics of allowing social transition in school. If a ND child gets into trouble because it is unable to comply with pronoun rules that feel like an untruth that could be disability discrimination and, unlike non binary, that is most definitely covered by the Equality Act.

Well, no, it’s not their choice.

it’s their choice to consider themselves to be non-binary.

it’s other people’s choice what they refer to them as.

one can’t enforce one’s self-view on others.

This is what I experienced with my own daughter who, from the age of three, insisted she was a boy. Fortunately, this was in the 70s, decades before the gender woo began. I mostly ignored it, but occasionally, when I became really irritated, I'd just tell her to stop being so silly. She was a typical tomboy, more interested in playing football, riding her bike and climbing trees, all.of which we happily encouraged.

When she reached puberty she developed into a very pretty girl and who had a lot of boyfriends - I think they were delighted to find an attractive girl who shared their own interests. She's married now with a daughter of her own and is fiercely gender critical.

We regularly discuss what would have happened to her had she be born in the last decade or two and she is horrified to think that she may have been encouraged to take puberty blockers and perhaps even have progressed to cross sex hormones. She thinks now that she was simply influenced by the fact that she had two similarly aged boy cousins who she used to regularly play with and that all the neighbourhood children were also male - she just wanted to be one of the gang.

I wonder how I would have coped if the school had gone along with her fixation and allowed her to adopt a boy's name. I know I would have fought it and social services would doubtlessly have been involved. I think the whole trans thing is really wicked, especially with regard to children. And the whole concept of non-binary really incenses me in the same way as men professing to be trans lesbians - it's just so completely batshit crazy.

Your friends would do well to completely ignore the non binary nonsense and trust that it will resolve itself in time, as any sort of validation will simply make it harder for the child to grow out of it as the majority do. And if not, at least the child will be in a far better place to make far reaching decisions once it's an adult.

Using "they", "their" and "them" is completely normal in English when the speaker doesn’t know the sex of the individual they’re referring to (as I have just demonstrated).

It is not normal when the speaker does know the sex of the individual they’re referring to, as is the case with OP.

Love this. Aside from all the really serious issues this stuff creates, it is just such navel-gazing self-obsessed nonsense. The girl's 9 ffs; presumably her parents either push this shit at her, or leave her in front of a screen watching navel-gazing self-obsessed people wanging on about it.
How about, oh I don't know, taking her to the play park, or swimming, or getting her into a sports team or playing musical instruments or sitting her down with books or puzzles, or a lego set. Of all the things in the world there are to do and to learn, a 9 year old is being encouraged to waste their time and headspace on this utterly pointless shit.

It's not at all "interesting". Presumably she's got stuff to do.

If you think it's a troll post, report it.

Presumably she's got stuff to do.

Bless your cotton socks.

It's also confusing for the dc to have to make a choice about whether to report that an adult is not using the correct pronouns

But they are using the correct pronouns.

11 seems a bit old for not dressing in front of people of the opposite sex!

At our primary school they have branded school tracksuits for PE days so there is no undressing (other than taking off tracksuit bottoms which have shorts underneath), but my DD started to develop around 9 years old so I would not be happy this is only a rule age 11+. I would say 8 would be better.