My op-ed, on why I would ban men from working in nurseries, has brought the boys to the yard. Some are annoyed that I apply safeguarding principles to ALL men, not just those in bad wigs and dresses
The UK has restricted this post – I’m pissed off about not being given the choice whether I want to see something or not. Fucking nanny state. Good job I have a VPN.
The point about women only spaces is exactly as Julie says, that - it's not that all men abuse but so many do that we have to ban them all if you want a safe space for women, girls and children. Trans identified men are men - same principle applies. Changing gender doesn't change sex.
"As a man" I fully support this. There may well be men who have a wholly innocent vocation for being a nursery worker (although I have yet to meet one) but why on earth would one take the risk?
I’m fully aware that many men are perfectly capable of working with very young children, and many men genuinely embrace caring roles just as most women do. My point is not to treat men as a monolithic category or to deny their individual abilities. I have known great men in my youth and I can count on a great number of good men to be around my child.
I work in HR. I deal daily with the gap between theory, principles, and what actually happens in practice. In principle, one can argue that banning men from childcare roles would not “solve” the issue of child safety.I agree with that in theory.
But I disagree entirely in practice.
As a parent, I also know firsthand the fragile state of early childcare services. And because men, on average, commit the overwhelming majority of severe abuses — especially sexual abuse — male staff inevitably require more supervision, more background checks, and more safeguarding structures than women.
The problem of the childcare sector are well known. Inadequate budgets, low wages,extremely poor supervision, little to no training and catastrophic turnover.
In such an environment, adding staff who require more resources to monitor is simply not manageable. You cannot realistically integrate men into a system that is already failing to meet even its basic safety obligations.
Again, I say this as someone who works in HR, trained — and legally required — to detect, avoid, and correct gender discrimination. As of today, I would support a temporary ban on men working in the childcare sector until proper reforms are implemented.
A failing system cannot safely absorb a statistically higher-risk profile, even if most individuals in that group are good, moral people.
I think I agree with you, and as a man I can say that the job of constantly working with very young children would be incredibly annoying.
However, I will point out that this is the sort of Bayesian reasoning based on demographic information that we reject in other contexts. Racial profiling, for example. Or banning gay men from being Boy Scout leaders. I mean, most gay guys are, like most people, reasonably moral. But do we want men who are sexually interested in other males camping with teenage boys? I would say no, but I’d also say we don’t want straight men camping with unrelated teenage girls, either.
But if you open the door to this sort of policy based on statistically accurate generalizations, lots of people will be unhappy with the results.
I understand your point. The framing of this issue is full of rhetorical landmines, which is why I’ve tried to moderate my own comment a bit.
Ultimately, if we want childcare to be inclusive of the minority of men who genuinely want to work with very young children — and many of them do exist, and do excellent work — then society needs to provide the means to support that inclusiveness. This isn’t something that can be achieved by goodwill alone. It requires proper funding, adequate staffing ratios, robust training, real supervision, and structural reforms.
Right now, the childcare sector is, by default, a women’s space. And because it is a women’s space, it suffers from the usual patterns of misogyny that affect female-dominated professions: chronic underfunding, lack of institutional prestige, insufficient regulation, and poor political attention. As long as these structural inequalities remain unaddressed, the system simply doesn’t have the capacity to integrate additional safeguarding requirements for anyone — including the specific monitoring, support, and oversight that would be necessary to include male staff responsibly.
In other words:
It’s not that men cannot be great caregivers — many are.
It’s that no inclusive policy is viable in a sector that is already collapsing under the weight of neglect.
Well, we could require all male child care workers to be escorted by a female child care worker at all times. Or install security cameras and record every instant. But I’d say that’s prohibitively costly. Personally, I’d allow Bayesian discrimination when doing so meets basic cost/benefit tests.
By the way, the Britishism of the post caused me a brief mental glitch. In the US, we’d say “nursery school” or “pre-school,” or “day care.” A “nursery” is a place where they raise and sell plants. Men work at such establishments without any issues.
