My daughter came to me in the middle of the night one night a few months after starting secondary school. She couldn’t sleep.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m scared’. We cuddled up together and I asked her what she was scared of ‘It’s all this talk about gender stuff’. ‘What exactly?’. In a very small voice ‘It doesn’t make any sense’.
A long talk later, she’s terrified she’ll be punished if she speaks up about believing in science and pointing out that the material taught in science directly contradicts the jumbled mish-mash of materials from RSE which sometimes say sex and gender are different, sometimes don’t and generally make no sense (although at least I’ve been allowed to see them – I know some schools don’t allow even that). Having just started her periods she was outraged that boys could identify as girls and be treated the same when their biological reality is very different.
We’ve agreed the best thing to do is to ignore it wherever possible and she’s promised to come to me if she feels under any more threat or if she feels her boundaries / safety / privacy are being violated. It seems there are some teachers who are pushing the ideology harder than others. A teacher told her that JK Rowling was ‘transphobic’ with no evidence. A political opinion which is entirely out of place in school. She loves Harry Potter so was very upset at this slur against one of her favourite authors.