Clarissa Farr, former headmistress of the private St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, said that schools were up against a ‘transtrender problem’ where students were identifying as transgender to be rebellious and cool.
Farr claimed that it had become trendy for some girls to say they are non-binary or trans. She insisted that the majority of the staff believed only a few pupils to have genuine gender identity concerns.
She told the Daily Mail: “This was something that became a thing very much towards the end of my time at St Paul’s. Some of the girls came to me and said they didn’t want to identify as girls, that they wanted to identify as non-binary. A couple of girls wanted to be known by a different name.”
In 2017, St Paul’s adopted a policy in which pupils were allowed to wear boys’ clothing and use boys’ names if they identified as such. However, Miss Farr, who is now an educational consultant, said that most teenagers would adhere to anything they saw as radical.
She told the Henley Literary Festival in Oxfordshire, “The important thing is to have open conversations – to show that you’re going to deal with them with respect and to distinguish those concerns which have longevity and some endurance where this is a genuine issue.”
The former headmistress clarified that while some girl students wanted to be called by different names, no one really asked to be referred to by different pronouns, such as ‘him’, ‘his’, and ‘he’.
