SARAH VINE: Brave girls who stood up to woke teacher are heroines for their generation
There are times when I miss having small children instead of hulking young adults around the place: no empty beer bottles down the back of the sofa; no fag butts in my geraniums; no midnight McDonald's.
But honestly, the way things are going, who would be a parent of school-age children? It's an ideological minefield.
In particular, advocates of hardline trans ideology have infiltrated our education system. No one — parent or child — is safe from their self-righteous wrath.
Our schools — which should be open-minded forums for debate and ideas — have become echo-chambers for a narrow band of aggressive, intolerant militants who abuse their authority as teachers.
This week, a recording emerged that illustrated this sinister situation all too clearly. For once, I suppose, we must be grateful for the incursion of mobile phones into the classroom, for without it we would have no record of the incident.
It involves an exchange between a teacher at Rye College in East Sussex and two Year 8 pupils, both girls. It begins with the teacher chastising one of the pupils: 'How dare you? You just really upset someone.'
The girl responds: 'I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell.'
'You were questioning their identity,' the teacher replies. 'Where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders?'
'I just said my opinion,' the pupil replies. 'If I can respect their opinion, can't they respect mine?'
The teacher goes on to say it is 'not an opinion' and 'gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with; gender is about how you identify'.
Another girl then chimes in. 'If you have a vagina you're a girl and if you have a penis you're a boy — that's it,' she says, only to be told that her views are 'despicable'.
The teacher then calls them both homophobic and adds that 'if you don't like it you need to go to a different school', before informing them that she's going to report them.
The first girl defends herself by saying she was being respectful, but felt compelled to ask her classmate: 'How can you identify as a cat when you are a girl?'
Let's be honest, it's not an unreasonable question. And a clever teacher would have known how to handle it.
Instead, and presumably for want of any ability to rise to the intellectual challenge, this one decided to interpret it as transphobia.
It's never nice to be accused of bigotry — even more so when all you are doing is questioning someone's decision to pretend they're another species. And yet, throughout it all, the girls' tone is remarkably restrained and polite.
There are times when I miss having small children instead of hulking young adults around the place: no empty beer bottles down the back of the sofa; no fag butts in my geraniums; no midnight McDonald's.
But honestly, the way things are going, who would be a parent of school-age children? It's an ideological minefield.
In particular, advocates of hardline trans ideology have infiltrated our education system. No one — parent or child — is safe from their self-righteous wrath.
Our schools — which should be open-minded forums for debate and ideas — have become echo-chambers for a narrow band of aggressive, intolerant militants who abuse their authority as teachers.
This week, a recording emerged that illustrated this sinister situation all too clearly. For once, I suppose, we must be grateful for the incursion of mobile phones into the classroom, for without it we would have no record of the incident.
It involves an exchange between a teacher at Rye College in East Sussex and two Year 8 pupils, both girls. It begins with the teacher chastising one of the pupils: 'How dare you? You just really upset someone.'
The girl responds: 'I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell.'
'You were questioning their identity,' the teacher replies. 'Where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders?'
'I just said my opinion,' the pupil replies. 'If I can respect their opinion, can't they respect mine?'
The teacher goes on to say it is 'not an opinion' and 'gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with; gender is about how you identify'.
Another girl then chimes in. 'If you have a vagina you're a girl and if you have a penis you're a boy — that's it,' she says, only to be told that her views are 'despicable'.
The teacher then calls them both homophobic and adds that 'if you don't like it you need to go to a different school', before informing them that she's going to report them.
The first girl defends herself by saying she was being respectful, but felt compelled to ask her classmate: 'How can you identify as a cat when you are a girl?'
Let's be honest, it's not an unreasonable question. And a clever teacher would have known how to handle it.
Instead, and presumably for want of any ability to rise to the intellectual challenge, this one decided to interpret it as transphobia.
It's never nice to be accused of bigotry — even more so when all you are doing is questioning someone's decision to pretend they're another species. And yet, throughout it all, the girls' tone is remarkably restrained and polite.
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