“Cynthia” is a pseudonym to protect the identity of the 14-year-old girl who wrote this article. This is a long post but her words have not been edited, although some potentially identifying details have been changed.
You’d expect schools to be a place of education, but nowadays it’s more like indoctrination. Most politicians, parents, and teachers are utterly oblivious about what’s happening right under their noses – or worse, they know, but are too cowardly to do anything.
So I’ll be the one to present my testimony of how schools are encouraging delusion, facilitating regressive political activism, and promoting extreme and dogmatic ideologies. Believe it or not, this seems to be happening in every British secondary school, and I’ve seen it happen first-hand. I’m a fourteen-year-old girl and this is my testimony on the infiltration of gender ideology in schools, including mine.
They didn’t hesitate to start preaching the political activism, and it started right away in year seven – as part of our PSHE lessons, we had to write a “Pledge” to LGBTQIA+ students and watch a video in class about what and what not to say to LGBTQIA+ people. After that, we had another lesson in which the word “butch” was labelled as “derogatory” and “a transphobic slur” – even though it’s a word used to describe a masculine lesbian. It’s not a slur and has nothing to do with being “transphobic”. This year – I’m in year 10 – we had another assembly which also denounced the word butch as a slur. This time, I had the confidence to talk to a teacher about it – who quickly dismissed my concerns and simply said they were just following the County Council’s guidance.
There was a display in the hallway featuring several “pride flags” and made-up labels, including “gender fluid”, “transgender”, “non-binary”, “pansexual”, “polysexual”, “demiboy”, “demigirl”, “gender queer”, and others. In year seven, I attended a debating competition hosted at our school and we were asked to state our name and preferred pronouns before we could say anything, and we had a display in the library featuring the trans propaganda book Beyond Magenta, which is extremely inappropriate and contains sexually explicit content. This book was in the library where 11-year-olds could read it, no questions asked, no age restriction. Thankfully, my mum and I wrote into school and had the explicit book display and pride flags removed.
Then I heard from a friend that she had been attending a lunchtime club called Equalities. It’s a group organised by the Librarian, and there are around fifteen participants in total, all girls (although some identify as “transgender”). Interested, I decided to attend, but it wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t advocating for equality and rights, it was blatant political activism – and in my first meeting, it was exclusively promoting gender ideology. They were attempting to get a survey sent out to all students, including eleven and twelve-year-olds, which asked them about pronouns, fabricated “genders”, whether they were LGBTQIA+ or not, and other concerning questions that raised serious safeguarding issues, and was clearly politically biased in favour of gender ideology. There was talk of organising a protest – against what, I don’t know – as well as “pronoun badges” and “pride flag badges” and “gender identity badges”.
Soon after, I got added to the Equalities group chat, and somehow, it’s even worse than I thought. There were 900+ messages about watching pornography and smoking weed, links to “fanfic” and “Harry Potter porn”, sexually explicit photos of mannequins, and more. This is a group chat for a club officially organised and recognised at school, and there have been TEACHERS recommending it to Year 8 kids – twelve and thirteen-year-olds. A younger friend in Year Eight told me that her tutor had urged the children in her group to attend Equalities meetings and join the club. The group chat is an unsupervised free-for-all, and there’s zero safeguarding measures in place, and rarely any teachers are present at the lunchtime meetings either.
There was also another club promoting gender ideology – the “LGBTQ+ Club”. The first (and only) time I attended I only stayed for around thirty seconds before hastily exiting. When I entered, all the children attending (I’d say there was around fifteen to twenty – most younger kids, the majority were girls) were sitting around the tables, and there were three teachers at the front of the room. They were going around stating their pronouns (e.g., “they / them”, as some kids said) and sexuality (e.g., “aro ace” and “pansexual”), encouraged by the teachers. As I said, I only stayed for half a minute before making an excuse about homework and leaving. However, I think it’s clear that a club that encourages an extreme and dogmatic political ideology and has young children state who they like to have sex with raises some serious safeguarding concerns; it’s just blatant indoctrination.
Obviously, these are all major issues, but I’m really conflicted. I’m the newest member of the Equalities group chat, and if I speak out publicly against it, they’ll probably know it was me, especially since I expressed a disliking to the term “birthing partner”, which they may have perceived as “transphobic”. It’s a really tricky situation. If I don’t do anything, the safeguarding issues will continue, but if I say something, I’ll be ostracised as a traitor and a “transphobe” and a “TERF” if they realise who it was. And I’m worried that if I report it to school, they’ll only shut down the chat, and keep the ideological activist group and promote that awful survey.
