Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Beck's avatar

How wonderful is Charlie! Maybe he could have a weekly column on topical cutural issues rather than some dork with the maturity and insight of a 12 year old. Being threatened by people who are different from you and feeling a need to comment, judge and ridicule this to prove how wrong their difference is, is immature and sad. For your job to be lecturing students on journalism and yet demonstrating no respect for the process of research or consideration for the value in open mindedness and continuous learning is fucking appalling.

Expand full comment
Nick Wilson's avatar

I consider myself very lucky to teach at a high school that has a relatively large community of openly trans students, and as of this year, a trans staff member. In addition to an established culture of acceptance of a identities, I think this is in large part due to our excellent counselling and student support services. As you observe in this blog, trans students are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer from psychological distress, so having these networks available around the clock is key.

We're also a school that doesn't have a uniform which removes another obstacle that trans students face in more traditional schools.

I've been incredibly impressed at how accepting gen z are of the trans community; in fact the only person I've known who refused to acknowledge a trans student's identity is an ex staff member. This didn't cause the sort of indignant outage from the student that TERFs would have you believe occurs. But I did see the quiet hurt it produced in the student from a teacher who continued to refer to them by their deadname.

Interestingly, a conversation came up the other day with students around the argument that schools are "force feeding a trans agenda" to young people. My students had been critically reading through the New Conservatives website (independently, be I should add; I certainly didn't ask them to go anywhere near that mess!) and found this contention very confusing. I asked the (cis male) students if they felt they had been forced some 'trans narrative' by schools. Not only did they disagree, they felt it hadn't gone far enough.

Expand full comment
40 more comments...

No posts