Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

[sarahandsage]

Was Called into school today.
My daughter has just started reception in September, it’s a lovely village school, and she’s made lots of friends and settled in really well.

Yesterday I was called into have chat with her teacher.
Was informed my child has a trans girl in her class, and that my child is questioning the teacher every day about this.
That all the other children accept this child was born in the wrong body, yet my daughter is questioning ‘too much’.

I said we encourage curiosity amongst our children, so am
not surprised.

The teacher then said that my child was taken to one side and read a couple of books :
My name is Jazz
and one about a crayon that feels like a different colour.
Which was astonishing to me, because really singling out a child to (as the teacher said ) “Get her on board”, feels very pushy.

My daughter is very kind, and plays with all the children in the class including the trans girl.
The teacher is not concerned with unkindness, but that my daughter is not accepting enough, and she has asked us to reiterate pronouns and that this child is a girl.

This is the first school experience for us, as previously my daughter was at a childminder

It feels very wrong to single out a child, and read books that introduce a concept that we haven’t broached with our children yet.

My suspicions were raised.
The child is 4.

😂😂

A similar thing happened to a child in a school a few years ago.

The truth is they weren’t trans, they were intersex (or whatever the correct terminology is).

The parents had raised them as a girl initially but as they got older they looked and acted more male and so when they started school they chose to have them seen as male.

The fact that this child has just started reception is very telling.
You have no idea of the actual sex of this child.

Your child is being rude (although inquisitive) because she’s constantly talking about someone’s gender.
It would be no different to her questioning a girl for having short hair and why she looks like a boy (a common occurrence in little ones).

If there is any truth and the child is trans - then we were taught as staff to not make a big deal out of it.
If you keep talking about it you are reinforcing the idea of having to be a specific gender etc.

An older child would be going through an identity crisis and you need to allow them to not feel pressured into staying in the opposite gender as it’s usually just a phase.
A younger child is influenced by their parents and the less they have others influencing them the better.

This. It's not convenient. That is what you are up against.

What OP should actually be doing - if this is real - is asking to speak to the head and querying why the school isn’t adhering to statutory safeguarding. Specifically Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) - government safeguarding and gender questioning guidelines. The school shouldn’t be allowing the use of preferred pronouns which differ from biological sex in the first place.

Hmmmm so if you see my DC and misgender them, is that bullshit? Happens ALL the time (gender IB and biology match in DC's case). Because me and DC don't care. Doesn't alter them or offend.

And the truth is the transed child you refer to was not a ‘trans child’, they were let down by people who should protect them.

Transchild gives SciFi vibes anyway- suggests masquerading as a child, maybe a robot or alien!

Gay is not the same as trans.

She's fine. Just living her life like the rest of us.

It used to be treated as poorly as trans is now.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention, it’s that poster’s cognitive bias speaking. There’s some good advice from others that focuses on what the school should be doing. They absolutely should not be pushing a contested belief system as fact and if they are doing so you can challenge it.

This. This is the document, @sarahandsage

Thank you - @sarahandsage - this is the way to go.

So the trans child wasn't a trans child even though 30 years later they're a trans adult.

And that trans adult is only a trans adult because other adults (when they were a child) let them down.

Amazing.

I'm guessing, @sarahandsage that when you said today, you meant yesterday.
So following the conversation, your child has gone into school as normal today?
What's your next step?

And if you look at some of my comments, I have said this myself.

RTFT

Exactly.

It's the social process.

Hate and attack the category of people we disagree with.
Society eventually changes.
Society moves on to hating a new group.

I work in uk education and this is the document we worked to from 2024

https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/supporting_documents/Gender%20Questioning%20Children%20%20nonstatutory%20guidance.pdf consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/supporting_documents/Gender%20Questioning%20Children%20%20nonstatutory%20guidance.pdf]]]]

Did the teacher specify the questions your DD is asking?

For some reason you seemed to think my BS comment something about children being misgendered. It wasn't it was about the fact that the OP clearly made up her post to have a laugh at people getting wound up on mumsnet.

Until a child reaches puberty there are no perceptible differences between boys and girls unless you actually look in their pants, which no one should be doing - the only signals are clothes, hair and behaviours which are the individual's choice for both sexes. At puberty it becomes obvious who is male but at age 5 any male child with long hair would fully pass as female. Has this other child only recently decided to change and still has short hair? It would certainly be appropriate to teach your child that it's inappropriate to decide someone's sex on the basis of hairstyle - lots of women have short hair, lots of men have long hair, and a 5 year old child is capable of learning that clothes and hair are free choices for both sexes.

However schools have an obligation to consider the needs of other children when considering to what extent they can participate in social transitioning of a gender-nonconforming child, and gaslighting your child and insisting that your child learns to lie and to pretend to believe something untrue is not considering those needs properly.

Schools are not allowed to fully pretend that male children can be female. The "Keeping children safe in education 2026" statutory guidance for schools and colleges gives very clear boundaries for how schools can respect a child's gender identity but also keep single-sex provision which is legally required from age 8 to be properly single sex with no exceptions (it is fine to also have single-user mixed-sex provision) so the school is setting up a serious future failure if they are trying to pretend this doesn't matter just because the child is currently only 5 - what will they do in 3 years time?

6.3 of this document states that primary aged children should use pronouns relating to their sex.

Thank you. Useful information if people come across this thread, whether it’s genuine or not.

Having been a primary school teacher for 30+ years I can categorically tell you that it extremely rare that an adult does not know the sex of a child, especially when they are with them day in day out.
Sex is not ‘decided’ by anyone, it is innate. If a child of 5 is telling people that they are ‘trans’, that’s because the adults around them have groomed them.