A 13-year-old girl was called “despicable” by her teacher at a Church of England school in the United Kingdom on Friday after asking a classmate how she identifies as a cat.
The schoolgirl and her friend were reprimanded by their teacher at Rye College in East Sussex at the end of an eighth-grade “life education” class, where they were told that they could “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you,” The Telegraph reported.
Following the lesson one of the students asked a classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”
The teacher told the students they were being reported to school administrators and would no longer be welcome at the school if they continued to express the view that only boys and girls exist, according to a recording of the exchange.
In the clip, taken by one of the students, the teacher starts off by saying, “How dare you, you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity,” according to The Telegraph.
The student replies: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”
The teacher then asks the young girls where they got the idea that there are only two genders.
“Gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson,” the teacher said.
The teacher added: “There is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is a gender who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all.”
The students disagreed, telling the teacher, “if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy.”
The teacher then interjected, raising their voice to say that while the students may consider being cisgender the “norm” it is not the law.
“You are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with. That’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”
The teacher then suggested that the girls were homophobic or confused – claims they quickly denied.
“If you don’t like it you need to go to a different school,” the teacher replied, adding that she was going to report the students.