I’m also a bit confused about “hospital wards.” Does she mean co-ed wards with both male and female patients? In the US, “wards” where large groups of people are housed in the same room like in the movies are basically extinct. Most hospital rooms are semi-private, and a lot of hospitals have gone to all private rooms. Caregivers doctors, nurses, orderlies — are of both sexes.
The prison statistics bear out the fact that 'trans' identified men are more likely than men, in general, to offend sexually. Of course they are, because it is not that they are pretending to be women, it is because so many sexual paraphilias and fetishes are expressed in cross-dressing men. If society would just admit that sexuality is at the root of all of this ideology as far as males are concerned, we would start to reassess the situation. The young women and the children are two separate categories, and separate from each other. Men are the common denominator.
Instead, in the early days, society accepted, driven by 'trans' ideology and the 'queering' of society, that these men were "stunning and brave" and should be lauded. We did not query why these men should feel the need to pretend to be women, just as we have not queried why men should wish to access very young children. Again, we have been blinded by the usual, "oh, isn't he wonderful?" con trick when we should have been demanding that deep scientific studies be done into male sexual paraphilias and fetishes and their impact on society as a whole, but particularly the female and child parts.
This man, like so many, as Julie says, inveigled his way into a work situation that was, until recently, an area that was reserved for females. It is always a minority of men who transgress, but enough to make it dangerous to ever give all men a bye since we cannot tell who is a predator and who is not, although a strong desire to work with very young children should, perhaps, be a red flag? As one male commentator said on here: he had never come across any male who expressed such a desire. Neither have most of us, I'd warrant.
Just a point of language. ‘Trans identified men’ are actually women who are trying to be men - with or without hormones and ‘top surgery’ - a wonderful euphemism for having perfectly healthy breast chopped off. Men in dresses (with or without sexual fetishes call themselves trans women - or just women. And here in Australia our Federal and State laws agree. Absolute madness. And as someone who worked with sexual offenders for many years I totally agree with you. In fact after a decade or so I refused to work with transvestites as they were called back then as their desire to resolve their fetishes was for most of them totally absent. I developed a real dislike for them which has obviously got much bigger as society promoted the message that we should be kind to the poor dears, let them get their rocks off as they parody sex worker women while reading stories to kids. NO THANK YOU
Thank you for the clarification, Maggie. Here, in the UK, it generally means men who identify as 'trans'. I have grown to hate the word, 'trans', and I believe in it as much as I believe in the fairies at the bottom of the garden. I agree with you entirely that few of these men, although I have heard of a few who have desisted through therapy, wish to end their feelz at all, and part of the kick is to make others, i.e. females, uncomfortable and intimidated. It is misogyny on stilts. Some will have suffered trauma in childhood, but girls, by and far, suffer far greater degrees of abuse - although all abuse is wrong - and not many of them end up being transvestites and loving it.
It boils my blood, the way that female children and grown-up females are just expected to get on with it, while we have to feel sorry for these males who, whatever their trauma, appear to go out of their way to harm others sexually, whether physically or psychologically. Even when it is recognized that they are sexual predators, we are still expected to feel sorry for them as if they have no agency at all. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that we are not viewed as fully human or worthy of any respect, and that goes right across all aspects of human society. It is appalling in the 21st century.
I thought your statistic that 98 percent of sex offenders are men was your strongest point in favour of no men working in nurseries. I had guessed the figure was higher than 90percent, but not known it was as high as that. A statistic you should quote more often I think.
You didn't answer the question about male nurses in hospitals being kept away from children's wards, and as children in hospitals may be even more vulnerable than children in nurseries, you might be able to make an argument here. Have any male nurses in hospitals been convicted of abuse of children in hospitals, I wonder? Ian
They certainly have in Australia - with several whose career has been child sex offending with nursing the handy pathway to fulfilling their career aspirations.
