Crossdressing 7 year old at gay bar

Guest post from a teacher who now questions his decision to set up an LGBT club at his school. I also do not want the school I worked in or the children I looked after to be identified for obvious reasons. I have decided to write this because I feel it incumbent on me to describe my own experiences as a teacher of gender dysphoric teenagers.

I refer to myself as same-sex attracted, rather than gay, in order to be specific about what this particular aspect of my identity means. Before I reflect on my experiences creating and gay an LGBT club at school, I want first of all to say that most teachers are out of their depth in this area specifically, and mental health generally.

The main concern for teachers is and should be teaching kids a particular subject, be it history, art or physics. Their job is not and should not be counselling them through mental health crises. However any good teacher will unavoidably find themselves dealing with a teenager who is struggling with their mental health.

Given we became and remain teachers because on crossdressing level we like kids, this can be a challenge. Old have no proper training, and yet we are confronted with unstable, hormonal teenagers, who often have no hope of seeing trained professionals for months, if not years. This is the context teachers and schools are currently in, and this is the context in which an LGBT club should be considered.

I believe that many of the teachers who are facilitating these groups are likely of a similar age to me, and therefore experienced the year challenges I faced growing up as a non gender-conforming same-sex attracted kid in the s and early s. Their decision to set up and run these groups is therefore well-intentioned, but, I now believe, a misreading of what it is the teenagers who attend them need.

I also strongly suspect that most teachers, myself included until recently, have little understanding of the path on which gender dysphoric children are now set by social media influencers and their peers. I meant well. However I now realise that I was projecting my own experiences of being a bullied same-sex attracted teenager growing up in the early s onto a group of teenagers who exist in a fundamentally transformed world.

So this is what I thought the teenagers in my care needed, and this is why I decided to set up the group. All of us are now constantly bombarded with images of gym-obsessed men and hyper-sexualised women. For same-sex attracted men and women, who are often non gender-conforming, these pressures are felt all the more intensely.

If we as adults find it hard, imagine what this is doing to children, at the confusing age when puberty is hitting and sexual desire starts to develop. To teenagers today, to be their truest happiest selves they are told they need to identify the correct label that best matches how they feel, and then act to bring their bodies in line with this label.

For a mentally stable adult, let alone a troubled teenager, this is all but impossible and potentially extremely dangerous. Instead I meant that she was simply herself: the unique, complex, beautiful, messy, bar mind that each human being is. This is the process that teenage transition represents: rapidly shifting from one poorly defined label or identity to another, eventually leading to major and potentially irreversible bodily modifications within only a few years.

Over the next 18 months, I witnessed this 13 year-old girl go through a painful, confusing and largely unsuccessful process of identity and label hopping.

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I affirmed this process the whole time, something which I now deeply regret. I am writing this in the hope that an adult still in her life might read this and tell her that she is fine as she is, that breast binders and hormones are not necessary and that someday she will come to see her body as something to be respected and loved, not something to be afraid of and hated.

When I grew up, the Internet was still in its infancy. Mobile phones were only capable of making and receiving calls and clunky text messages.