'I tried to help students - only for them to turn on me when I failed to ... trends now

One chilly Monday morning I spotted, among the throng of pupils flooding into the playground, one of our male students standing alone, wearing a skirt.

This quiet, gentle teenager had few friends and was known to teachers at the secondary school where I taught because he had been suffering from anorexia.

I remember looking at this painfully thin, awkward 14-year-old in his ill-fitting school skirt and thinking: 'You're not a girl.'

Was it not more likely he was just a camp, insecure boy in a rough state school who somehow found it easier to dress as a girl rather than simply admit he was gay?

The truth is that it struck a chord with me. I could sympathise because I had been where he was — a gay boy attending a single-sex school — back in the late 1990s. I know the pain, misery and isolation that came with it.

This was the moment I realised how troubling the trans mania sweeping our schools is. My present scepticism is worlds away from the optimism I felt when I had started teaching history at the 1,000-pupil school in rural England two years earlier.

I was a new teacher who had changed career after deciding to leave my former job in current affairs.

All I wanted was to bring the love of my subject to the children I would be teaching. I had no idea I was about to find myself on the front line of the gender identity revolution playing out in our schools.

My rude introduction came when I stumbled into a minefield by deciding to start an LGBT club for pupils.

I'd had no intention of getting involved in anything 'LGBT' when I joined the school. I'd never been to a Pride march or felt the need to shout about being a gay man. To me, my sexuality was just a fact of life.

But in my new role as a teacher I didn't hide the fact I was gay — and some students began confiding in me that they were suffering homophobic bullying. Some were even self-harming because of it.

I believed that an LGBT club could be a way to offer them a 'safe space' to be themselves. And the mother of one of the girls who was self-harming agreed.

Child protection and safeguarding laws required that I contact the school's 'safeguarding office' about my plan, which I did. And I told them whenever I had a conversation in which a child disclosed something personal.

With the consent of the headmaster, the club began meeting in my classroom every Monday after school. From the start, it was well-attended, with 20 to 25 students turning up. I felt positive I could quell their anxieties.

But as the sessions went on, it became apparent just how different schools had become since I had attended one. 

The pupils began telling me about 'LGBTQIA' politics, bombarding me with a mind-boggling array of trans terminology that they had picked up online. They knew everything about Pride, the acronym, the ever-changing flags, the terminology.

What on earth was going on? My simple attempt to make gay children feel more included — and to stop bullying — had been hijacked as a hotbed for gender anxiety and trans ideology.

I was completely out of my depth. From the outset, the students aged 11 to 18 were already steeped in 'gender-identity theory!'

This is the idea that feelings about who you are matter more than biological reality. And it is, in my experience, increasingly the overriding school of thought among teenagers.

The young people attending my group acted as though they were shopping around for different gender identities and sexualities, rather than trying to feel more comfortable the way they really were.

Their pronouns and names were changing on an almost weekly basis, while they talked about all this as though they were in an exclusive club together.

I listened, alarmed, as they happily discussed their goal of going to the Tavistock gender identity clinic for hormone therapy.

Many were frustrated that they had to wait until they were old enough to start treatment.

I had teenagers explaining to me the meaning of dozens of identities I had never heard of. In one bizarre incident, a Year 8 girl came along and said very seriously: 'Sir I have something to tell you: I'm demisexual.'

Alarm bells started ringing as I felt the discussion was wholly inappropriate. Later, when I looked up the definition of 'demisexual', I discovered it meant you like to get to know a person before you have sexual intercourse with them.

That, as far as I can tell, is the default position for most people.

Yet my reluctance to validate her declaration was soon picked up on by my students. The older, self-declared 'trans' students at the school became rude and aggressive towards me.

My status as the 'cool gay teacher' came into question because anyone who did not fully support them was regarded as a transphobe.

They attended the group and sat glowering at me, talking conspiratorially among themselves.

When I suggested that their attitude was counterproductive and unnecessary, they scowled even more. Of course, this knowledge was passed on to the younger kids.

I now realise these were all tell-tale signs of them having been integrated into online trans culture, which at the time I had no

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