Skirting The Issues

Gymslip hysteria shows the age of satire is dead  

By Daily Mail Comment. Last updated at 12:39 AM on 23rd February 2010. 

Defying parody, a £70million-a-year quango warns schools it may be unlawful for them to require girls to wear skirts.
And why? Because ... wait for it ... under Harriet Harman's Equality Bill, compulsory 'gender-specific' uniform may breach the rights of transsexual pupils!
Schools that force girls to wear skirts may be breaching the rights of girls who feel compelled to live as boys, according to a quango
It is still unclear how much time and public money the Equality and Human Rights Commission has lavished on its 68-page report. All that's certain is that this lunacy proves, yet again, the age of satire is dead.

As a former pupil of Grotbag Comprehensive, now demolished with the playing fields sold and rebuilt as the Macky D Academy High, managed by EduCorp. the whole hysteria whipped up by some newspapers over the mythical banning of schoolgirls wearing skirts rather bemuses me.

In my memory, with the rare exception, often by wearing a skirt so short (although incredibly long by some some trannies standards) they ended being being sent home. Which is what they wanted. Many years later there's a future partner who excitedly suggests they put on their old uniform for a bit of fun only to be disappointed when she appears in a pair of trousers, an old blouse with a frayed cardie.

But apparently there are schools where skirts are worn and in the current guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission to public bodies regarding trans users one part politely suggests transgendered boys should be allowed to wear trousers and that it may be unlawful if they don't. All perfectly fair and right one might think given the great discomfort and distress a trans boy may feel if no allowance was made. Suddenly it gets blown up to be a blanket ban on school girls wearing skirts.

(Though personally this blogger feels it to be a highly retrograde step that in the second decade of the 21st century there could be schools which only permit girls to wear skirts in this country. That along with my views on gender identity will probably be dismissed as "ultra-feminist drivel" undermining "traditional British values". I'm not sure what's meant by the latter comment presumably in "Mail world" that's going back to sending unmarried mothers to mental institutions and hideously racist comments are just a bit of banter).

Total bollocks of course, but you suspect they don't really care about the truth when there's newspapers to fill and a daily quote of things to hate to be met, especially if it allows them to bash their traditional targets. Which is that hideous notion of basic transgender rights. As it rumbled on the commenter's, especially the male ones, a little hot under the collar. Many trans children have a hard enough time as it is with bullying and some driven to suicide without attacks like this and the suggestion you are not trans or in a minuscule group that its not worth bothering with. The numbers one suspects are under-reported, some parents, often well meaning, try to deal with it privately or the child learns to hide it.

Its not the only recent example of a document being so distorted it bears no recognition to the original. Claims of secret plots appear regularly along with phrases like PC gone mad and lunacy. Often after someone's done some digging the truth is rather more prosaic with things done for very good reasons. Which shows despite claims to the contrary shows that you can make it up.