Should a 6 year old be taught that it’s normal to be trans, in a PSHE lesson?

[cloverdance]

Hi everyone,

I’d appreciate views and any knowledge on this. My husband came downstairs this morning really perturbed and upset that our 6 year old daughter had said that she’d been taught a book in PSHE- something about ‘My Brother’s Now My Sister’ and told him that a TA leading the lesson had said that it is normal to be trans. She told him she now wants to be a boy.
I don’t actually think she is gender confused at all, more that this suggestion has been made and the idea has been put into her head.
I’ve done a bit of research and there is a 2024 government doc that suggests that this level of detail should be saved for secondary school. I’m not sure if this is still the case.
DH is adamant he wants to go down to school and challenge the teaching of this. The school are a Rainbow Flag school and are very much inclusive. To be clear, we like this about the school and we are not homophobic- happy for children to be taught that love looks different for different families etc. However, we are both not happy that this level of detail has been used, including the word ‘trans’ at age 6 and in year 1 and that transitioning is a normal thing to do.

DH is a secondary school teacher so has to be careful in airing this view. My view is that biological men shouldn’t be in female only spaces.

Does anyone have any advice what we should/can say to school. We don’t want her being taught this at such a young age.

You'd have to look at what you've devoted your life to - I mean, that username does tell me an awful lot - and own your small part in enabling the extreme violence trans children suffer. What a waste. Unless you enjoy that, I guess.

Exactly what ‘extreme violence’ are you accusing us of causing to these vulnerable children and how? I’d say advocating for them to be given the support they need to retain a healthy body and brain that matures fully and preserving their future fertility is quite the opposite of ‘extreme violence’.

@TransParentlyAnnoyed are you able to answer my question about what being trans is? Especially in the case of children?

Haircut and a name change innit? As if no girls ever had short hair or a nickname/ diminutive of her name. In the 80s it was rare for a girl to have long hair. Very few girls in my single sex Grammar did.

And you're talking to someone who spent a chunk of her teenage years thinking she should have been the opposite sex, but at least had enough of a grip on reality not think that she actually was the opposite sex. It's not profound ignorance, it's experience. By accepting the concrete reality of how I actually am, I've had a much happier life than I would have had if I'd been constantly chasing affirmation of some nebulous inner state, or worse harming my body with medical and surgical attempts to make it match whatever I thought that should be.

Again, of course being trans has to do with beliefs - it's believing that there's a certain way to be the sex that you are, and that you don't fit it, so you must be something else. They may be following their inner voice, but it doesn't mean it's leading them in the right direction, if they've not understood the map properly. As adults our job is to support them exploring the terrain without doing anything that risks long term negative effects. I know you're just trying to support your kid, but you're wrong that nothing stops "trans kids" from being trans - there are numerous testimonies from detransitioners who once thought they were trans and now realise that they aren't, and have been profoundly harmed by the treatment they have had. I really hope that this does not turn out to be the case for your child, but you really ought to consider that those of us who are opposed to child transition are trying to protect kids like I was from long term harm, and are not responsible for male violence against them just like women aren't for any other forms of male violence.

Exactly.

There is zero objective, verifiable evidence that anyone has a 'gender identity'. As a belief system, it follows a very similar pattern as believing that one has an immortal soul.

People can hold whatever belief systems they want. But there is absolutely no obligation on anyone else to go along with it.

I think there might be a handbook, and one for trans teens too.

Ultimately, if someone thinks their is something about them that's at odds with their sex, it's because they believe there is a right and wrong way to manifest their sex.

That's fundamentally wrong. There is no right or wrong way to be male or female. This is a mistaken notion that they've been told or absorbed from society at large.

I can accept that some people feel (for whatever reason) that there's a profound disconnect between their actual sex and what they feel themselves to be, and some may feel this from childhood, and transitioning may indeed make them happier.

But that seems to me quite rare, and what I hear much more is what toys or clothes someone preferred, or that they liked playing with boys more than girls, etc, and this is presented as "evidence" of being trans. This seems really regressive, when there are of course so many ways of being a girl or a boy.

A doctor at the Tavistock, Dr Az Hakim, used the term Transhausens by Proxy to describe the motives of some of these children’s parents. (See screen shot of a Times article October 2022.) Some brought children in as young as three he said.

Think of that case brought up in the House of Lords of the little boy transed by his parents aged two and a half, gas-lit into thinking he was a girl, and now that puberty has hit he is a wreck hiding in his bedroom and will probably now be put on the puberty blockers trial.

