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.