if you were born a boy or a girl, what are you now ...

There's some weird stuff happening in UK schools and the Daily Mail has got very overexcited about it. I know it's a long blog. You can skip to the last paragraph.

The link is at the bottom of the blog but because it's the Daily Mail, and wants to make you OUTRAGED, a bit of context first ...

There's an 8 year old boy who wants to be a girl. He wants it so badly that his parents are on board with it (man, I hope some serious counselling and thought has gone into this, but the Mail ain't saying) and he's going to be starting sex-change drugs now, before puberty. The school authorities know and are being fully supportive. They even had an organization called Mermaid come in to talk about it in general terms.

(Hang on, this is so common there's an organization?? oh yes. Government funded, AND a 500K lottery grant. Yeah, I was taken aback too )

The Mail angle is that the school vicar, while on board with the sex-change, has clashed with the school over one issue so badly that he's resigned. The kid's parents, and the school, want it to be as low-key and uncontroversial as possible. Victor (not his name) will, as Victoria, use the female loos and be called she, move along folks, nothing to see here.

The vicar wants all the other parents of all the other kids to be told. Well, we all know the average parent will be supportive, will tell their own kids to take it in their stride and not give it a second thought.

I can see both points of view but then that is my curse

Here's that link, prepare to be stirred to your boots, eh?

The Mail being the Mail strongly implies the school is doing it and the kid's own parents don't know. That is Fake News. Oh and turns out the drugs aren't changing his sex just delaying puberty. Well, that's the Daily Mail for you. Read by 23.5 million people every month, too.

Colour me puzzled that there are so many kids who, before puberty, are so convinced they are the wrong gender they know it is right to change. And is it right to change? What's so bad about spending childhood being androgynous, wearing jeans and t-shirts and not confronted with having to wear frills or have skinned knees ... I was a bit of a tomboy. In retrospect, man I would not be happy now to have been hurried along the road to make a decision to change to a boy. My younger brother, frankly, a bit of a sissy as a kid. Cried every time I knocked him over, that sort of thing. Ditto.



edited this blog to say I finally got round to looking at some statistics and turns out one baby in up to 2000 births is born with "atypical" genitalia. There's a comment on the 2nd page with more detail on that. That's a small percentage, sure, but in big populations a surprising number of people where the boy/girl line is definitely blurred.