What a mess we create when we conflate sex and gender
Girls’ schools will probably go the way of the coral reefs.
Girls schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog.
The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals that schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”.
There were supposed to be guidelines by 2018 but the process has bogged down. Quel surprise.
The Telegraph however has a draft and is sharing from that.
It says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination. Admitting such a pupil will not affect the school’s single-sex status.
“A pupil who has transitioned, or wants to, must be allowed to continue to attend the school; to remove them would amount to direct gender reassignment discrimination.”
So you put sex discrimination and gender reassignment discrimination together and you get…girls lose?
The document also says: “An admission policy of only admitting pupils in accordance with their sex recorded at birth would particularly disadvantage trans pupils, and would be indirectly discriminatory against trans pupils, unless it could be demonstrated to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”
Would it though? That seems to be true only if you buy the full ideological package, and if you assume that children have infallible knowledge about their “gender identity” and how it can be opposed to their sex. If instead you simply say that girls don’t have to conform to gender conventions to attend your school, then you can continue admitting girls who are girls without discriminating against “trans pupils.”
On the controversial area of sex categories in sports, the leaked EHRC document encourages schools to “consider ways of enabling all pupils to participate in sports, including competitive events that align with their gender identity.”
Meaning, girls’ schools have to admit boys and let them compete against the girls?
The leaked document has prompted controversy among the feminist academic and women’s rights campaigners, with critics claiming that it will have controversial implications for single-sex schools and “shows what a mess we create when we conflate sex and gender”.
Meanwhile trans rights and childrens charities say it is paramount that transgender children can “ live their life freely” and that all schools take steps to create “inclusive environments” for vulnerable students.
Well children are not generally able to “live their lives freely” in every sense, because they’re children. I chafed against this endlessly as a child, because I wanted to wander off by myself and there were limits on how far I was allowed to go. This idea of “living their lives freely” as the sex they are not is a very adult one and a very disruptive one. Let them pretend and fantasize freely, by all means, but put every fantasy into literal practice, no. We don’t give children real guns or real swords or real cars; we let them pretend.
Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, said that educational guidance should not be based on a “usually transitory feeling”.
She said: “We have to remember that literally the only criterion of telling who is a trans child and who isn’t is that they say so. It’s based on a feeling.
“Moreover it’s a feeling that we know most will grow out of. Assuming that there are good reasons to retain single sex provision in certain schools, it’s incomprehensible that these reasons should be overidden in favour of a usually transitory feeling.”
Mermaids, on the other hand, talked the usual bullshit.
The transing of gender non-conforming kids is just so blatantly homophobic. We can tell these people a thousand times that those kids are almost invariably just homosexual and not trans, we can show them all the stats gathered from different countries over decades to back this up. We can point out to them that the gender non-conforming kids they knew and grew up with — and perhaps still know now — are now happy homosexual adults, not trans people. And they just don’t care. They won’t listen.
And the only explanation for their deafness that makes any sense is that they don’t WANT their kids to be homosexual. They’d rather these kids be lifelong medical patients than be gender non-conforming homosexuals.
It’s misogyny and misogyny’s bastard child, homophobia. Yep.
We have learned that, despite what Western people thought we were during the past few decades, we really did not ever, truly, want homosexuals to be free to be homosexuals. It wasn’t real. Or it wasn’t real enough, for enough people. If it were, this wouldn’t have happened.
Yes, but it’s more. Gender non-conforming does not necessarily mean “prefers the same sex”. I don’t conform to gender expectations (though, of course, in some ways I do).
It is misogyny, plain and simple. Boys who act ‘like girls’ must perforce be girls, because boys would never act so sissy. Girls who act ‘like boys’ must be boys, because, well, girls just don’t act that way.
Homophobia is of a piece with misogyny. It is the hatred of all things feminine.
Quite right, iknklast.
But the homophobia explanation wouldn’t address the commonality of trans women declaring themselves lesbians, would it?
Or does that just part of the general tendency of homophobes to focus 90% of their ire on gay men, while mostly ignoring (or even fetishizing) lesbians?
I’m not convinced about the homophobia explanation because it’s the woke people leading the charge, not Ethel and Fred Average of Strawberry Lane.
I mean one factor, yes, but the whole thing, no.
