How the childhood rite of imagining yourself as something else has become politicised - David Behrens

No-one knows this better than the students of Rye College, a state secondary school in West Sussex which is facing a “pupil safety investigation” after a teacher told a 13-year-old girl she was being “despicable” for not taking at face value her classmate’s wish to “identify as a cat”.

“How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” asked her friend, with piercing logic. Was she drinking her school milk from a saucer, she might have added, or being taken home in a basket? Perhaps she was cocking a snook at every passing human? She doesn’t seem very cat-like, if not.

The teacher, however, was less binary about it. “How dare you – you’ve just really upset someone,” she scolded the girl for having “questioned the identity” of her friend. The tone was clear: if anyone was behaving unacceptably it wasn’t the girl purring away on someone’s lap; it was her classmate for having the audacity to be sceptical.

This is not an isolated incident. At other schools there have been reports of teachers allowing children to identify as horses, dinosaurs and even moons. At one secondary establishment in Wales, a pupil is said to answer questions only in miaows.

Not many years ago, a teacher’s response would have been to make an intractable child write “I am not a cat” 100 times, scratched in claws on the blackboard if necessary. But suddenly the childhood rite of imagining yourself as someone or something else has become politicised. And whereas playing Let’s Pretend was essentially harmless, self-identification can get you cancelled.

The response of the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, has been to moot an inquiry. “Teachers should not be teaching contested ideology as fact. They must have due regard to safeguarding if a pupil identifies as an animal,” she has reportedly said.

But safeguarding whom and from what? Suppose someone else in the class identifies as a mouse and they start going at each other like Tom and Jerry? Are the teachers supposed to put them in cages?

And what happens if someone starts tossing guitars out of the music room window because they have self-identified as Pete Townshend from The Who? Would it be vandalism or legitimate self-expression?

The “contested ideology” to which Ms Keegan referred was the Rye College teacher’s assertion, captured in a tape recording, that “gender is not linked to the parts you were born with [but] about how you identify”. She went on to say there were “three biological sexes” and “lots of genders” including no gender at all.

That’s as may be, but feline does not fall into any of those categories, any more than bovine, canine or equine. Children know this very well; it’s adults who can’t seem to tell the difference between a little girl’s fantasy of being a pony and her right to actually be one.

Kids are also good at stringing grown-ups along when it suits them. Are all those day-dreamers truly serious about their preferred role in the universe or are they just pushing the envelope as far as they can before someone sends them to bed without so much as a tin of Whiskas for dinner?

For some, the wish to be someone else will be a symptom of an unhappy home life. Hiding behind a mask may be their way of blotting out their real life. Those children deserve practical help, not blind indulgence.

But listening to the recording from Rye College, what strikes you is how readily a constructive debate can be shut down the moment it veers into controversy. “You can be who you want to be; how you identify is up to you,” says the teacher. “If you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”. In this classroom there is no respect shown for those – and they appear to be in the majority – who express the view that there are two genders and neither of them has four paws and a tail. Those pupils are dismissed as objectively wrong and will have gone away feeling they are outside the ring of protection thrown around anyone who wishes to be different. How is that inclusive?

In this context, the Education Secretary has no choice but to seek an inquiry. The conclusion, however, is already self-evident: children can be excused for sometimes confusing fantasy with reality; their teachers ought to know the difference.