Stop calling them boys and girls, schools told
It’s unfair to transgender children, says group given £200k to help train teachers
CHILDREN as young as seven are to be taught in schools to stop using the terms ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ – in case they discriminate against transgender pupils.
A guidebook for teachers, parents and pupils to be sent to schools around Britain advises against using language that suggests there are only two genders. It also condemns saying ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’.
Instead the book – described as ‘damaging’ by critics – offers a bewildering array of alternative terms to describe gender and sexuality. Children who think of themselves as being the gender with which they were born are described as ‘cisgender’. Other terms offered include ‘panromantic’, ‘intersex’ and ‘genderqueer’.
The book – Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? – also features the use of hormone blockers by a fictional 12-year-old ‘transitioning’ from female to male in order to stop the onset of puberty. The treatment is controversially available to children on the NHS, as first revealed by The Mail on Sunday.
Billed by the publishers as ‘the first book to explain medical transitioning for children aged seven and above’, it is distributed by Educate & Celebrate, a Government-funded body that goes into primary and secondary schools to give lessons on ‘gender diversity’.
The organisation received £200,000 of taxpayer-funding from former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan and is endorsed by Ofsted. Earlier this year, the watchdog described as ‘innovative and visionary’ their work educating staff and children on gender and sexuality.
But politicians and leading religious figures last night lambasted the advice to stop saying boys and girls as ‘damaging’.
The book follows Kit, a 12-year-old who is transitioning from female to male, and features illustrations that may appeal to young readers, including one of a ‘gender-neutral’ unicorn whose genitals are masked with a star. A key passage from the book advises that the use of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ excludes transgender children – and reinforces the idea that there are behavioural differences between the sexes.
Former Tory Party chairman Lord Tebbit said: ‘I think it is damaging to children to introduce uncertainty into their minds.’
Sir Anthony Seldon, the former Master of Wellington College, said: ‘We have to respect the feelings of everybody, including teachers and parents who want traditional modes followed.’
And the Bishop of Chester, the Right Reverend Peter Forster, added: ‘This is likely to sow more confusion than clarity.’
As an alternative to using the terms ‘boys’ or ‘girls’, the book by C.J. Atkinson – a poet, academic and ‘trans advocate’ – suggests: ‘It may instead be preferable to group students into classes, or houses, or pupils.’ In another part of the book, Kit talks about his fictional school, explaining that when children in his class were split into groups they were divided by numbers or heights. Kit says: ‘This meant that when we were asked to do something, I didn’t feel that I was weird or different.’
Other labels in the book include ‘transman’, which describes a man who was born female but who identifies as male; ‘transwoman’, which indicates the opposite; and ‘panromantic’ – someone who has a ‘romantic attraction towards people of all gender identities’.
The book will be released by publishers Jessica Kingsley next month. Educate & Celebrate, which holds hundreds of workshops in schools, will send copies to the 120 ‘best practice’ schools with which it works. It expects hundreds more head teachers to buy the book.
Founder Elly Barnes, who was awarded the OBE for her contribution to education, equality and diversity, said the book was ‘much-needed’. She added: ‘Not everyone identifies as male or female – that is fact.’
The use of language in general throughout the school should... veer away from the idea there are only that two genders. Using such language as “boys and and girls” or “ladies gents” is not only exclusionary to trans-identified and gender young variant people, but subtly reinforces gender is a significant that difference about behaviour patterns. KEY PASSAGE FROM NEW GUIDEBOOK
IT is alarming to see the Government and the education establishment looking seriously at plans to stop using the terms ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ in schools, supposedly because doing so ‘discriminates’ against transgender pupils.
Can we really contemplate schools in which teachers will hesitate – or even fear – to use the time-worn phrase ‘boys and girls’ in daily life, in case it is deemed to be offensive, or even a trigger for some sort of legal or disciplinary action?
Yet experience shows just how quickly such things can spread, once they have begun. Even more radically, promoters of the new book Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? propose to introduce seven-year-olds to the complexities of gender categories – including ‘genderqueer’, ‘panromantic’ and ‘transwoman’.
Nobody would seek to deny some children become troubled about such things, or that they need sympathy and care when they do. But that does not mean our school system should accept without question the contentious beliefs of some that the best way to deal with this is to introduce children as young as seven to ‘medical transition’ and hormone blockers.
Our main concern must be for the wellbeing of those children involved. Surely we would be better off keeping an open mind about their doubts, and dealing with them individually, rather than officially endorsing a controversial theory about the nature of gender.
It is hard enough being seven years old in 2016, without being instructed to believe that boys will be girls, and girls will be boys, or perhaps neither – and that it may be necessary to take drugs to decide. This is a step too far.