I don’t know if it’s “deeply” woke people though. Parents and their doctors may like to pose as progressive (everybody does these days, it’s practically mandatory in many circles) but I get a sense that’s only skin deep. There’s something about all these people freaking out over a gender non-conforming child… Maybe it’s indirect homophobia, or a yuppie-ish variant of it: like they’re so afraid of their child having to endure homophobia and discrimination they’re trying to opt their kid out of it. And pretend they’re being progressive about it.
Ah, yes, parents, I wasn’t thinking about them so much.
That baffles me, really – why all the nuisance (at minimum) of being trans would seem better than being lesbian or gay.
Arrymorty,
That strikes me as implausible. Why would a parent think that a transgender child is going to endure less discrimination than a homosexual one? Pretty much everyone who’s homophobic is also transphobic, whereas I don’t think the reverse is true.
I think it might be more accurate to say that such parents are overestimating society’s “wokeness” in general (so that they think that homophobia and transphobia are both non-issues).
I have a different hypothesis. I wonder if the eagerness to accept (and even induce) a child’s identification as trans might be part of the general tendency towards medicalizing and diagnosing everything about children. At the risk of going on a grumpy old man “get off my lawn” rant:
— kids are never brats anymore, they have ADHD or Oppositional Defiant Disorder
— no kid is ever… pick your term for “not very bright,” they’re all learning disabled
— no kid is ever just nerdy and socially awkward, they’re all on the goddamn “spectrum,”
So, too, no child is ever just a tomboy or a boy who likes traditionally “girly” stuff, they’re all on the gender identity spectrum or whatever.
And that’s not to say that ADHD, learning disabilities, autism, or trans people don’t exist, or are just invented entirely out of nothing. I’m sure all those things are real in many cases. But there seems to be an eagerness to apply labels like that, maybe because it provides some sort of comfort and reassurance that we must understand these things if we have a medical term for them. Or the illusion of control. Or the belief that everybody has to accommodate your problem’s or your kid’s once there’s a medical label on it; sadly, there may be some truth to this one.
I don’t think it’s true that everyone who’s homophobic is also transphobic. To pick an example, Iran has been forcing gay people to undergo sex reassignment surgery in order to stay in a relationship with a same-sex partner. But perhaps that’s a distinction of degree rather than substance; they are less bothered by trans-ness than by homosexuality, but still bothered by it.
Surely that legitimate aim is to have a school comprised of a single sex? And didn’t the previous paragraph admit that a school can admit a trans student on the basis of their birth sex is still single sex? Baffling then that the author bothers looking for justifications to use identity rather than sex as basis for admission.
At least they (inadvertently) admit that there is tension caused by identity theory and normal and entire legal sex segregation.
Screechy, I’ve noticed that, too. In fact, the school (and my son’s father) were so eager to get my son diagnosed ADHD that they picked the doctor, and told his father who to take him to…he was diagnosed, just as expected, and put on medication that turned him from a bright, alert, and energetic 6 year old into a zombie.
Now, people have him convinced he is on the spectrum because he is shy and socially awkward.
If I had been born in the modern world, I would be diagnosed as autism spectrum, and who the hell knows what else, because I was an abused child who cowered in the corner when people tried to talk to me. I sat with my head down and my hair covering my face because whenever people noticed me, they hurt me. In short, they would let my parents off the hook (not that anyone bothered to notice my depression when I was in school; it’s easier to just call a kid shy).
That’s another things, as a teacher, that I see. Not only is every child “neuroatypical” or “spectrum”, but we don’t consider any possibility of abuse from parents, because that is blaming parents. A child fails, we blame the teacher, because that is the only safe individual to blame. Right now, it seems everyone hates teachers, though no one will admit it. We have ‘teacher of the year’ or ‘thank a teacher’ but the more appropriate bumper sticker might be ‘blame your teacher for everything’ and ‘I’m on the spectrum’.
I’m glad I wasn’t born yesterday. Even if my teachers did nothing to help me, at least they didn’t put me on medicine or insist I change my gender whenever I acted the ‘wrong’ way.
I think you’re quite right about over medicalizing and diagnosing children. I read somewhere about how the hardest thing for parents to do these days when they have a concern about their child is nothing. To just sit and wait it out a while and let it sort itself out is something modern parents are incapable of doing.
But still, the fact that gender nonconformity causes so much anxiety in parents that they need to diagnose and medicalize it has a whiff of homophobia/misogyny to me.
And it’s true that it’s irrational to prefer a medicalized child over a homosexual one, but transing a child is an action you can perform now, a tangible step you can take to address the “problem”, whereas to acknowledge your kid is gay means you must refrain from taking action and let the kid develop on their own.