At an academy school in the UK in the 21^st century

They have anti-bullying toilets – wide halls opening onto the main corridor with toilet cubicles down each side and rows of dirty sinks back-to-back in the centre. Originally, they were boys-side and girls-side – so that if you, for example, needed to rinse something in the basin, you’d be doing so face-to-face with boys at the sinks on the other side. From there, it was a small step to getting out of ‘the trans issue’ by just calling them all everyone’s loos.

There’s a girl lingering on the edge of what were the girls-side toilets. The kids still do their best to keep to their own side, but all the cubicles on this side are occupied. The head teacher sails down the corridor, squawking as she passes, “what are you waiting for – use the other side. They’re for all sexes now.”

The girls looks mutinous.

I don’t think I ever had the misfortune to be squawked at by the head in a public corridor, but I know what it would have done to my blood pressure, especially if I was already having embarrassing difficulties.

What would you do, if you were me? You’re a mere visitor to the school.  Are you seeing a stroppy teenager malingering, or are you seeing a young girl being publicly traumatised? Your decision probably depends on what sort of a day you’re having. Vast amounts of trauma goes unnoticed daily by nice people in schools. And work places. And in government.

I feel weary and traumatized and I’m not even being bombed.

Bombs

There are millions of people all over the world who are angry and miserable because for the last year, they’ve been hitting their heads on a brick wall trying to get their governments to play their part in stopping the arms industry’s carnage, clearly in evidence in various world hotspots but currently focussed on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebannon.

There are people who still hold Israel in their hearts as a dream refuge for Jews. They are traumatised by its degradation, whether they see it as a fault in Israel or a fault in the world’s attitude to Israel. (The latter view demonstrated this week by Howard Jacobson, who was given space in the Sundays to complain that reporting on dead children in Gaza is antisemitic).

There are people who don’t know either of those narratives, people who just guess what’s happening based on what they see on mainstream TV and in newspapers. They can’t possibly understand the situation, because there are D-notices out telling reporters not to discuss UK involvement in the carnage. The people who rely on those reporters are simply traumatized because “The Middle East” appears to be on the verge of starting world war three, for reasons that are completely beyond them.

The latter two groups apparently don’t have any headspace to imagine the trauma of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza, being bombed, shot at and starved.

They may or may not have noticed their kids being traumatized at school.

Poverty

Unless you’re a millionaire, you are either in poverty or you can see it coming – if not for you, then for your children or grandchildren. We in the UK are going through all the trauma of seeing politicians who won’t try to stop the bombs, whilst we are being steadily impoverished by the corporate thieves our government refuses to rein in, whilst we are steadily discovering that our health and social welfare services are no longer there for us.

I don’t know how many people really believe that Wes Streeting’s plans for further NHS privatisation and Rachel Reeves’ attempts to channel Thatcher are going to solve any of this but even if they do, they must be a bit worried that our new Prime Minster is responding to this ‘financial black hole’ they say they’ve discovered by taking every opportunity to get expensive presents.

Toilets

And in the middle of all that, I find a throwback male on my Facebook page who has worked in ‘hundreds’ of schools, and hasn’t seen any evidence of schools getting rid of single-sex toilets, and can’t see how girls’ needs being denied relates to the ‘trans’ issue.

Well I suppose it depends where you live – some areas fell for the Stonewall/Pride/Mermaids campaigns more than others but the best response I’ve seen from a school in my town (pathetic, but the best I’ve seen) is an academy that had six-foot high Pride banners in its front atrium and a set of mixed sex staff and visitors’ toilets front-of-house where visitors and inspectors couldn’t miss them, and kept its single-sex loos and changing rooms everywhere else.

Most academy schools are loud and frenetic places. There is no peace and no privacy for anyone, anywhere. It’s a particularly distressing environment for girls learning how to cope with periods, among other things. ‘I haven’t heard any girls complain’ said the commenter on my page. Well no, kids don’t have a long history. You don’t complain much about the loss of what you don’t know ever existed. There are even women who say ‘oh well, the end of privacy in loos solved the bullying problem’. It did not, it moved the bullying problem and if you doubt that single-sex spaces were ever a necessary refuge, consider the phrase ‘I found her crying in the loos’. I bet you’ve heard it, unless you’re a really heedless male. Why did girls retreat to the loos? Because a big part of getting over a trauma is getting out of the male gaze. Even if they hadn’t considered the problem enough yet to know that’s what they were doing. It’s why girls rarely tell male staff even the problems they can articulate.

