April 25, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this week, the Daily Mail published a nauseating and stunning op-ed by a mother who is speaking out about what is going on at schools in the United Kingdom. Suzanne Glover, which is a pseudonym for safety reasons due to the level of harassment faced by mothers who dare to speak out against the transgender trend, noted just how much things have changed since back when she was in school. No longer are the conversations with her 13-year-old daughter Bella (also a pseudonym) about school sports, studies, and social life. Now, says Glover, tales from school generally involve “dizzying stories of gender fluidity and sexual politics”:
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.
Remember: Bella is only thirteen. Glover makes clear that if her daughter came out as gay, she would be fine with that. On the other hand, she writes, the number of children who are now claiming sexual minority status and the ages of those children deeply concern her and many other parents:
Over the past year, Bella has totted it up and she and her friends estimate that around 12 per cent — one in eight — of her year group have already come out as gay, bisexual or transgender. Other parents I talk to at similar girls selective schools near us in the Home Counties cite similar percentages.
And it’s not just single-sex schools. In council figures released last November, Dorothy Stringer, a High School in Brighton, was revealed to have 40 children who didn’t identify with the sex they were at birth, with another 36 out of 1,600 children saying they were gender fluid…According to the Government’s latest Sexual Identity Census figures — which are gathered anonymously — 1.6 per cent of adult women in the UK identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Although it is not tracked, it is estimated that the number of transgender people lies somewhere between 0.2 per cent and 1 per cent.
That being said, Glover writes, there is a “big gap” between those statistics and what is unfolding in schools — especially among girls. In fact, her daughter was given almost no information in her classes on how to “have a heterosexual relationship,” yet she’d already been “given a seminar on gender and sexual preferences led by five of the school’s transsexual, non-binary (not identifying as male or female) and gay sixth-formers.” This included presentations on the definitions of a wide range of words, from “transgender” to “asexual.” Being normal, however, is presented as just another of a buffet of options, despite official statistics indicating that only a tiny fraction of the population identifies as LGBTQ:
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 many students are apparently beginning to feel this way. Students were asked to raise their hands if they found the presentations “useful and enjoyable,” and Bella told her mother she felt she had to put her hand up to avoid being accused of transphobia, despite the fact that she didn’t know if she was comfortable with it. Bella and many other students now try their best to avoid talking about gender or sexuality completely, because they have seen students who dare ask questions get aggressively confronted by other girls. Forgetting to use transgender or non-binary pronouns such as “he” or “they” when talking to students, Bella says, can get you immediately “snapped at” by other students.
Something, writes Glover, is obviously going on here, and noted that a recent (and much maligned) study may explain why rates of transgender teens have been skyrocketing:
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. Parents told the study how their trans children derided straight children, whom they viewed as ‘dumb and boring’, and were ‘disparaging’ about ‘heterosexuality, marriage and nuclear families’. Bella says she knows the feeling: ‘When I talk about liking boys to some girls in my year I am treated as if I am stupid and I don’t get it. ‘It’s like if you are straight and like the opposite sex, you can’t be a deep or evolved person.’
In short, children are being poisoned by these ideologies, and it is having a profound effect on how they see the world. In fact, the hyper-sexualization of everything — many students suspect that simply liking someone means they must be gay, lesbian, or sexually interested in that person — is destroying childhood friendships:
There’s also the devastating effect this is having on girls’ friendships…A thoroughly confused Bella wonders whether some of her classmates don’t just like her. She has to consider whether they fancy her, too. As a mother, I chose to send her to a single-sex school so she didn’t have to be saddled with these sorts of concerns. Indeed, Bella showed me a text exchange in which a female friend had asked her if she had ever kissed anyone. When Bella said no, she replied: ‘Want to try it with me?’
Because Bella and her own best friend are inseparable, Bella said she has also had to counter rumours they are gay — not that she has anything against being gay, she just isn’t. My daughter believes that there’s definitely an element of the gender and sexual fluidity movement at her school that is for show. ‘The gay couples in my year don’t even seem to talk much at school,’ she tells me. ‘They mainly have their relationships on social media. They seem to like very intense relationships — with a lot of drama and breaking up and getting back to together — and they sometimes post pictures of them kissing.’
Another mother told me of similar scenarios at her own 13-year-old daughter’s school: ‘My daughter Macie’s school pushes a very sexualised agenda, and this seems to result in very young girls — age 11 to 13 — seeing the world, including female friendships, in a sexual way. One girl said she thought Macie and her friend were “dating” because they’d held hands while running for a bus. Although pressure groups which push this agenda say parents are part of the problem and denying their children a chance to be themselves, I say they are just children, and people change a great deal between childhood and adulthood.’
A thirteen-year-old girl is coming home from school and telling her mother that she is worried that she is “boring” because she is a girl who does not think she is a boy and does not think she is gay. Her mother, it must be emphasized, would not even care much if her daughter did identify as gay, but she finds the hyper-sexualized atmosphere, the promotion of transgenderism and sexual ideologies to young children, and the resulting misery this is causing students, to be enormously problematic.
These confused children, it must be said, are the upcoming generation. That should genuinely terrify us.
