The parents of a 13 year-old girl who was branded “despicable” by her teacher after she rejected a classmate’s claim that she identified as a cat have told of their fury and how proud they are of her. The girl’s mother told the Mail.
I’m so proud of my daughter, she will always stand up for what she believes is right and this is all that she did.
She expressed a view that many, many of her classmates and their parents would share yet she was shouted down and bullied by someone in authority.
For that teacher to tell her to leave and go to another school if she didn’t like what she was being told made my blood boil. What kind of welcome is that for a 13 year-old girl.
My daughter texted me from her class last Friday and said that she was being taught gender identity and asked to fill out a worksheet. We’ve spoken about the issue before and she’s like me you can be whatever you want to be – but facts are facts.
I replied that she could walk out of the lesson if she didn’t feel what she was being taught was right.
She didn’t, however, and stayed in the classroom but her and her friend put their views across and clashed with another girl in the class who identifies as a cat
My daughter told the teacher that what they were learning was ridiculous and the girl identifying as a cat tried to argue that it wasn’t and that anyone could identify as anything.
As she said that my daughter replied “so If I identify as a kangaroo then I can say I’m a kangaroo?!” Some of the others in the class started laughing and the girl who thinks she’s a cat started crying.
My daughter and her friend were told to stay after the class and were given a warning to stop and toe the line. That’s when she started secretly recording the teacher.
I have to say that when my daughter came home from school and told me what happened. I didn’t believe her, I thought she was a typical teenage girl exaggerating.
But then she played me the recording and I was shocked and then horrified and then furious. I still get angry listening to it.
There are girls in her class and at the school who are trans and she has no problem with any of them, she calls them by their preferred pronouns and accepts them for who they are – but there are only two sexes. It’s just science, you are born male or female.
The fact that the school is shielding this young girl who identifies as a cat and reprimanding anyone who challenges that notion seems to me to be completely absurd.
Why on earth are 13-year-old kids being taught about gender identity anyway? They’re just children. It’s not right.
So many people agree with us on this but many are reluctant to put their heads above the parapet, so to speak, because they’ll be labelled a bigot, a TERF or a Tory. But this sort of stuff is messing with children’s heads.
The father added:
We’ve heard absolutely nothing from the school, nobody has called us at any point today or over the weekend, but it’s all over the news.
I think they’re just trying to sweep it under the rug to be honest and are burying their head in the sand because they’ve had such a negative response from people all over the country.
I thought the way my daughter handled it was very respectful but the teacher got very, very irate and just shut down the conversation.
So many other parents have got in touch to say that they agree with what our daughter said and congratulated her for sticking to her guns.
The Telegraph notes that the cat incident is far from one-off:
The incident at Rye College, first reported by the Daily Telegraph yesterday, was not a one-off. Inquiries by this newspaper have established that other children at other schools are also identifying as animals, and the responses of parents suggest that the schools in question are hopelessly out of their depth on the question of how to handle the pupils’ behaviour.
The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the South West is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon.
The Mail has more detail on the shocking sex education lesson plans being used in schools. And the Telegraph has an interview with Clare Page, the mother who is campaigning against ideological and harmful sex education in schools. She says she first got involved five years ago after her nine year-old came back from primary school saying she had been taught there are “many more than two genders” and that when referring to historical figures, she should use ‘they’, because “we don’t know for sure what their preferred pronouns are”. More recently, in 2021, Page discovered that her elder daughter, in secondary school, was being taught sex education by a charity that promotes fetishes, sex toys and introductory guides to “quick, rough, anonymous sex”. Yet all of Page’s attempts to see the lesson plan and materials have been blocked, including by the courts, on grounds of the commercial interests of the provider.
Page asked the school if she could see the lesson plan and materials, but was told that SSE wasn’t willing to share them.
When she called SSE directly, they disagreed about sharing the lesson and whether their teaching was impartial, but on “civil” terms, Page says.
She was then shocked to be told by the school’s head teacher that she had been accused of harassing the education provider, and there was nothing more the school could do for her.
Page escalated her complaint to the chief executive of the academy trust, who was able to show her the lesson slides on her laptop. Page says she saw the word “sex positivity” which she believed was enough for a formal complaint. She says she expected to receive a copy of the materials to proceed with her complaint. However, she was told repeatedly that it was secret copyright material which can’t be shown to the parents.
“Showing me the slides means I can’t complain about it, I can’t tell anyone, can’t prove I’ve seen it,” she says. “It sort of means nothing.”
Page then attempted to use freedom of information laws to obtain the lesson materials and lesson plan, but the school argued it would be a breach of a confidentiality agreement.
Her first attempt to have the decision overturned was rejected by the Information Commissioner’s Office. This month, it emerged that her appeal was rejected by a judge in a first-tier tribunal.
In both cases, it was ruled that the commercial interests of the sex education provider outweighed the public interest in widely releasing the materials.
Parents have lost power over what their children are taught, Page says.
“Schools and educational authorities want to shape society for the best in their view. I think they have taken too much power away from parents.”
It is no coincidence that widespread teaching of contested gender ideology in schools in recent years has coincided with a rise in the number of children questioning their gender, she believes. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t know of a family who has that [a child questioning their gender identity] going on.”
Page adds: “I’m sure there is a huge online social media effect.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Telegraph reports that Gillian Keegan has asked a Regional Schools Commissioner to investigate Rye College, the school at the centre of the ‘Cat-gate’ row.
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