I completely agree. I would have thought that an argument could be made under the Equality Act exceptions to make caring for vulnerable children and adults a female only profession. I think it is a reasonable measure to meet a legitimate need
I used to work at the hq of a large nursery chain in London.
The CEO was adamant to promote men in nurseries. The same men that encouraged her, sure that she didn't need much, to hire drag queens to go in a read stories dressed as a parody of women, to babs from 6 months to toddler age. So, really, her obsession with getting men into nurseries also led to drag queen story hour across the whole chain. She was an utter psychopath we zero experience of child education.
I completely agree. I woeldet have left my children in a nursery that employed men, nor had a male child-minder for them. In answer to "Well in that case maybe men should also be banned from becoming paediatricians or children’s nurses or school teachers or swimming instructors or Cub leaders etc.”, that should be investigated for the risk:benefit ratio, not used as a "gotcha" to defend men working in nursery situations.
Predators are a minority of men, but certainly a bunch of them will choose the strategy of female mimicry to attempt to gain access to women and children. Predation is an indication of a psychological pathology, as are thinking you can be the opposite sex and paraphilias. That there may be significant overlap is no surprise. I think the statistics support this.
There have also been recent examples in Australia of men abusing children in care and they went through the check and nothing was picked up. Nor were they trans, case in point.
You say 'children in care' Elizabeth. Is that in hospitals or more of the appalling toll of young people in local authority care, like Virginia Roberts? Ian
It seems like the institution itself (ie, the nurseries) have a large responsability in that awful story. They are the ones who were supposed to organize the work and set the rules. Why should an adult, wether man or woman, should be working alone with the children ? Why should places were children are changed or dressed be closed places ? Isn't, in the first place, an incredible lack of caution and common sense ?
The UK has restricted this post – I’m pissed off about not being given the choice whether I want to see something or not. Fucking nanny state. Good job I have a VPN.
Isn't the blocking system there to protect children?
So much irony, isn’t it 🤦♂️
TRANS WOMEN IS TRANSHUMANISTIC NONSENSE. WHAT THEY WILL BE WHEN ALL FEMALES WILL STOP USING ANY MAKE UP? (WHICH IS HAPPENING NOW)
Just prove you’re over 18 and stop being a prat
The point about women only spaces is exactly as Julie says, that - it's not that all men abuse but so many do that we have to ban them all if you want a safe space for women, girls and children. Trans identified men are men - same principle applies. Changing gender doesn't change sex.
"As a man" I fully support this. There may well be men who have a wholly innocent vocation for being a nursery worker (although I have yet to meet one) but why on earth would one take the risk?
As a man and parent, I agree completely with your post. No man should be left alone with young children.
As a man I'm alas too aware of the issues with my sex. As a parent too prudent to risk any child welfare.
We have right now in France a massive sexual abuse scandal being reported.
https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/paris-52-animateurs-periscolaires-suspendus-pour-agression-sexuelle-en-trois-ans-14-11-2025-PLKG6M2UNZC47LUPR7KXVMC22Y.php
Just to moderate my initial comment:
I’m fully aware that many men are perfectly capable of working with very young children, and many men genuinely embrace caring roles just as most women do. My point is not to treat men as a monolithic category or to deny their individual abilities. I have known great men in my youth and I can count on a great number of good men to be around my child.
I work in HR. I deal daily with the gap between theory, principles, and what actually happens in practice. In principle, one can argue that banning men from childcare roles would not “solve” the issue of child safety.I agree with that in theory.
But I disagree entirely in practice.
As a parent, I also know firsthand the fragile state of early childcare services. And because men, on average, commit the overwhelming majority of severe abuses — especially sexual abuse — male staff inevitably require more supervision, more background checks, and more safeguarding structures than women.
The problem of the childcare sector are well known. Inadequate budgets, low wages,extremely poor supervision, little to no training and catastrophic turnover.
In such an environment, adding staff who require more resources to monitor is simply not manageable. You cannot realistically integrate men into a system that is already failing to meet even its basic safety obligations.