Then there are the gay haters like Susy Greens husband, whose attitude led to the transing and castrating of their son.

Check out the horror of Kai Shappley in America. As a four year the little boy he wanted to be dead and “go to Jesus” after being beaten aged 3 (“spanking, really spanking”) by his fundamentalist religious mother for loving typically feminine things and seeming possibly to his mother as though he might be gay, at which point the mother relented and decided God had given her a little girl. This was real conversion in action.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cuIkLNsRtas

The last thing anyone needs is this book.

Shocking, but not surprising. Those poor children. DS 2 went to Infant and Junior school with a boy who'd been transed by his mother in Reception. Being trans looked a lot like having long hair, a female version of his own name, screaming hysterically at bugs and wearing pink, sparkly boots. Definitely not school uniform regs. Oddly, he disappeared after yr 7, presumably when puberty started to hit. Nobody knows where he went.
Absolutely nobody needs a handbook.

Heartbreaking to think of that little boy saving himself from more beatings by agreeing with his abuser that he is ‘really a girl’.

A powerful piece from Transgender Trend about the abuse of the 2 & 1/2 year old that Cass cited in the HoL when she told peers about :
"Jo who was a biological male, socially transitioned at two and a half by his parents. At eleven, she – which I say advisedly because the chances of her reverting to her biological gender is vanishingly remote – she has been in stealth and will not go to secondary school because she is so afraid of being outed in that environment. She’s now refusing to come out of her room except very rarely and she now has weak bones, not as a result of puberty blockers but through inactivity. I ask the noble lady the minister should her subsequent treatment be decided by politicians or by the clinicians who are looking after her?”

https://www.transgendertrend.com/abuse-two-and-a-half-year-old-child/

Interesting that she's asking who should decide on Jo's future treatment while ignoring the elephant in the room. That had social services and the police intervened when the parents were abusing that 2 & 1/2 year old perhaps Jo might not now be shut up in his room with weak bones and refusing to come out.

Her story speaks to the lack of understanding safeguarding children that's baked into so many NHS staff. Shameful to see it in such a senior medic.

No, no, no and no again.

No they shouldnt. We should teach children to tolerate other beliefs without teaching them those beliefs are true. We should also teach them that violence, whoever it is aimed at, is wrong and how to deal with anger in other ways.

transparentlyannoyed wants to suggest that someone other than the violent person is responsible for their violence. No, they are not. Trans activists talk of hurty words as literal violence, therefore claims that trans people experience more violence are often taken with a packet of salt. What we see is transactivists full of hatred for anyone who disagrees with them and sometimes translating that into real physical violence and sometimes into behaviour designed to try and provoke an aggressive response, like thrusting a camera into someone's face.

'Your Lordships, Jo's life and healthcare to date is a raging binfire. I humbly ask that the medics partly responsible for this state of affairs be left in peace to throw more fuel on it'.

We should teach children to tolerate other beliefs without teaching them those beliefs are true. We should also teach them that violence, whoever it is aimed at, is wrong and how to deal with anger in other ways.

Indeed so ...

Thank you for posting that.

It’s very good Transgender Trend got that out so quickly. This House of Lords’, almost incidental, exposure of what is clearly a horror story of sanctioned child abuse, even though they, the Lords, did not seem to properly realise it, must not be allowed to be forgotten and disappear.

There are probably very many more Jo s than we think. About six years ago I bumped into an old acquaintance and asked about their little boy X, whom I had last seen when he was two, and who was now about reception age.

“Oh, X has transitioned” he told me perfectly calmly. “ He is at Y school [ a very popular state school in a middle class area]. Of course they are very good about that sort of thing” he went on, matter of factly.

I have not seen them since so do not know how the child’s life went on. He would now be Jo’s age. I only hope his parents desisted at some stage.

The Times in Oct 2022 wrote about Dr Az Hakim having mentioned at a recent conference where he was speaking, that three year olds were coming through his door when he worked at the Tavistock/ Portman clinic.

Hakheem said: “The Gids thing was eye-opening….I saw these parents who had a son but wanted a daughter, or the other way around.

”And these three year olds were coming in, and the parents were saying, ‘Oh Johnny has never looked like a boy. So we’ve changed his name and put on a wig.’

”I was thinking, ‘This is mad.’ And this was 20 years ago. Gids at the time…..It was just a transing factory.”

absolutely irresponsible to be teaching very young children that if they feel they don’t fit in it might be because there is a huge error at their core, that they were born in the wrong body, rather than teaching them to be at home in it.