The reason I’m afraid to speak out is because there is extreme hostility towards anyone who doesn’t vehemently support gender ideology; it feels extremely cultish. I’ve noticed the frenzy of hatred towards “transphobes” in the form of comments from my friends, remarks about people they dislike, including “I hate anyone who supports JK Rowling”, “I want to strangle transphobes with a rope”, “I wish JK Rowling and all transphobes would drop dead”, and the like.
There was even a petition to get our head of year fired because he was being apparently “transphobic”. From what I understand, it was because he was not letting male students get undressed with the girls in the girls’ changing rooms for PE. Another student came up to me after class and asked me to report a teacher in the next Year Council meeting for being “transphobic” as well. My friends seem just absolutely certain that there is ONE point of view that everyone should have and that anyone who questions it must be a raging transphobe.
My friends don’t know I disagree with gender ideology and I’m too scared to say anything that goes against the accepted norm in case I’ll be targeted; I’ve heard what’s happened to girls in other schools when they’ve spoken out – take “Kate”, for example, she was spat on and harassed and ended up self-harming after bullying from her classmates after she said “I respectfully disagree” to a person who was talking about the topic of “trans rights”. I feel like it is EXACTLY the same environment at my school, and it’s basically like there’s been this mass-radicalisation of today’s youth in favour of a hateful ideology which favours sexist, regressive stereotypes over biological truth.
I have “trans” and “non-binary” friends, and I love them to pieces, but if they find out I disagree with gender ideology I have zero doubt they’ll abandon me (and probably turn on me) in the blink of an eye. There’s this culture of absolute intolerance towards any notion of an opinion that differs from the politically-correct norm, and it’s clearly present at my school. So I just meekly agree and nod along while my friends rant on about how men can have cervixes; why “birthing partner” is an acceptable replacement for the word mother; why there’s actually no reason for single-sex sport; why “neopronouns are the future!”; why JK Rowling is a “transphobic TERF” who deserves to die, etc., because I’m terrified of speaking out.
It’s their vitriolic attitudes of complete intolerance and hate that makes it so hard to find the courage to say “I disagree”. I usually steer away from the “it’s a cult!” language but that’s what it seriously feels like; like it’s a cult that I’m the only one who is not part of.
When I entered secondary school, I met a girl, who I’ll call “Kelly”. Eleven-year-old Kelly was already identifying as “transgender” and “pansexual”, and soon refused to use the correct changing room and insisted that other girls refer to her by “he/him” pronouns. I watched as the school allowed her to change her name from Kelly to a boy’s name on the school register and gave her exemption from having to use the girls’ changing rooms.
You can see the self-harming scars on Kelly’s arms, face, hands, and neck. She has to frequently take days off school due to mental health issues. She has talked multiple times about ending her life and she recounted to me how she attempted suicide before. I believe she keeps razor blades in her bag. Her phone gallery is filled with images of her arms bloodied and sliced into – I have seen it with my own eyes, and the scars are very prominent. I do not believe that a mentally unstable self-harming child should have her delusions that she is actually a boy affirmed; I think it would be better to treat mental illness rather than to encourage it. And the “social transition” that school is helping her and other children with places her on a path to life-altering drugs and irreversible surgeries that will disfigure her body permanently. Kelly has stated she has dysphoria about her breasts.
Since Kelly “came out as transgender” in Year Seven, almost every other girl from her friend group has declared a make-believe identity, opting for new names and new pronouns and new “gender identities”, such as “gender-fluid” or “non-binary”, and the like. Other kids in different year groups soon started adopting fabricated “identities” and the social contagion flourished. There has been a significant influx of girls in my classes demanding that other children refer to them with biologically incorrect pronouns and “gender identities” such as “gender-fluid” and the like.
I’ll be frank, it’s popular to be “trans”. I know there’s a lot of talk about ROGD – Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria – but from my experience with trans-identifying friends, it feels more like a label one can apply to gain popularity points rather than a misdiagnosis or self-diagnosis of a troubled teen. In fact, while talking to Kelly about the trans topic, I inquired what she thought a sign that a person was “trans” could be, and she said that gender dysphoria had nothing to do with it, and that a person could easily be “trans” without experiencing any dysphoria or distress, which actually greatly surprised me at the time.
It makes you amazingly popular to be part of the “oppressed” few, the struggling trans kids trying to survive in a hateful, transphobia-ridden world, and this attitude is even more prominent online, where most trans-identifying kids first heard about gender ideology. That’s why we have “pansexual non-binary agender demiromantic” ten-year-olds. It’s the cool and trendy thing to be doing right now, but there are serious consequences, and “social transition” places trans-identifying children on a path to surgical mutilation, sterilisation, and irreversible damage.
The school, by “transitioning” these children, is doing a lot of harm and it is not in the best interests of the trans-identifying child. Furthermore, there’s the culture of 100% affirmation, where any scepticism is blasted down as “transphobia”, and I have heard my friends repeating the slogan “If you’re thinking you might be trans, you probably are.”