Again, I say this as someone who works in HR, trained — and legally required — to detect, avoid, and correct gender discrimination. As of today, I would support a temporary ban on men working in the childcare sector until proper reforms are implemented.
A failing system cannot safely absorb a statistically higher-risk profile, even if most individuals in that group are good, moral people.
I think I agree with you, and as a man I can say that the job of constantly working with very young children would be incredibly annoying.
However, I will point out that this is the sort of Bayesian reasoning based on demographic information that we reject in other contexts. Racial profiling, for example. Or banning gay men from being Boy Scout leaders. I mean, most gay guys are, like most people, reasonably moral. But do we want men who are sexually interested in other males camping with teenage boys? I would say no, but I’d also say we don’t want straight men camping with unrelated teenage girls, either.
But if you open the door to this sort of policy based on statistically accurate generalizations, lots of people will be unhappy with the results.
I understand your point. The framing of this issue is full of rhetorical landmines, which is why I’ve tried to moderate my own comment a bit.
Ultimately, if we want childcare to be inclusive of the minority of men who genuinely want to work with very young children — and many of them do exist, and do excellent work — then society needs to provide the means to support that inclusiveness. This isn’t something that can be achieved by goodwill alone. It requires proper funding, adequate staffing ratios, robust training, real supervision, and structural reforms.
Right now, the childcare sector is, by default, a women’s space. And because it is a women’s space, it suffers from the usual patterns of misogyny that affect female-dominated professions: chronic underfunding, lack of institutional prestige, insufficient regulation, and poor political attention. As long as these structural inequalities remain unaddressed, the system simply doesn’t have the capacity to integrate additional safeguarding requirements for anyone — including the specific monitoring, support, and oversight that would be necessary to include male staff responsibly.
In other words:
It’s not that men cannot be great caregivers — many are.
It’s that no inclusive policy is viable in a sector that is already collapsing under the weight of neglect.
Well, we could require all male child care workers to be escorted by a female child care worker at all times. Or install security cameras and record every instant. But I’d say that’s prohibitively costly. Personally, I’d allow Bayesian discrimination when doing so meets basic cost/benefit tests.
By the way, the Britishism of the post caused me a brief mental glitch. In the US, we’d say “nursery school” or “pre-school,” or “day care.” A “nursery” is a place where they raise and sell plants. Men work at such establishments without any issues.
I’m also a bit confused about “hospital wards.” Does she mean co-ed wards with both male and female patients? In the US, “wards” where large groups of people are housed in the same room like in the movies are basically extinct. Most hospital rooms are semi-private, and a lot of hospitals have gone to all private rooms. Caregivers doctors, nurses, orderlies — are of both sexes.
The prison statistics bear out the fact that 'trans' identified men are more likely than men, in general, to offend sexually. Of course they are, because it is not that they are pretending to be women, it is because so many sexual paraphilias and fetishes are expressed in cross-dressing men. If society would just admit that sexuality is at the root of all of this ideology as far as males are concerned, we would start to reassess the situation. The young women and the children are two separate categories, and separate from each other. Men are the common denominator.
Instead, in the early days, society accepted, driven by 'trans' ideology and the 'queering' of society, that these men were "stunning and brave" and should be lauded. We did not query why these men should feel the need to pretend to be women, just as we have not queried why men should wish to access very young children. Again, we have been blinded by the usual, "oh, isn't he wonderful?" con trick when we should have been demanding that deep scientific studies be done into male sexual paraphilias and fetishes and their impact on society as a whole, but particularly the female and child parts.
This man, like so many, as Julie says, inveigled his way into a work situation that was, until recently, an area that was reserved for females. It is always a minority of men who transgress, but enough to make it dangerous to ever give all men a bye since we cannot tell who is a predator and who is not, although a strong desire to work with very young children should, perhaps, be a red flag? As one male commentator said on here: he had never come across any male who expressed such a desire. Neither have most of us, I'd warrant.
