School Days Sophia Waugh

I’ve been wondering whether to write about this subject, and have been deeply questioning my own thoughts and attitudes. How much of me is reactionary, old-fashioned, Catholic? Am I letting myself (and some of them) down with my reaction to this particular ever-growing problem?

Recently a teacher was suspended for accidentally saying, ‘Well done, girls’ to two students, one of whom was in the process of transitioning to male. Although he immediately apologised, he did not help his case by admitting that his Christian beliefs made the idea of transitioning unacceptable to him.

When I was a child (a girl, I was a girl), there were tomboys. Some of them wanted to be boys – I can’t remember any male friends who said they wanted to be girls, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The parents of these tomboys smiled, only made them wear dresses on special occasions, and sometimes even called their daughters the boy’s name of their choice. None of these girls has gone on to transition to male – all have turned into fiftysomething women who are happy in their skins.

Those people nowadays would be in the middle of counselling; maybe already being called ‘he’ and (in America, at least) be taking hormone-blocking tablets to prevent puberty, to smooth the future process of gender realignment.

I am not saying there are not people who genuinely feel they are born into the wrong gender and want to change. What I query is the extraordinarily young age this process is now allowed to begin at.

At the schools where I have taught, at my own children’s schools, at schools all over the country, young (very young) people are beginning an irreversible, life-changing path. They are rushing in their droves towards the knife. In some cases, their parents are fully supportive. In others, the parents drag their feet, begging the children to take more time.

But children this young cannot comprehend the enormity of what they are beginning. It is a very different thing from sexual experimentation. Even if the children do not go as far as the knife or the drugs, they are making a statement to the rest of the world, taking a position from which it will be hard to retreat.

Of course gender dysphoria has always existed, but there is a really puzzling issue: in the past, the transition seemed to be mostly male to female. Nowadays, in schools at least, it appears to be the other way round. Girls are wanting to become male, which brings me back to my childhood friends who wanted to be Tom.

In a world where children are given more and more say over their lives, more and more choices over decisions that used to be the parents’ province, where we are wrong if we question their judgement, this is the inevitable next step. The teens are the time the young step away from the certainties of childhood, and question everything. They have always gone through a stage of hating the world, of being misunderstood – aren’t we just offering them something else to rail against?

My most politically active LGBTQI friend, a gay woman in the old-fashioned mould, summed this up perfectly. ‘Offer kids too many sweets and they don’t know what to choose. Give them a lollipop and they’ll like it. It’s the same with gender – you were given the lollipop, kid. Stick with it.’