A mother wrote to her, heartbroken
Helen Webberley is economical with her words. She omits a lot of words that would make her meaning clearer.
A mother wrote to me recently, heartbroken. Her ten-year-old transgender daughter had been told, just two weeks before departure, that she could not go on her school trip. The reason given was that she could not share a room with her friends because of new legislation. Her daughter was inconsolable. And her mother wanted to know: how can this happen? What can I do?
We can guess at her meaning because we know something about her, not because she makes it clear. She makes it the opposite of clear. That’s not random. What does she mean “she could not share a room with her friends because of new legislation”? Who are these friends? What is the new legislation that says this boy can’t share a room with his friends?
Because we know something about her we can guess that she means the “daughter” in question is a son and the “friends” in question are girls. The fact that Webberley takes care not to spell that out is telling. What does it tell? That she is a manipulative liar with zero concern for the rights and/or safety of young girls.
Schools across the country are making decisions like this one right now, often in good faith but on the basis of a misunderstanding of what the law actually requires. So let me set out what the law says, what the current guidance actually is, and what any parent in this situation can do.
The Equality Act 2010 is the piece of legislation that governs this. Under Section 7 of that Act, gender reassignment is a protected characteristic. That means a child who is transgender, or who is in the process of transitioning, is protected by law from discrimination at school.
Section 85 of the same Act makes it explicitly unlawful for schools to discriminate against a pupil on the basis of a protected characteristic in the way they provide education and related activities. School trips are school activities. Excluding a child from a trip, or placing conditions on their participation that prevent them from going, on the basis of their transgender identity, is direct discrimination. It is unlawful. That has not changed.
But excluding a boy from the girls’ sleeping room is not “on the basis of their transgender identity” – it’s on the basis of their being a boy. The rule is not “transgender children cannot sleep in the girls’ sleeping room” – the rule is “boys cannot sleep in the girls’ sleeping room.” Claiming a transgender idennniny is not an all-day pass to intrude on female people.
The protected characteristic of gender reassignment requires a gender reassignment certificate, which the child will not – cannot – have, so the EA2010 doesn’t apply. Also, the test for discrimination is compared to someone who does not have that characteristic. In this case, is the boy-claiming-to-be-a-girl treated less favourably than a boy-not-claiming-to-be-a-girl? It is not boy-claiming-to-be-a-girl against actual-real-genuine-girl.
I suspect also that the boy wasn’t told he couldn’t go on the trip per se. He was probably told that he could go on the trip but had to share with other boys.
A likely feminine boy being “inconsolable” at being reminded he’s a boy is, to me, an enraging indicator that the parents and the school are failing in their duties to raise that boy.
I was that boy, and it was indeed hard being a girlie-boy, but it would have been infinitely harder in the long run if everyone had set me up to become a medicalized transsexual out of a warped sense of pity for me.
Stories like this make me nearly explode with rage. Feminine boys are not a medical problem to be solved. We are in a sense a social problem, in that society needs to better understand us and tolerate us. When all of society chooses medically “fixing” us instead of learning to accept us, my fury can shatter planets.
And another infuriating thing: it’s WAY less fraught for girls, as of course you know. I was boyish-ish as a child and I suppose I still am if a total refusal to wear skirts of any kind [and similar refusal of makeup, torture shoes, etc] is enough. I was forced to do some dress-wearing as a child but apart from that I don’t recall much disapproval. Mind you, it helped that I went to a girls’ school K-12.
#4, I think that might depend on the family and the community. Disapproval of pants-wearing women and girls was rife in my family. I was required (by the school district) to wear dresses to school until junior high, when they allowed us to wear matching pantsuits. About the time I entered high school, we were allowed to wear jeans and t-shirts. My mother called anyone who dressed that way ‘a hippie’, and her disapproval of hippies was obvious. Perhaps not quite as bad as her disapproval of feminists, which was also something she charged every woman stepping out of her role of being, and she was convinced feminists winning rights would mean she would have to end her marriage. For some reason, choice in marriage translates for some into ‘you can’t choose to be married’.
I do think feminine boys have it rougher, but in some places, it’s sort of hard to quantify. None of the males I knew (at least those my mother also knew) were effeminate, so I didn’t see any of the males get bashed around or even called names. Of course, part of that is a function of having no friends, I suppose.
There’s a concept I recently encountered in psychology called ego-dystonia. It describes the idea that one’s sense or idea of oneself doesn’t match what one… well, what one actually is. I find it a very useful term to describe young people who feel out of place in their bodies. And especially young people who discover that they’re homosexual but aren’t ready for it yet.
As in… their bodies are doing the things bodies do when they get aroused at a sexual target, but their minds are not there yet. Because it’s not the erotic target they’re expecting to erotically target. Whoops, my pupils appear to be dilating and my heart appears to be bursting out of my chest in the presence of attractive women instead of attractive men. Hmmm, that’s odd. This is a problem. Because I’m a fourteen-year-old girl and everything I’ve learned about lesbians just doesn’t register as in sync with my mind. So I can’t be one of those…
And so on with the sexes reversed, in the case of young budding gay males.
Ego-dystonia, or the phenomenon of ego-dystonic experience I think explains A LOT of young trans-identifiers. Their egos — their senses of *self* and how their *selves* fit into the wider social landscape — haven’t yet caught up with their bodies, which are racing into adulthood and doing adult hormonal things. And I think that’s been exacerbated by social media: the kids these days are being forced to develop a public *sense of self* before they’re ready to, because they have to have an online presence and an online profile, and by extension, a sense of what they look like to other people.
When I was a budding young gay boy, I had thankfully too much other stuff on my mind to think too hard about my *public image*. I was just me, doing my thing, mostly just lost in my own mind.
If kids are forced to develop a *public image* of themselves before their private ideas about themselves are ready to gel, well, then of course there will be an increase in ego-dystonic homosexuality and bisexuality. And frankly ego-dystonic everything else. Just a general overall sense of not-fitting.
And society tells kids if they don’t “feel right in themselves” in any way, then they’re probably trans.
Maybe this whole thing is just a massive explosion of ego-dystonia. A side-effect of young people being forced to construct a social image of themselves and to then try and fit themselves into it, far too young…
I mean, it’s not exactly a shocking reveal, but all the evidence points to the culprit: it was social media who dun it.
This seems to confirm what I’ve been suspecting, but not been able to clearly articulate. But what surprises me, and perhaps you can shed some light, Artymorty, is why gay leaders and organizations are in such strong denial over it. Being straight myself, I had a tough time as an adolescent because I did have some interest in many of the same things that, in my small mid-western town, were considered to only be what girls would be interested in or if boys, “fags.” I’m referring to social aspects, not sex. And I wasn’t very good at sports, so it really made me feel out of place.
The leader of the Stonewall DFL gave a talk at a meeting I was at and sneered that “there is no trans ideology,” and the rule is steadfast, that trans identity is not to be questioned because “knowing” is evidence enough. The alternative hypotheses, that gender itself is toxic and enforces rules that we should be breaking out of, is denied and in its place trans ideology affirms that yes, one can be born in the wrong-sex body.
It’s a puzzle and frustrating that I can’t find anyone to have an honest conversation about it.