Sex, Lies and College Life: the Gender Madness Has Peaked

It was the absence of a small enamel badge that first alerted me to the shifting sands of gender ideology in my Sixth Form college, a unique petri dish environment, filled as it is with impressionable teenagers and staff who are desperate to be kind.

The badge had belonged to Kate, the English department’s young gun teacher, who two years ago signalled she had gone a bit gendery by telling us that for an ice-breaking activity she would be getting new students to declare their pronouns. Apart from the creak of my greying eyebrow, silence had erupted within the normally loquacious team, followed by a few sage nods as if this was an activity we’d all been doing for decades. Somebody will say something, I’d thought, even if it’s just a ‘That’s interesting. Tell us more.’ But nothing more was said.

Next, Kate – who in any age throughout history would be very recognisably a woman – began sporting the She/Her enamel badge on her lanyard. Foolishly, I’d taken the bait and asked as sensitively as I could why she was wearing it. “Because this is how I identify,” she said with the air of a Year 7 teacher explaining the facts of life to a curious student. “And it’s how I show support for our transgender kids.” I’d wanted to say something but bit my lip, partly because I was yet to develop a line of argument but also because she was looking at me in that way – you know the one – the razor-sharp stare of the self-righteous. I nodded, offered a thin smile and retreated. But last week, I noticed the badge had gone. Perhaps the fever has broken?

There are other clues that the tide is turning. Two years ago there was a noticeable increase in the number of teenagers, especially girls, who had seen the transition to Sixth Form college as an opportunity to also transition their gender, wearing a new skin as others might have displayed newly acquired Goth garb. Alices, Eves and Rebeccas on the register had become Noahs, Oskars and Zaks in the classroom and He and They in intra-college correspondence. Young women who in previous years would have been confident leaders of the college’s Gay and Lesbian Society were now occupying an unsettling liminal space, with many teachers and students keeping their distance, wary of upsetting them by asking inappropriate questions or God forbid, misgendering them and revealing their ‘transphobia’.

The continual fear of misgendering and causing upset haunted the college. For example, just before a Parents’ Evening I had received a hastily composed email from Jack’s tutor informing me that Jack is Eve at home and telling me to refer to her (or is it him?) as such when I meet the unsuspecting parents. In the minutes before the meeting I was declaiming, “Not Jack! Not Jack! Not Jack!” to an empty room, followed by “Eve. Eve. EVE!”, incanting like some deranged Wall-E, willing myself not to embarrass or hurt anyone. Heaven knows what the parents thought as they witnessed me refusing to make eye contact with their daughter Eve, my student Jack, and stumbling over second person pronouns in my desperation to avoid the ‘J Bomb’. This year, however, there’s not been a single name change (if you discount the girl who has sensibly eschewed her natal Madison in favour of the more exotic Lola). It’s not a scientific sample but it feels different. And better.

Infuriatingly, my colleagues were also part of the mass delusion, or were too afraid to declare the emperor had no clothes, as I discovered when I related the story of Eve/Jack to the invariably sardonic Helen the next morning at break. Like me, she is the parent of a teenager and I was convinced she’d share my feelings of absurdity but also horror at the institutionally sanctioned lying taking place, but her only response was, “It’s just being kind though, isn’t it?” The stinging slap delivered, I sat back in my chair, increasingly frustrated by my growing sense of isolation. I looked to confide in Sue, the department’s other ageing warhorse and stalwart of decades of feminist activism. Surely she felt equally uncomfortable with this madness? “It’s tricky,” she said and told me of the rows in her house when her drama college daughter returned and made clear her entire immersion in gender ideology. I’d perked up at the mention of rows, hoping that I’d finally found an ally. She continued, “But maybe just as my version of feminism overthrew the wave before it, so her generation is doing something similar, you know?” and shrugged. I wanted to blurt, “Yeah, but she’s a daft theatre kid. What do YOU think?” But I didn’t, picking up on the tacit agreement that this was a topic that had clearly become verboten to discuss openly as the department entered an ice age of self-censorship.

Recently, however, the ice has begun to thaw. There’s suddenly talk of unfairness in women’s sport, tentative discussions about transgender men in women’s toilets and a grudging admiration of the antichrist herself, J.K. Rowling. And tucked away in a dark drawer somewhere, a badge that is losing its lustre.

Dave Summers is a sixth form teacher and his name is a pseudonym.