Parents of a 13-year-old girl have accused a school in the UK of “brainwashing” their daughter into believing she is transgender.
According to the Daily Mail, Ashleigh and Ged Barnett said the head of the LGBT group at Hoe Valley School in Woking, Surrey, conducted weekly one-to-one sessions with their daughter without their consent or knowledge.
Mrs Barnett said a teaching assistant at the school had also pointed their daughter to a YouTube channel of trans activists promoting irreversible transgender surgeries and encouraged the youngster to change in the boy’s cubical.
“The school didn’t think it was fit to tell us,” Mrs Barnett told the Daily Mail. “We are her parents, but responsibility to care for our child has been taken away. The attitude is that it’s the child’s choice and it’s got nothing to do with us.”
Mrs Barnett went on to say: “Children at 13 or 14, especially girls, are sometimes not happy in their own bodies — that’s what puberty does to you. They are very vulnerable. It only takes one person with an agenda to plant a little seed that they’re ‘in the wrong body.'”
The teen’s father suggested the mentoring sessions convinced the impressionable teen she was transgender, saying their daughter showed “no signs of gender dysphoria immediately prior to the ‘mentoring’, but presented with classic signs afterwards.”
Last year it was reported that the UK is seeing a record number of children under the age of 16 identifying as transgender.
According to the UK Deed Poll Service, in the past five years, there has been a surge of parents seeking to change their child’s title from Miss to Master and vice versa.
The rise in transgender children now averages at least one child making the switch every day.
Louise Bowers, a senior deed poll officer, told The Sun: “We used to issue a couple every couple of months — but now it’s seven to ten a week.”
According to Bowers, most of the kids are in their teens, aged either 14 or 15, however, some are as young as ten.
In 2017, The Telegraph revealed the number of children being referred to gender identity clinics had quadrupled in the five years prior to 2016. Overall, there was a staggering total of 2,016 referrals for children aged between 3 and 18. Over six times more than the 314 referrals just five years earlier.
The numbers were so high that in 2018, the UK’s Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt ordered an urgent investigation after it was revealed there had been a 4,415 per cent increase in the number of girls being referred for transitioning treatment.
One school in Brighton was reported to have up to 76 students between the ages of 11 and 16, who identify as transgender.
According to a survey conducted at Dorthy Stringer School, 40 of those children said they do not identify with their birth sex, while 36 claimed they were ‘gender fluid.’
“It’s become an industry,” said Chris McGovern, a former advisor to the Department of Education in the UK. “People are making a career out of encouraging children to question gender at an age when they need to be left to be children.”