Girl boarder with gender doubts can sleep in boys’ wing

A TEENAGE girl is being allowed to sleep in a boys’ boarding house at a private school because she is questioning her gender, it emerged yesterday.

Frensham Heights School, which charges £28,680-a-year for boarders, has let the girl have a single bedroom in the boys’ wing following discussions with her parents.

It is the latest in a series of cases involving children reassessing their gender identity, with state and independent schools increasingly introducing gender neutral uniforms and toilets.

But critics yesterday claimed that a rush by some schools to accommodate a surge in ‘gender fluid’ children could be risky – spurred on by online sites that encourage unhappy youngsters to question their gender.

Andrew Fisher, headmaster of Frensham Heights School, in Farnham, Surrey, said he had agreed to the request of the teenager and her parents to allow her to sleep in the boys’ wing.

‘Our boarding houses are coeducational in the day – but boys and girl separate at night into single-sex wings,’ he told The Sunday Times.

‘One of our students, however, has a single room in a boys’ boarding house wing this year. The other boys are aware this student is going through questioning their identity and they are not frightened or intimidated by that.’

Two other teenage girls at the school have asked to be addressed as ‘him’ rather than ‘her’, play football in the boys’ team and have changed their names to male ones.

Mr Fisher said he tried to avoid saying ‘Hi guys’ or ‘boys and girls’ to groups of students and aims to use the neutral word ‘pupils’ instead. ‘We are a progessive school,’ he added.

But Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School, Wimbledon, in south-west London, said: ‘I am not being a backwoodsman but we might be creating a hysteria in which boys think, “Oh my God, perhaps I should be a girl” and find support online for such ideas.

‘We have to be careful. There is evidence [if you look at the suicide rates] that some people who have done the full transgendering have regretted it. This is like a new science no one fully understands.’

The chairman of the Independent Schools Council said the question of when and whether teenagers should have surgery or hormone treatment to change gender is the most concerning one for schools.

Barnaby Lenon, former head of Harrow School, said school leaders urgently need access to ‘wise doctors’ in the field.

He said: ‘At the point of medical transition, there can be no return. A wise school will take into account the views of 14year- olds – but knowing that those views will change. It would have been very rare indeed to have come across a transgender pupil before 2015.’

÷A veteran revolutionary feminist has been barred from speaking at a Cambridge college because of her scepticism about the politics of transgender rights.

Linda Bellos, a lesbian activist, had been invited to speak at Peterhouse by its Beard Society, a feminist organisation, but the society withdrew the invitation after she told it what she planned to say, according to The Sunday Times.

‘Creating a hysteria’