SARAH VINE: Brave girls who stood up to woke teacher are heroines for their generation
There are times when I miss having small children instead of hulking young adults around the place: no empty beer bottles down the back of the sofa; no fag butts in my geraniums; no midnight McDonald’s.
But honestly, the way things are going, who would be a parent of school-age children? It’s an ideological minefield.
In particular, advocates of hardline trans ideology have infiltrated our education system. No one — parent or child — is safe from their self-righteous wrath.
Our schools — which should be open-minded forums for debate and ideas — have become echo-chambers for a narrow band of aggressive, intolerant militants who abuse their authority as teachers.
This week, a recording emerged that illustrated this sinister situation all too clearly. For once, I suppose, we must be grateful for the incursion of mobile phones into the classroom, for without it we would have no record of the incident.
A recording emerged this week of a teacher at Rye College in East Sussex and two Year 8 pupils, both girls, in which she berated the students for saying there are only two genders
It involves an exchange between a teacher at Rye College in East Sussex and two Year 8 pupils, both girls. It begins with the teacher chastising one of the pupils: ‘How dare you? You just really upset someone.’
The girl responds: ‘I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell.’
‘You were questioning their identity,’ the teacher replies. ‘Where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders?’
‘I just said my opinion,’ the pupil replies. ‘If I can respect their opinion, can’t they respect mine?’
The teacher goes on to say it is ‘not an opinion’ and ‘gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with; gender is about how you identify’.
Another girl then chimes in. ‘If you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy — that’s it,’ she says, only to be told that her views are ‘despicable’.
The teacher then calls them both homophobic and adds that ‘if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school’, before informing them that she’s going to report them.
The first girl defends herself by saying she was being respectful, but felt compelled to ask her classmate: ‘How can you identify as a cat when you are a girl?’
Let’s be honest, it’s not an unreasonable question. And a clever teacher would have known how to handle it.
Instead, and presumably for want of any ability to rise to the intellectual challenge, this one decided to interpret it as transphobia.
It’s never nice to be accused of bigotry — even more so when all you are doing is questioning someone’s decision to pretend they’re another species. And yet, throughout it all, the girls’ tone is remarkably restrained and polite.
If I were the mother of either of them, I would be proud of them for their good manners, their composure and for arguing their case so cogently. The teacher, on the other hand, is completely out of control: over-emotional, aggressive and intimidating as she tells the girls: ‘If you don’t like it, you need to go to a different school.’
If her behaviour weren’t so sinister, it would be laughably embarrassing. She could not have handled the situation worse.
The teacher called both girls homophobic and added that ‘if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school’, before informing them that she’s going to report them
Come now, you say, this is just one bad teacher. But it’s not. This kind of thing is happening in classrooms up and down the country. Teachers are using their positions of power to impart an ideology: that to emphasise biological sex is wicked and that gender is no more than a social construct.
This is not only highly debatable, but also the root cause of many young people making irreversible decisions about their bodies they may one day come to regret.
Just this week, another former patient of the now-discredited Tavistock Clinic for children with gender dysphoria has spoken out, saying she feels like a ‘mutilated experiment gone wrong’ after undergoing a double mastectomy.
The girl, Jasmine, who was born female but decided she wanted to be male and has now detransitioned, says her original decision was a childish ‘mistake’. Her story (and that of others) is examined on Sunday in an ITV documentary called The Clinic.
Jasmine is far from an isolated case: she’s just one of a wave of young people — including Keira Bell, who took her case against the Tavistock to the High Court — who have exposed the stark reality behind the rainbows-and-unicorns narrative of the trans lobby. If only the adults around these two young women had questioned them more rigorously, neither of them would now be facing a lifetime of medical and mental health issues.
Of course, trans people should live their lives in peace and dignity. No one is disputing that.
But there is a world of difference between ensuring that basic human right and filling young children’s heads with ideas they find confusing, even frightening, and which might one day lead them to make ‘mistakes’ they bitterly come to regret.
Children look to adults for stability and guidance — and schools and teachers are key in that. They have a responsibility not to push any agenda — and yet sometimes that seems to be almost all they do.
Those who fail to fall in line are punished. Which is why I’m so full of admiration for those two girls at Rye College. To stand up to that kind of pressure takes extraordinary courage and toughness, which most 13-year-olds don’t possess.
But there is also something about their ingenuity in seeing the facts as they are, rather than allowing the woke imperatives of the age to influence them. They are standing up not only for themselves, but for their generation — and all those who dare to question the views of a small but aggressive minority that seems to want to make everyone dance to their own deeply controversial tune.
Shame of the Jingle and Mingle beano
As a conservative, large and small C, I am mortified about that video of young Tory activists dancing at a ‘Jingle and Mingle’ party at CCHQ in 2020, at the height of the pandemic.
I know there have been pictures of the event before, but seeing it in live-action only emphasises their staggering stupidity.
When you think of the sacrifices people made, to witness such reckless disregard for the rules is a kick in the teeth.
As for the damage this does to the Conservative Party, it’s devastating. People just think we’re a bunch of arrogant idiots. And who can blame them?
Taylor’s Glasto gossip is just glorious
Taylor Swift, who is in the middle of a world tour that so far has netted her in excess of half a billion dollars and seen her criss-cross half the globe, reportedly has an ’empty space’ in her diary on June 25 — the closing night of Glastonbury. A duet with Elton? Some rumours are just too delicious to shake off . . .
Taylor Swift, who is in the middle of a world tour that so far has netted her in excess of half a billion dollars and seen her criss-cross half the globe, reportedly has an ’empty space’ in her diary on June 25 — the closing night of Glastonbury
Inquiry with a high price
I may be in a minority of one, but I am sick of these endless public inquiries. Take the one for Covid, which has so far racked up a tab of about £114 million, with estimates suggesting the final bill could run to many multiples of that. And for what? So a bunch of grandees can sit round asking each other self-important questions and David Cameron can tell everyone how much better he would have handled things had he been in charge (not). Will it bring back anyone who died? No. Will ‘lessons be learned’? No. Will it reassure the public or make up for all the damage to the country, the economy and everyone’s sanity? No. Wouldn’t that money be better spent on something useful? Of course it would.
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