This is a guest post from a supply teacher who describes the transgender lesson she was a sked to teach to children as a “well-funded, dangerous social and medical experiment” and asks whether people are aware that this has become standard teaching throughout secondary schools in the UK. This teacher’s testimony was originally published as part of a longer post back in 2016 but we thought it was worth revisiting as a stand-alone piece.
A well-funded, dangerous social and medical experiment
As a supply teacher, I get to teach in many different secondary schools when a teacher is off sick or on maternity leave. The main subjects I teach are Religious Education, now often called PHSE, Citizenship or ethics. As a qualified RE teacher I am usually left to prepare my own lessons for students.
This year I taught in several schools that asked me to include lessons on Transgender as part of the syllabus. I am used to schools asking me to include special lessons on, for example, smoking, drugs, financial management, career options etc. Sometimes material is provided but usually I am asked to make my own lesson resources. The last school I taught in I was given 3 lessons on Transgender issues to include as part of the syllabus. The content of these lessons made me feel very uneasy.
The three lessons I was asked to deliver were like something from the 50’s in terms of gender stereotypes. Slick animations showed diagrams of boys with mainly blue brains and girls with mainly pink brains. Amongst these pink and blue-brained figures were a minority of boys with pink brains and girls with blue brains. A video interview with a doctor explained that sometimes biology gets it wrong and a boy or a girl will be born with the “wrong” brain in the “wrong” body. But, now it is all ok because medical science can “fix” this and put the right brain in the right body. Interviews with happy trans kids who had taken drugs to stop puberty and were awaiting “gender reassignment” surgery made the whole thing look perfectly ordinary.
The lesson continued with explanatory diagrams and explanations about how easy it is to change sex now. Any child who thinks their problems are a result of their being in the “wrong” body is encouraged to explore gender reassignment as a possible solution. There was no mention of any side effects or of the long-term consequences of taking such an important step.
Normally at the end of a controversial lesson, students are keen to debate the issues. RE lessons are often lively as the syllabus includes lessons on capital punishment, alcohol, war, abortion, drugs, racism etc. Both sides are always presented. What was different about this lesson was that no opposing views were included in the material provided. There was no chance to debate the issues in any meaningful way. Unproven theories such as males having blue brains and females having pink brains were presented as scientific fact. Consequently, there were no questions at the end of the lesson, just a stunned silence. I wanted to encourage the students to think critically about the issues but the time and material given made no allowance for that. I was also very aware that any attempt to challenge the carefully prepared message could lead to my dismissal.
I spoke to several other teachers who explained that they had had a training day earlier in the year when a transgender person had come into the school and told them how they should behave with young people questioning their gender and what the main issues were. There was no debate about whether this should or should not be included in the syllabus, it was simply “this is what will be taught from now on”. Several teachers told me they did not feel comfortable about teaching these lessons to year 7 pupils (aged about 11) but they did not feel they could speak out for fear of being labelled transphobic or worse, losing their jobs.
These lessons are now part of the syllabus in most secondary schools I have taught in. I wonder if parents are aware of this. I wonder if this is perhaps the reason there are now so many more young people presenting for gender reassignment. The year 7 pupils I taught these lessons to had probably never thought of it before, but they certainly will now. I wonder how many young people going through the normal angst and worry of adolescence have been encouraged by well meaning adults into believing the root of perfectly ordinary problems lie in their being born into the “wrong” body.
The whole thing felt like a well-funded dangerous social and medical experiment. We do not know the long-term consequences of such medical treatments yet young people are being encouraged to see it as perfectly normal to change sex. I wonder if this will be the next child abuse scandal in 20 years time as these children realise they are unable to reverse an ill-informed decision made before puberty. As a teacher of 10 years I know how squeezed in-school teacher CPD training is. The one or two days teachers get a year are usually about curriculum changes or important whole school initiatives. Yet schools are giving precious days of training to this bizarre educational experiment.
Outrageous!! Dangerous!!
Teaching children that they are in the wrong body or that their heads are wrong for their body is abusive.
My conscience would not allow me to teach that lie.
My feeling is that gender change is unnatural. It is not a cure for anything other than unwanted fertility.
This experiment is more than just child abuse. It is a form of population control as it is simply sterilisation presented to children as a cool thing to do.
I might have thought previously that this is just a conspiracy theory, but the evidence is gathering as the numbers of infertile children increase.
Year 7 you say. How wise of the child trans lobby to get this truly scientific message about blue brains and pink brains “sitting in” the wrong body across before the major hormonal changes occur. And before the students are taught any of that pernicious stuff about XX and XY chromosomes, and humans being part of the mammalian order within which it is impossible for any individual organism to change sex.
Be aware: teaching ‘born in the wrong body’ is now expressly forbidden by the DfE Guidance ‘Plan you relationships sex and health curriculum’ of September 20 2020. In fact, the requirement that gender teaching be robust and evidence-based rules out all the absurd ideology of the TG zealots, sorry, I mean the neo-Marxist agitators.
Charles Lewis: what has Marx got to do with it? Many on the left are trans-skeptic too. Most TERFS aren’t Tories.
I don’t see what’s Marxist about “TG zealots”; I thought Marx was against irrational belief systems!
This isn’t about Left/Right; I think it’s about hatred of the body – specifically the female body; you could call it neo-Puritanism.
This will only continue until people in affected professions stand up to the trans bullies. These bullies are activists and do not represent all trans people out there. I’m really sad that this teacher taught the lesson as given and didn’t have the courage to offer any counter factual information. The impact this message is having on children is too great to rationalise staying quiet and “safe” in one’s job situation. Don’t agree to traumatise innocent children!
It’s not illegal in U.K. for schools to use materials or talks that assert ‘children can be born in the wrong body’ .
Is that lie still being taught?
