17 pupils changing their sex – at just one school
‘They want to be part of a group’
A SINGLE school has 17 pupils changing their sex amid fears that impressionable youngsters are being groomed into joining the trend, a whistleblower said yesterday.
The majority of the children undergoing gender change also show signs of autism, according to the teacher.
The 17 pupils appear to be the largest group of children from a single school to have said they are suffering from gender dysphoria and to have moved towards gender transition.
The whistleblower is a teacher who has been identified only as ‘Carol’. The school involved has not been named. Carol, who has been in the profession for almost 20 years, believes few of the pupils actually suffer from gender dysphoria – the belief that they were born into a body of the wrong sex.
Instead, she thinks they have adopted the idea at the suggestion of others and have used it as a way of coping with problems that are really linked to autism.
Carol said: ‘They are just young people with mental health problems who have found an identity and want to be part of a group of like-minded people.’ She suggested older pupils who had changed sex were grooming younger pupils into doing the same, and that most of the pupils who have been influenced have symptoms of autism.
The teacher said she was told that if a pupil claimed to be transgender she should not tell parents or other teachers.
Pupils have also been following the advice of transgender performers on YouTube who try to persuade children to change sex, she added. An autistic pupil allegedly claimed in 2014, when she was 16, that she wanted to identify as non-binary – someone without male or female gender.
The same pupil – the first in the wave of transgenderism at the school – had been diagnosed as autistic two years earlier, Carol said. But the former student is apparently now set to have transition surgery and a double mastectomy. Carol told The Mail On Sunday: ‘That child was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 14 and certainly was not transgender.
‘ She had other complicated mental health problems. It is a tragedy her claim was accepted so readily. Now she is going to mutilate her body.’
The teacher was also concerned that others were taking drugs designed to suppress the development of puberty as a possible precursor to surgery. Carol said the group of transgender pupils are now a powerful presence in the school, wearing the same clothes and adopting the same hairstyles.
David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, said: ‘It’s horrendous that children are being encouraged by other pupils to identify as transgender, particularly if they have autism.
‘Parents are not told about this and there is no way of challenging these pupils who are convinced by others that they have a problem they almost certainly do not have.
‘Tragically the end result could be irreversible surgical procedures. This is scandalous.’ Figures from the country’s only NHS transgender clinic, the Tavistock Centre, show that since 2011 some 372 of 1,069 patients under 18 showed at least moderate signs of autism.
The centre said: ‘It is now well documented that a significant proportion of individuals with gender dysphoria have concurrent autism spectrum disorder.
‘It is not yet clear how we might understand the presence of gender-related concerns in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and more research is needed.’