As well as this, I’m a girl who has short hair and wears trousers, and I’ve been asked so many times about whether I’m “transitioning” and what pronouns I’d prefer to be referred to with, whereas none of my gender-conforming friends get this treatment. I feel like this is a really important point to make – how my generation supports the rigid, regressive stereotypes of what a boy or a girl should be: it’s like we’ve suddenly gone back fifty years and once again, being a woman is nothing more than a pretty dress, sparkly high heels, a pronounced liking for sewing and a preference for Barbie. A pink brain.
They’re reinforcing the binary that they try so hard to destroy, fitting each person in a little pink or blue box depending on their personality and preferences, regardless of biology. In the school residential in year nine, the girls in the tent I was in went round in turns stating their preferred pronouns and I was forced to participate due to fear of being exposed as gender-critical. In a younger friend’s PE class, the girls she was in a team with also asked each other their preferred pronouns. This was in the girls’ PE class!
The kids at school equate femininity as actually BEING female, and masculinity as literally BEING male. According to them, there’s no such thing as a girl who has short hair and wears trousers and likes video games – she’s got to be a boy. They value regressive, sexist stereotypes over the biological reality of sex.
Other stuff has been happening at school as well, such as the occasion where girls were complaining that their parents weren’t letting them buy breast binders in the changing rooms, as well as claiming there were no negative side effects (which there ARE: rib fractures, shoulder dislocation, itching, swelling, numbness, infections, permanent disfigurement of the breasts), and stating they’d buy one and leave their parents. The kids who “identify” as something other than their sex are allowed to refuse to enter the correct sex’s changing room, and instead change in mixed-sex toilet cubicles – we have both single-sex and mixed-sex toilets at school.
As I said, every single child I know believes in gender ideology, and you often hear students asking each other questions like – “what’s the word for being attracted to non-binary people?” (Which, by the way, is “Skoliosexual”), and other such questions. The school has a poster put up near the Head of Year offices offering an online “confidential safe space” for LGBT+ students, and when I visited their website, one of the first things I read was “trans women are women and trans men are men. This is a common-sense statement”. As well as this, the kids at school and all of my friends refuse to refer to mothers as mothers, and instead use terms like “birthing partner” for mother and “non-birthing partner” for father.
Instead of saying male or female to describe people who are either male or female, they say “afab” or “amab”, ridiculous terms which stand for “assigned female at birth” and “assigned male at birth”. They rant about hating “transphobes” and have a cult-like loyalty to gender ideology, and it’s really distressing to know that they hate people like me, those that don’t subscribe to a sexist and homophobic ideology that endangers women and girls.
The teachers are useless at dealing with this, and some even encourage it; they changed one of my friend’s names on the official register, she was eleven at the time and identifying as “transgender” and “pansexual”. The teachers refer to her with male pronouns and I believe her “gender” (sex!) is officially registered as male, although I am not certain. Also, some of the teachers are really woke. The head of debate club wears pride flag badges and I’m scared to speak my actual opinion when debating in case it’s not politically correct enough, and there are the three teachers who run the LGBTQ+ Club who were asking for kid’s pronouns. The head librarian wears the pride badges as well, and created the Equalities club, and also created the display which featured the explicit book (although the display was taken down).
An important thing to note is that my school is, by far, not the worst – my testimony is a relatively mild example of how gender ideology can infiltrate a school. I’ve heard accounts from parents and teachers in the UK where each child has had to state their preferred pronouns before they speak in class; PowerPoints teaching six-year-olds words such as “gender-fluid” and “pansexual”; the horrific treatment of teachers and students who speak out. It’s a terrifying environment.
We must draw attention to the indoctrination of children into gender ideology in schools and the intolerant and hostile atmosphere that surrounds speaking out against it. I’ve seen first-hand the vehement devotion my friends and classmates present towards this ideology – as I’ve said before, it legitimately feels like a cult: the fierce loyalty they show towards an ideology that essentially reduces people to meaningless stereotypes.
What’s even worse is how the schools encourage this attitude, pushing gender ideology on children with obvious political bias, and yet zero consequences. There is a shocking lack of safeguarding, as seen with the Equalities group chat, where a club officially recognised and organised by the school has a group chat where the girls involved exchange links to pornography and talk about their favourite kinds of porn and getting high.
We have repeatedly written into school now and it feels like our concerns are still not being taken seriously. It is time for the Government to stop the affirmation and encouragement of delusion, and to calm the vehemently dogmatic atmosphere that surrounds speaking out. This can be done by issuing clear guidance that ensures political neutrality in schools, and instructs headteachers not to present highly controversial ideology as fact.
Reprinted with the permission of Transgender Trend.