Diversity Role Models – or role models of conformity to a new ideology?

Jan 20, 2020 by

by Shelley Charlesworth, Transgender Trend:

Let’s start with two real girls and their mothers. Two families from very different backgrounds and cultures but each with the same hopes for their daughters: that they go to school and be educated, make friends, and grow up to be happy fulfilled young women. But each girl came home and expressed doubts about being a girl after being taught about transgenderism in their primary schools.

Fatima Shah’s daughter was ten at the time and was a pupil at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham where she was taught using the No Outsiders programme. Fatima said that her daughter came home and asked “am I ok to be a boy?” I’ve written here about the No Outsiders programme and its content and teaching plans.[1]

The other girl was eight, in year 4, when her London primary was visited by Diversity Role Models, a national charity set up to tackle homophobic bullying. After the workshop, she told her mother, anxiously, that she didn’t think she was trans. She said it twice. She’d never raised the question or ever used the word trans before.

Fatima’s daughter would have been taught about gender identity in the No Outsiders programme. Year 6 are read My Princess Boy, a true story about a small boy who wants to wear girls’ clothes. The story in itself is not the point. It is the way No Outsiders frames the book in the lesson plan that is problematic. Children would have been told that this story is relevant to the Equality Act and wrongly that there is a protected characteristic of “gender identity”. The teaching plan tells teachers where to go to find more specific picture books about “Transgender awareness”. Where a child might just accept that this is a story about a boy in a dress, the teacher is told to take an adult view of gender non-conforming behaviour and frame the story as being about a “trans child”.

Read here

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This