Teen Girl Picked on for NOT Being Gay or Trans

Most kids come home from school and chat with their parents about what happened during their day:  this may include lunchroom drama, friend issues, romantic disappointments and adventures.  But these days, parenting is not for the faint of heart.

Suzanne Glover wrote an article for the Daily Mailthat explains what her 13 year old daughter tells her after she gets picked up from school…. And it’s quite different from the playground antics of days-gone-by:

There’s the on-going saga of Bella’s friend Jessica, who came out last year after she started dating Alexandra in another Year 9 class.

Only Alexandra has since decided she’s now transgender and is living as a boy called Alex — who must only be referred to as ‘he’ — despite being a pupil at an all-girls school.

There were huge dramas when another classmate, Rebecca, confessed to Laura, who is in her maths set, that she was sexually attracted to her. 

Laura, who used to present as a boy, angrily rejected her, saying she had jumped to the wrong conclusions, leaving Rebecca in tears. However, Laura has since decided she is gay after all, and the pair are now dating.

Got that?   Me either. But it makes the drama I used to deal with pale in comparison.

Glover’s daughter believes that she is “less than” because she doesn’t belong to one of the popular identity groups of the day.  Her school spends so much time making sure that “sexual minorities” are not discriminated against that her daughter feels comparatively boring.

Bella has had precious little information in her PSHE lessons on how to have a heterosexual relationship, yet at the start of this term she was given a seminar on gender and sexual preference led by five of the school’s transsexual, non-binary (not identifying as male or female) and gay sixth-formers.

Bella described walking into the hall and being shown a powerpoint presentation on the meaning of a selection of words, ranging from ‘transgender’ to ‘asexual’.

One word whose meaning Bella did not yet know the meaning of was ‘cisgender.’ The word, which is being heard more and more, is defined as ‘people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth’.

In other words, Bella has been told she now has a label for being born a girl and wanting to stay one. Baffled, she told me after school: ‘I am a girl. I like being a girl. Until now, it didn’t occur to me that I needed to justify it.’

But that’s because this kid is exhibiting more common sense than the adults who run her school.  She shouldn’t have to defend herself (or her traditional romantic impulses), but welcome to 2019.

The student also said she feared expressing her true beliefs for fear of being called transphobic.  She’s not, by the way.  But increasingly her school is hostile toward people who used to be called, simply, “normal.”  Yes, I’m fully aware that “normal” is not the politically correct adjective in this space, but – after looking at the statistics – it is obvious that LGBTQ and trans people are not in the majority of the public at large.  However, in these school settings, where these issues are glamorized, more and more kids are experiencing gender dysphoria:

Public health researcher Lisa Littman, of Brown University in the U.S., found that ‘social contagion’ might be a factor, while it was also noted that girls were more likely to have rapid onset gender dysphoria if they knew someone else who did.

When they came out as transgender, parents also said they noticed their children became more popular, gained more social media followers and were praised more. One parent reported: ‘Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens.’

The flipside however is that ‘cisgender’ has become a term of abuse against straight teens.

Good grief!  What is society becoming?  

This is what happens when a culture decides to sexualize children and mainstream mental illness.  

The consequences are devastating.  Not just for those awkward after-school conversations. But for years to come.

Hat Tip: Daily Mail

Image Credit: Pexels