Drag queens to teach children aged 2 about ‘LGBT tolerance’
DRAG queens are being brought into taxpayer-funded nursery schools so that children as young as two can learn about transgender issues. The cross-dressers are reading nursery rhymes and singing specially adapted songs ‘to teach children about LGBT tolerance’. Nursery bosses in England say the sessions are needed so children can ‘see people who defy rigid gender restrictions’ and grow up to combat hate crime. They want to target two- and three-year-olds to influence them early, as they say at this age children have not yet developed any discriminatory ‘isms’. The ‘performances’ are the brainchild of Thomas Canham, a Bristol University law graduate and part-time crossdresser who dismisses traditional notions of masculinity as ‘meaningless’. But critics last night said the sessions could ‘blind impressionable children of two and three to one of the most basic facts of human existence’. Top child psychotherapist Dilys Daws, co-author of the book Finding Your Way With Your Baby, said: ‘There’s this idea that’s sweeping the country that being transgender is an “ordinary situation”. It’s getting so much publicity that it’s getting children thinking that they might be transgender, when it otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to them.
‘But it’s perfectly normal for most young children to think about being the opposite sex. It’s probably because they are identifying with a parent or sibling.’
Mr Canham’s organisation Drag Queen Story Time (DQST) is holding sessions at seven nurseries run by the London Early Years Foundation over the winter. If deemed successful, they will be rolled out across all the nursery’s 37 sites.
Mr Canham, 26, said he wanted to create a ‘safe space’ where adults or children would not be criticised for ‘wearing a dress’.
His drag queens had ‘complete control’ over their performances, he added. ‘They can include, for example, drag queen references within songs. So if you’re doing something like Wheels On The Bus, you can sing, “The skirt on the drag queen goes swish, swish, swish”. The parents love it, and the children love it too.’