That should read ‘it is NOW illegal ……
We will never succeed in defeating Trans ideology until we allow not only that we are male and female- but also we are equipped for functional sexual activity with our opposite – not same. This is my second try at posting this comment. I realise not all readers will agree. and I am open to correction if I am wrong. That is the point of a comments section surely.
Some of us enjoy more than ‘functional’ sexual activity! I don’t think homophobia is going to help us win the debate on transgenderism.
Hello Trish
I am pleased you were successful at posting your comment; I don’t think it’s at all helpful if readers are denied the opportunity to make their point on this platform. I hope you won’t mind if I respectfully disagree with you.
There is so much more to sexual activity than it being functional. I hope you would not think it taboo for heterosexual couples to be childless by choice, or believe that every heterosexual act has to be carried out in the hope of procreation. And same sex couples are equipped for sexual activity – just not ‘functional’ in that narrow sense of the word.
If you are worried about what is natural then try researching the behaviour of the closest relatives to us: other mammals. You will find plenty of instances of same-sex sexual activity over a number of species. What you won’t find is any of them being able to change their sex, nor in birds either. The closest you will find is in certain species of fish.
I think the whole of trans ideology is based on a fundamental flaw: the failure to recognise that humans are part of the animal kingdom. I suspect that you, on the other hand, do.
This is an extremely delicate subject. It is essential to teach our children about transsexuality and genders, because this is how we will reduce intolerance and ignorance in the near future.
And it is also through information that the lives of transgender people are saved. I didn’t have access to the material provided by the school, so I don’t know exactly what this teacher saw, but this article is worth at least the reminder that gender education must be done very carefully and by someone well prepared, so as not to give rise to conspiracies and boycotts.
Thank for your sharing your thoughtful post. You raise some interesting issues, and certainly it is alarming to see educational materials presenting “blue brains and pink brains” and attaching those to gender. Absurd and as you say, very 1950’s.
That said, it seems equally absurd to think that more children are seeking gender reassignment because of these lessons. No amount of crappy or well-intentioned “propaganda” is going to get a child to consider or ask for gender reassignment.
What is happening is that when we were all growing up, there was no outlet, no means, not even the language to describe the things that a trans person is feeling. Young people today thankfully have more access to resources and are better informed, and society is also more tolerant. While the lesson plan you have described sounds extremely clumsy, it might certainly serve the purpose of saying to a child who already has these feelings that there is someone s/he can talk to.
There is no way that a child of 11 years, and I would suggest children who are substantially younger as well, doesn’t understand the gravity of gender reassignment. Children are not stupid. They also pick up very early on social cues and stigma…and gender is a big one. What I am saying is that there is absolutely not a chance that course content seen in school like what you describe is going to act on an 11 year old mind and turn an otherwise normal child into a trans child.
If I move from the general to the specific, had I had some level of awareness of what options existed, I might have made a series of different life choices. Admittedly, what we know now, what science and medicine can do now, are light years ahead of what was doable when I was of the age to transition “properly”. But I can also tell you that from my first waking memories I knew that my body betrayed me. I also learned probably by the age of 5 that letting anyone around me know that I looked at the world through a gender dysphoric lens was a ticket to getting into real trouble.
What I am saying is that what a reader should learn from your post is that the teaching methods we are putting out are ungainly, and a bit camp, and probably not as effective or nuanced as they should be. They will improve with time. But trans children in your classrooms need the lifeline. It may be the only one they will get, and unfortunately, it is one they need to receive and act on before puberty if they are to have a chance at a normal life. That is far superior to a life of dysphoria. Trans people are born that way, it isn’t something that gets socialised into us. A minuscule sliver of our population is trans, estimated at 1%. We are a tiny minority, but like any minority, and perhaps more than most, we need protecting for our voices to be heard. The consequences in suicide are testament to how wrong we have gotten things so far.
Thanks for raising these important issues.
Sorry but this is way off on so many levels. Social contagion means that entire friend groups in my daughter’s school are coming out as either trans-non binary or pansexual – the girls, and it’s usually groups of girls, are all grooming each other. I’ve seen this in each of my children’s years across different schools.
My autistic daughter was told that she had to come out as gay or she would be excluded by her friends and that “cis het” people were privileged and evil.
Her 9 year old step sibling is collecting various rainbow flags and said her classmate saw a Newsround clip at school and saw a poster that said “Black trans lives matter” the child went to the toilet and started crying and came back and said she was transgender.
This is social contagion and a child abuse scandal right here, right now.
The last post suggests that “No amount of crappy or well-intentioned “propaganda” is going to get a child to consider or ask for gender reassignment.”. But applications for “gender reassignment” have increased by 4000% in a decade, so something is going on, which is persuading kids to consider something they would not have considered 20 years ago. Whether propagandized education in schools is a symptom or part of the cause of this phenomenon might be difficult to get elucidated, but it seems to contribute if only indirectly. It must be obvious it does nothing to stem this runaway trend. Part of what seems to be going on is the hetz against homosexuality and lesbianism in particular, which subconsciously is steering kids who have some feeling of being not quite like the others away from considering that particular avenue of support and identification. The cruel irony of it all is that it seems to be LGBT organisations themselves which are facilitating this hetz, by for example insisting on absurdities such as it being possible for a man to be a lesbian, and mobbing (sometimes quite viciously) anyone who disagrees. So acrimonious has this feud become that some gays and lesbians broke away from their parent organisations whom they felt no longer served the purpose of supporting gay rights and formed the LGB alliance, which promptly became denounced with every slur under the sun by trans activists, and the organisations are now lobbying to get the Alliance’s status as a charity revoked.
When a person is born, they are either male or female.
They grow up to live in a very confusing world where people can not agree what being male means or what being female means. Insanity.