Summarised by Centrist
A sixth form teacher writing under a pseudonym says gender ideology has quietly peaked inside his college, describing a sudden cooling of the pronoun and identity craze that swept through staff and students over the past few years.
Dave Summers recalls the moment he first sensed a shift. A young English teacher who once insisted new students declare pronouns and wore a “She Her” enamel badge has quietly stopped displaying it. Summers writes that the staff room froze when pronoun declarations were first proposed, yet no one dared question it. The badge’s disappearance feels symbolic to him, a sign that “maybe the fever has broken”.
He describes what he saw at the height of the trend. Numbers of teenage girls adopting male or neutral identities surged. “Alices, Eves and Rebeccas on the register had become Noahs, Oskars and Zaks,” he writes, and the atmosphere became tense as staff feared accidental misgendering.
Summers argues that teachers, too, were swept along by a culture of silence. When he raised concerns with colleagues, he found only reluctance or resignation.
One colleague brushed it off as “just being kind”. Another suggested each generation overturns the last, even if the results seemed absurd.
But this year, he says, everything feels different. He notes no new social-transition name changes, emerging discussions about fairness in women’s sport and safety in women’s toilets, and what he calls a “grudging admiration” for J. K. Rowling among staff who once avoided the topic entirely.
Summers believes the self-censorship is thawing and that teachers are beginning to admit the obvious.
“Somewhere, a badge is losing its lustre,” he writes, suggesting the cultural moment may have finally reached its peak and begun to recede.
