Transtrenders!

Ex-top private school head: Some pupils identify as transgender to be cool and ‘cause turbulence’

‘Some girls wanted to be non-binary’

SCHOOLS are facing a ‘transtrender problem’ with pupils identifying as transgender to be cool and rebellious, a former top headmistress said yesterday.

Clarissa Farr claimed that it has become trendy for some girls to say they are trans or ‘non-binary’.

She said while some pupils had genuine concerns about gender identity, staff believed others were trying to cause ‘turbulence’ in school. The former head of the private St Paul’s Girls’ School in London suggested a bandwagon was causing students with no real gender issues to come forward claiming they are trans.

Miss Farr, now an educational consultant, insisted that some teenagers will ‘adhere to anything a bit radical’.

St Paul’s adopted a policy in 2017 which allowed pupils to use boys’ names and wear boys’ clothing if they identified as such.

Miss Farr told the Henley Literary Festival in Oxfordshire: ‘The important thing is to have open conversations – to show that you’re going to deal with them with respect and to distinguish those concerns which have longevity and some endurance where this is a genuine issue.

‘It’s what we, I’m afraid, in the staff room at the end of a long day called the “transtrender problem” where you’ve got these individuals adhering to the issue because they’d adhere to anything that was a bit radical and might cause a little bit of turbulence in the school.’

Miss Farr said that while some students came to her saying they wanted to be known by different names, no one ever asked to be known by different pronouns, such as ‘he’ and ‘him’ rather than ‘she’ and ‘her’. She added: ‘This was something that became a thing very much towards the end of my time at St Paul’s. Some of the girls came to me and said they didn’t want to identify as girls, that they wanted to identify as non-binary. A couple of girls wanted to be known by a different name.

‘ It being an intellectually respectful environment, this was a thing that we needed to talk about – no good my saying “This is a girls’ school, go away and behave yourselves!” That would not work in St Paul’s. So we discussed it, we created a protocol about it, I took some legal advice about it. Our foundation was as a girls’ school to educate girls only – so that created inevitably some potential issues for us.’ She explained that it was particularly difficult for a single- sex school to tackle the issue as it was mandated to teach pupils of only one gender.

Miss Farr stressed: ‘The difficulty for a school is that you have to run things for the benefit of the many as well as for the individual.

‘And in a single gender school there are obviously difficulties but I think not insuperable ones.’ Former pupils of St Paul’s include top Labour politician Harriet Harman, actress Rachel Weisz and TV host Victoria Coren Mitchell.

Earlier this year, Susie Green, of Mermaids, a charity that supports transgender children and their families, said: ‘The young people we see are not puzzled about their gender. They are saying, very clearly “This is who I am.”’ She said the number of transgender children ‘may not have actually increased. Instead people are making sense of the way they feel earlier and therefore more are seeking help.’

Meanwhile, clinics specialising in gender reassignment have seen a surge in patients. Last year 2,590 children were referred to the Gender Identity Development Service clinic alone. This is a rise of more than 400 per cent since 2013, leading to a two-year waiting list.

Ten of the children were aged three or four and dozens more were of primary school age.