SARAH VINE: Brave girls who stood up to woke teacher are heroines for their generation<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />But honestly, the way things are going, who would be a parent of school-age children? It's an ideological minefield.<br /><br />In particular, advocates of hardline trans ideology have infiltrated our education system. No one — parent or child — is safe from their self-righteous wrath.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.'<br /><br />The girl responds: 'I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell.'<br /><br />'You were questioning their identity,' the teacher replies. 'Where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders?'<br /><br />'I just said my opinion,' the pupil replies. 'If I can respect their opinion, can't they respect mine?'<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?'<br /><br />Let's be honest, it's not an unreasonable question. And a clever teacher would have known how to handle it.<br /><br />Instead, and presumably for want of any ability to rise to the intellectual challenge, this one decided to interpret it as transphobia.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />
