How the girl in the clip was treated
The Crown Prosecution Service has withdrawn an anti-bullying guidance pack for schools developed with Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, after a 14-year-old girl brought a legal action. The pack, which has been withdrawn for review, encouraged schools to tell girls to ignore their discomfort and not object to males entering single sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms.
I can’t think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong, can you? Similarly with bears. If you’re out hiking in the woods and you see a bear, you should approach it to make friends. Similarly with fires. If you see a house on fire you should hasten to go inside the house to enjoy the spectacle.
One of its teaching exercises features a video scenario where an adult male presenting in a feminine style enters the women’s toilets. Two young women at the sinks whisper their discomfort: “What’s he doing in here? This is the Ladies”. The next time the person uses the Gents’ where two middle-aged men shout abuse and bang on the door.
Ah yes – so, because men are abusive to the man in a skirt, girls should shut up when he decides to use their toilets instead of the men’s. That’s totally fair. The fact that he could be abusive to them is of no importance whatever.
The guidance says:
“Ask the students what happened in the clip. Thinking about how the girl in the clip was treated, can the class understand why she might have felt hesitant about going into the toilets?”
But there was no “girl,” there was an adult man. However he dresses, he doesn’t get to use the girls’ toilets. (Why is an adult using students’ toilets in the first place? That itself is not the usual arrangement.)
As the legal letter to the CPS points out it is not safe for girls to learn that they should consider an adult male using a facility intended for their bodily privacy as a ‘girl’.
Nor is it safe for them to learn that they have some kind of obligation to put themselves in danger to protect a man in a dress. I’m not saying men in dresses should be put in danger, but I damn well am saying they shouldn’t use girls as shields.
So it never occurred to them to point out to the boys how the man in the dress felt when they were abusive? Because all the girls did was whisper about it being the Ladies, while the “gents” actively shouted abuse. Who is the group who needs correction and instruction? Obviously the girls, right?
Damn, I hate spending my whole life fighting for equality for the sexes only to find us sliding into this bilge.
History knows a term relevant here: pretender. As in a claimant to a throne, such as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ of Scotland.
So accordingly, perhaps there should be dunnies / washrooms / toilet blocks / changerooms / whatever for each of the following: 1. males 2. females 3. pretender males 4. pretender females . (Numbers do not indicate any order of superiority.)
Omar, when I read dunnies, I misread it dummies, and thought you were about to propose that there be dummy women’s rooms, fakes that the fake male women would think were real and would use, while all the real female women would know the location of the real woman’s room where they could continue to retain their privacy.
Your idea is good, too, though. But that sort of thing has been suggested, with the single-sex single-seat toilets that anyone can use, and they refuse that. It makes it too obvious they are not, in fact, women.
Years ago, when I was in the Australian Army, we had multiple-holer field latrines. Little danger of feeling lonely while perched on one.
Could have relevance to the above situation. Worth a try, surely. ;-)
…Therefore women need to accept men in women’s toilets? No, sorry, the conclusion does not follow. The wrongdoing presented in the scenario is the abuse towards the man wearing a dress. That’s what needs to be rectified by cultural retraining, not the discomfort felt by women in a female-only space upon seeing a male enter.
Young girls of student age are asked if they can understand a man’s discomfort at sharing a space with other men; the man is not asked if he can understand the female students’ discomfort at sharing space with men. All because the man calls himself a woman and puts a dress on. Move over, women! Men need accommodatin’.
“Teacher, I think the girl in the clip was treated very poorly indeed. She probably feels hesitant to go into the loo because some great hairy bloke in a skirt might be lurking in there.”
I read your article and the pre-action protocol letter. Now, I want to see the videos that those kids were forced to watched. Do you know where I can find those videos ? I tried to google “CPS toolkit” or “LGBT toolkit” but I found nothing.
I really want to be able to show my – very liberal – friends the kind of content that girls are forced to comply with.
Maya Forstater has an excellent take on the subversion and corruption of laws and guidelines to “send a positive message” that overturns the actual point of having the laws and guidelines there in the first place:
https://mobile.twitter.com/MForstater/status/1256128111604793345
…realizing AFTER posting that Forstater was the source of the OP topic!
At least I didn’t link the same item!
Heh, I was going to apologize for not spelling that out (I sometimes let the link do the work of id’ing the source), but I see that I did.
If being exposed to open abuse by other men in the Gents, the offered solution is to allow said transwoman into the Ladies. The girls only whisper and are not threatening.
Clearly, the solution then is to be loud and abusive. Then people listen to you and not the girls whispering and retaining their urine for fear of using their own toilets in their school.
regina #7, your idea is right on, to let the public see what is really going on.
But as this blog reported here and here, the CPS “schools pack” was password protected, so the CPS was not letting the public see it.
@ Dave Ricks: Oh I see… Thanks for the info. That in itself is actually worrying: it means that material brought to the classroom is not available to parents. I mean, I can read through schoolbooks and discuss the content with my kids. I can look at anything they write or have to learn. And that is crucial. But those videos, shown to our kids, we can’t watch those? If a teacher is going to show my kid that video and ask her to shut down her thoughts to “be nice” to a grown up man, I certainly want to be able to watch that video again with her and tell her that she doesn’t have to obey her teacher’s order.