Rishi Sunak said…

The whole school - all the pupils are affected by seeing the school condone and facilitate a child living a lie. It has implications for everyone - that display of bias and dishonesty.

Well said. And if the teachers use wrong-sex pronouns there is - at best - implicit pressure to compel the speech of all the other children

Yes, it absolutely has implications for everyone.
I've already told my 2 older children (9 & 13) that if teachers at school mention gender to come and tell me what's been said because there's a good chance they're being lied to. I'm in Wales so there's a high chance this will happen at some point as queer theory/trans ideology is being embedded throughout the whole curriculum.
So now my kids know that teachers and people in authority will lie to them which obviously doesn't feel good for them, does it?

Just to clarify on names - no-one should be compelled to use a new name, or called a bigot if they get a name wrong. No-one should be walking on the eggshells of coercive control about this OR pronouns.

I know some children who go through phases of changing their name almost as often as their hairstyle. The best they can expect is for people to do their best, and speaking solely for myself I'm happy to do so (though I will often forget !).

It’s an awful thing for dc

I’ll always say you can’t change sex to my dc but it can go against the gender ideology introduced at the school

Bear in mind giving teachers so much blame is a bit like blaming the sales assistants in a clothing store for letting trans identified men use the changing rooms as per policy decided by people way up the food chain.

Teacher autonomy has been being systematically undermined and micro managed and scrutinised for a long time. Many schools are really quite toxic places of employment where bullying, sidelining and making life difficult for out of favour staff are only too commonplace.

Look at decision makers rather than the frontline staff.

Its mainly because, as has been said very many times, FWR isnt a hive mind

lots of women and posters with many different opinions

it would be interesting to hear how teachers think this should (could) be moved forward with hopefully the least damage done to children

apologies if a teacher has already come forward…I haven’t read to the end of the thread which is very remiss of me

I like marshas posts

i bet we disagree about lots of things but her posts are usually very cordial 😀

I've seen posters make personal remarks to Marsha a few times and I'm never impressed. I don't know what the history is and I don't care. Not impressed.

Thanks 😄

i avoid certain posters these days if I can, I think I’ve managed to shake most of them off which is a boon.

Odd to see FWR like this as usually we’re all pretty good at rumbling along, loads of intelligent posters.

As a teacher, clear nationwide guidance would be a start. With explicit reference to the steps schools should take with transitioning students. If the national approach is GC, that makes it much easier for individual teachers to outwardly adopt that position.

Thank you hercisback

@MarshaBradyo

I always appreciate your posts, don't always agree, but always appreciate your perspective.

We do generally get along with arguing cordially on here.

Maybe it’s a hangover from the hideous Covid board

I don’t really get involved with those types of threads anymore or those dominated by the same

Personally I think FWR has achieved loads, actual real world impact, so I’m always thanking people for continuing to post

And on this topic there isn’t even that much disagreement I’ve posted a few times guidance needs to be government driven.

You said you worked with fragile and autistic children. Why would suggesting you were a special needs teacher be insulting?

Yes, but many schools have a separate special needs unit. This is to keep as many children in mainstream education as possible.

@noblegiraffe I really don't think we're blaming individual teachers. There are many teachers on here managing to try and balance the safeguarding of all kids - here's an example of a teacher doing just that

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4765851-residential-trips

Also the excellent Vebrithien who not only is a science teacher herself but effectively challenged her child's primary school incorrectly using 'gender' (not a protected characteristic) instead of 'sex' (the protected characteristic) on an equalities poster. She was successful, despite quite clear attempts by the school to silence her and other parents and stop them talking with each other (I mean really, I'm still WTAF about this - they argued that talking to other parents about the school being wrong could be 'defamatory' and reported to the police showing their grasp of the law and reality wasn't great - I would recommend highly reading the thread - quite chilling really). https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4733278-sex-not-gender-no-outsiders-changing-the-equality-act-depheaddsl-captured

The thing is activists have pushed this agenda in schools against the law and guidance.

There might not be guidance on gender but there's KCSIE which wrong sex pronouns at the very least is coming close to breaching; there's also guidance on teachers not being politically partisan, and again using preferred pronouns is taking a very clear political position.

Third person pronouns ARE NOT parts of English that are - in accepted normal usage, traditionally - different for individual people (unlike names). It's essentially changing the entire rules of English for a political ideology! I don't think you can be more ideological than that. It really is like deciding 2+2=5 suddenly and expect the entire school to just change their understanding of and framework for Maths.

Plus of course, given most people use sex based pronouns still, how is anyone supposed to know when someone's using sex based or 'gender' based pronouns. And that's before you even get to the definition of what 'gender is' (not yet had an answer).

I'm obviously not being clear on this! Why can people not see that pronouns and names are entirely different because of the rules of grammar and normal English usage?

I agree! I always steered clear of the NUT ( now morphed into the NEU) as they were always agitating. Telling people " don't mark that, don't assess that", and saying, "no more than five minutes for each set of parents" at parent's evening and so on.

Like you say what most staff are looking to their union for is what you desctibe above.

I take your point.

I’d love to not have to wait.

Add press and media to this list as well. They all went along with 'no debate' for far too long.

I posted a link to the safe school's alliance suggestions earlier.