First world and third world problems

I remember us (women) laughing about the charity organisations that got lost in all this, and were busy converting their own office toilets into mixed sex spaces at the same time as campaigning for single-sex loos for third world women – they even had literature explaining why it mattered. That’s how blind most of the world is to feminism.

That’s why most people didn’t hesitate to castigate women’s groups that were slow to join the campaigns against the genocide in Gaza. It was only the more insightful women’s groups that were given pause by the knowledge that on the one hand, there is a cohort of women in the UK who still rely on the Israel dream for their security, and on the other, that all the women in Israel are amongst those who need rescuing. There’s no way a responsible women’s organization could take a firm stand on the genocide issue until they’d sorted out the clashes it was going to generate in their own ranks.

Yes, a whole country can be traumatized – recent visitors to Israel often comment on the aggression and extreme sexism that’s evident everywhere in Israeli society. That’s what highly militarized, propagandized countries are like. Israel is a cruel problem to its own people, as well as all its neighbours.

What do men do, when they feel the world disapproving of them? They attack their women, that’s what they do. Yeah, yeah, not all men – just enough to create a society-wide, silent trauma.

And on a lesser scale, this is what our schools are like.

And that’s why all those ghastly, anti-trans women’s groups campaign to keep single sex spaces, but take their time thinking about how to address global-scale traumatizing stories.

And that’s why groovy progressives who think they are ‘the left’ still support ‘sex work’ and ‘surrogacy’ and ‘trans rights’ and then confidently claim to be feminist and anti-violence.

Trauma on trauma

I suppose Kier Starmer and his henchmen do know how much they are hated but I doubt they really know why. How many people put their hopes in Jeremy Corbyn to put an end to all those traumas, just to see the bastards who would not let go of Party administration steadily destroy the movement in the Party? HOPE read the back-drop banner, in the year we were ascendant in the party – a hope for millions in the UK, for an end to lying, thieving, weapons-dealing war-mongering, austerity-creating politics.

For me, the very worst line in the evidence those famously leaked reports gave against the Labour Party Holdfasts was that bit where someone messaged a staffers’ whatsapp group and said she’d found Diane Abbott crying in the loos in a pub – and set a journalist on her.

The ultimate betrayal of the social codes we used to have to protect ourselves, and the worst example I’ve seen of the dysfunctional behaviour that led so many schools to install those ‘anti-bullying’ loos where no-one got any privacy at all.

They called it problem solved. I call it problem moved.

And there are still some people who wonder why we have so many ‘school refusers’ and home-edders.

Israelis don’t know what it’s like to live in a society that’s not aggressive and delusional. Our kids don’t know what it’s like to be in a school that isn’t. There aren’t many people who understand both those things. That’s why J K Rowling could post a comment like this, but still go around not knowing why Corbyn was important, and thinking that the Palestine campaigners in the Labour Party were antisemitic.

Trauma blinds people

There are teachers who tut at the rise in school-refusers and home-edders, and still don’t know that school traumatizes a large proportion of our kids.

There are Jewish people in the UK who still don’t know that Palestinians have been murdered on a grand scale by an illegal occupier for decades.

There are people clinging by their fingernails to a middle-class standard of life who still don’t know how comprehensively they’re being robbed.

There are ‘socialists’ in the Labour Party who still don’t know their beloved organisation is a sexist, racist, undemocratic bullyfest.

There are ‘socialists’ to the left of the Labour Party who still don’t know that the sex industry systematically traffics and kills women and girls, and blinds them to all the other forms of sexism they’re surrounded by.

There are ‘feminists’ and other VAWG campaigners who still don’t know that women’s spaces, services, politics and sports have been invaded by males on a grand scale, and that this is traumatizing many women and girls.

There are career politicians who still don’t know that they’re working for a government that’s run largely by and for the arms industry.

It’s horrible, spending a whole day in political discussion with women who are carefully not mentioning Palestine.

It’s horrible, spending a whole day in political discussion with ‘lefties’ who are carefully not mentioning racism and sexism in their organizations, but surely, surely it’s not hard to understand that not a single one of us in the UK is as traumatized as any woman trying to care for her kids in Gaza just now.

Sometimes, I lie awake worrying that there might be a huge and vital issue that I haven’t even noticed, whilst I’m so taken up with being traumatized by the silences in debates that all those traumatized people conjure.

********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

Click here to donate

Cheers,

Kay

********************