The Myth of the Racist, Transphobic Toddlers

This began some years ago in the United States. Unfortunately, it seems the insanity is now spreading to the United Kingdom. It's all bollocks!

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

Hypersensitive teachers are treating playground insults and innocent misunderstandings as evidence of serious bigotry.

Are British schools experiencing an epidemic of racism? Are classrooms filled with little budding neo-Nazis? Are four-year-olds unleashing a regime of bigoted terror upon their non-white classmates? 

Not quite. Although, this is what the statistics would have you believe. According to official figures, the number of children being sent home from school for racism has more than doubled in the last three years. In 2021, there were 7,400 suspensions for racist behaviour. In 2024, there were over 15,000. Nearly 2,500 of those cases took place within primary schools, where children are no older than 11. Some reports even involve pupils from reception, where children are aged just four or five. 

Four-year-olds are doing well for their age if they’re able to colour inside the lines or use child-safe scissors. They’re not exactly poring over Mein Kampf and measuring skulls. Even if children do use inappropriate language, like slurs or race-based insults, they don’t have the capacity to truly understand the meanings behind them. 

There are no doubt cases in which children were deservedly sent home for genuine hateful and threatening behaviour towards their classmates. But have those instances really more than doubled lately? And are so many of them really aged 11 and under? It’s far more likely that hypersensitive teachers and the ever-expanding definition of ‘racism’ are to blame. 

Practically everything can be classified as racism these days, from asking someone where they’re from to mispronouncing names. So it’s no wonder kids—who are just starting to learn about the differences between themselves and their friends and how to navigate them—are getting caught in the crossfire of this. This becomes clear when looking at some of the previous cases of supposed racism in schools. In 2021, the Daily Mail reported that incidents logged in primary schools have included a five-year-old remarking that a classmate’s hair looked “different” and another child describing someone’s skin as being the colour of “chocolate.” An education expert and former headteacher told the Mail that most of these instances are recorded to cover the school’s back, despite being completely benign. Ironically, the result of this is unlikely to be happier and more tolerant children. Rather, many of them will become too afraid of getting into trouble to make friendships across racial and ethnic lines. 

If your child isn’t racist, he might well be transphobic. In March this year, data from the Department for Education revealed that a three- or four-year-old child had been kicked out of nursery school for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity.” This toddler wasn’t the only one. Those same statistics showed that 94 primary-school pupils had either been suspended or expelled from schools in the 2022-23 academic year for the same reason—they were apparently homophobic or transphobic. Again, because these are primary school kids, the oldest any of them could have been was 11. 

A four-year-old is barely going to be able to get his head around the concept of race, let alone sexuality or gender identity. The idea that some children are being punished for not understanding the complexities of these very adult ideas is outrageous.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, children caught engaging in thought crimes can even find themselves in trouble with the law. A report by The Times revealed last year that police had been recording Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI) against kids. In one instance, a nine-year-old child was placed on the NCHI database for calling a classmate a “retard.” Two secondary-school girls were accused of hate non-crimes for saying that another pupil smelled “like fish.” 

NCHIs, as the name suggests, aren’t treated like actual crimes—so, thankfully, no children are being arrested for low-level bullying and playground taunts. They are supposed to be an indication of behaviour that may escalate into actual crimes later on. But having one recorded against you does mean that your name will show up in some enhanced background checks. Most of the time, a ‘perpetrator’ won’t even realise he has committed a NCHI. These children’s names may well sit on that database for years, without them knowing, until it comes back to potentially ruin their career prospects. 

There is something deeply wrong about treating kids like tiny hate criminals for behaviour that could and should be easily dealt with by a stern talking-to. It’s especially ridiculous that even young children are being punished for not parroting ideologies they cannot possibly understand yet. Within reason, kids don’t mean a lot of what they say. They often don’t mean any malice by it. When a five-year-old says a classmate’s hair looks “different,” or a nine-year-old says “you’re a Turkey from Turkey,” they’re almost never doing it out of hate or prejudice. They are simply figuring out what words mean, how they relate to the world around them, and how other people respond to what they say. This is a normal and unavoidable part of growing up. 

As it is, British schoolchildren have to wade through a swamp of woke indoctrination to get a scrap of decent education. Pupils are taught all manner of nonsense, ranging from the claim that black people built Stonehenge, to the idea that Britain was a “black country” before white people arrived, to the blatant lie that St. Hadrian of Canterbury—a 7th-century abbot from North Africa—was black. Until recently, they were also given wildly inappropriate sex-education lessons, including being taught gender identity as fact. Some kids were even told that there were as many as 73 genders by a drag queen. 

None of this makes kids kinder, smarter, or more tolerant. Cramming their heads full of ideological drivel and threatening to brand them as racist or transphobic if they disagree is indoctrination, not education. This obsession with creating an army of mini activists is going to produce a generation that is undersocialised and incapable of thinking critically. Kids deserve better than to be used as footsoldiers in the Culture War.