The hopes
A teacher has been sacked after attempting to scupper the election hopes of a transgender candidate who wanted to be head girl.
Susan Field told her tutor group she felt the pupil was not “representative” of the student body and that it was not an “appropriate” role for her, the teaching watchdog found.
Ms Field, a French teacher who was said to have previously enjoyed an “unblemished 35-year career”, was dismissed from Ash Manor School, in Surrey, for gross misconduct after a disciplinary hearing into her remarks and subsequently lost her appeal.
I don’t know what being representative of the student body is supposed to mean, but as for a boy who calls himself a girl being head girl, I think that should be off the table. I don’t think boys should take girls’ prizes or jobs or offices or any other scarce commodity of that kind, no matter how they identify.
The student, referred to by the Teaching Regulation Agency as “Pupil I”, had publicly identified as a female student to the school since the start of the academic year.
Whatever. That doesn’t entitle him to take the head girl position away from a girl.
The disciplinary hearing in Coventry was told that, during the 10 to 15-minute conversation in May 2019, various pupils described Pupil I as “disgusting”. Other “hostile and derogatory language” was also used – which Ms Field failed to challenge, the panel said.
During the investigation, she admitted telling her tutor group that it is “not appropriate for a member of the LGBTQI to represent Ash Manor School”.
That complicates the picture, because it shouldn’t be the issue. A lesbian head girl would be a fine thing, it’s the boy as head girl that’s the problem.
Even if we grant that TWAW, that trans women are just another type of woman, the key word here seems to be ‘representative’. How is a trans girl representative of girls that have had a / are taking a radically different pathway to womanhood?
But of course he is not a girl and anyone can see it. The guy is just another intrusive egotist.
Except that we don’t generally feel we need people to be representative in all ways to be head girls or boys & similar. If she’s the only girl in the school with red hair, for instance, that doesn’t matter. But being not representative in the sense of having a male body…that seems like a qualitatively different kind of not representative, which makes the idea of granting that trans women are just another type of woman seem more like a set of words than a genuine granting. We can say the formula, but can we actually believe it?
I suppose it depends how many other “girls” in the school are transgender, i.e. how many are boys. If, for example, 100% of the “girls” in the school are boys, then it would make sense for a boy to represent them.
To quote you: “a very differenty kind of differen[t]”. :-)
(I love that. I wonder if I would call it Carrollian, as in Lewis Carroll. Not sure.)
So, no details about why the girls used terms like “disgusting” for this person? Maybe they were dealing with a junior Jess Bradley or junior Charles Clymer or junior Zinnia Jones or junior Allison Woolbert? We are left not knowing what was really going on among the students at all, aren’t we?
The 35 year teaching veteran seems to have had almost a quarter of an hour during which the actual, female, students failed to grovel at the feet of the trans-idol. Having failed to send them to the re-education camp for Errant Females, she compounded the Literal Violence™ by speaking her mind when asked.