Trans children more likely to be ‘white and privileged', says Katharine Birbalsingh
Katharine Birbalsingh, 52, also said that they are searching for 'victimhood narratives', which she claims are 'admired' in modern society.
The former government social mobility tsar, who is head teacher at the Michaela Community School in north west London, suggested she was 'unlikely' to have any transgender pupils because of the school's heavy ethnic minority intake.
'I think if one actually did a survey on this sort of thing nationally, I think you would find that white privileged kids would be more likely to be doing that,' she told The Standard. 'No question.
'Our society is such that victimhood is admired. And if you feel that you're white and privileged, then you don't have much of a victimhood narrative to embrace.
'So then you need to find something to embrace to be respected by your peers.'
Ms Birbalsingh said she did not expect to be welcoming a trans pupil soon because much of the Michaela intake is from the inner city. 'That plays a huge part,' she continued. 'I think they'd be less inclined.'
She added that she would want to support any child identifying as trans at the school and 'make sure they weren't just participating in a fad'.
The head teacher said her school discourages children from doing anything 'performative'.
'Of course there are obstacles – racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, all that exists clearly,' she added. 'But how you react to that obstacle is up to you. We reject victimhood and embrace agency and personal responsibility.'
157 children under 10 await gender care
New figures show 157 children awaiting gender care in England and Wales are aged 10 or under.
The data, obtained following the Supreme Court's ruling on the definition of a woman last month, also show there were 6,225 children on the national waiting list at the end of March – up from 5,560 at the same point a year earlier.
Although the court ruling does not directly affect pupils, as gender recognition certificates are only available to people aged 18 or over, experts have said it will have consequences for the school admission policies of single-sex schools.
The Telegraph has previously revealed that the NHS is treating nursery school-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance.
Ms Birbalsingh, who is known for her strict, uncompromising rule, said her school's values 'encourage the kids to seek the truth'. She has already banned phones entirely at Michaela and encourages parents not to buy them for under-16s at all.
In April last year, the High Court upheld her ban on Muslim prayers taking place during the learning day.
A pupil claimed the policy was discriminatory and infringed her right to religious freedom.
However, the court sided with Ms Birbalsingh who had argued the ban was vital to ensure 'children of all races and religions can thrive'.
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A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