Incidentally, both PDfilia and rape are paraphilias, so these definitions stretch way beyond 'trans' identified males.
Just a point of language. ‘Trans identified men’ are actually women who are trying to be men - with or without hormones and ‘top surgery’ - a wonderful euphemism for having perfectly healthy breast chopped off. Men in dresses (with or without sexual fetishes call themselves trans women - or just women. And here in Australia our Federal and State laws agree. Absolute madness. And as someone who worked with sexual offenders for many years I totally agree with you. In fact after a decade or so I refused to work with transvestites as they were called back then as their desire to resolve their fetishes was for most of them totally absent. I developed a real dislike for them which has obviously got much bigger as society promoted the message that we should be kind to the poor dears, let them get their rocks off as they parody sex worker women while reading stories to kids. NO THANK YOU
Thank you for the clarification, Maggie. Here, in the UK, it generally means men who identify as 'trans'. I have grown to hate the word, 'trans', and I believe in it as much as I believe in the fairies at the bottom of the garden. I agree with you entirely that few of these men, although I have heard of a few who have desisted through therapy, wish to end their feelz at all, and part of the kick is to make others, i.e. females, uncomfortable and intimidated. It is misogyny on stilts. Some will have suffered trauma in childhood, but girls, by and far, suffer far greater degrees of abuse - although all abuse is wrong - and not many of them end up being transvestites and loving it.
It boils my blood, the way that female children and grown-up females are just expected to get on with it, while we have to feel sorry for these males who, whatever their trauma, appear to go out of their way to harm others sexually, whether physically or psychologically. Even when it is recognized that they are sexual predators, we are still expected to feel sorry for them as if they have no agency at all. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that we are not viewed as fully human or worthy of any respect, and that goes right across all aspects of human society. It is appalling in the 21st century.
As a man I don’t even have to read the article - should never be allowed.
That's not your real name, and you're not a man.
huh?
What's a common nickname for "Richard"?
In real life, people do have unfortunate names.
Also, what person not a man would embrace such a name? Even if it’s fake, I’d bet it’s a guy.
The Department of Education said “nine in ten parents believe it’s important for children to be cared for by both men and women”.
I'm fairly sure that when answering this question, most respondents meant 'cared for AT HOME by both men and women'.
I'd like to see curfews for men as well :)
I thought your statistic that 98 percent of sex offenders are men was your strongest point in favour of no men working in nurseries. I had guessed the figure was higher than 90percent, but not known it was as high as that. A statistic you should quote more often I think.
You didn't answer the question about male nurses in hospitals being kept away from children's wards, and as children in hospitals may be even more vulnerable than children in nurseries, you might be able to make an argument here. Have any male nurses in hospitals been convicted of abuse of children in hospitals, I wonder? Ian
They certainly have in Australia - with several whose career has been child sex offending with nursing the handy pathway to fulfilling their career aspirations.
I completely agree. I would have thought that an argument could be made under the Equality Act exceptions to make caring for vulnerable children and adults a female only profession. I think it is a reasonable measure to meet a legitimate need
I used to work at the hq of a large nursery chain in London.
The CEO was adamant to promote men in nurseries. The same men that encouraged her, sure that she didn't need much, to hire drag queens to go in a read stories dressed as a parody of women, to babs from 6 months to toddler age. So, really, her obsession with getting men into nurseries also led to drag queen story hour across the whole chain. She was an utter psychopath we zero experience of child education.
I completely agree. I woeldet have left my children in a nursery that employed men, nor had a male child-minder for them. In answer to "Well in that case maybe men should also be banned from becoming paediatricians or children’s nurses or school teachers or swimming instructors or Cub leaders etc.”, that should be investigated for the risk:benefit ratio, not used as a "gotcha" to defend men working in nursery situations.
Predators are a minority of men, but certainly a bunch of them will choose the strategy of female mimicry to attempt to gain access to women and children. Predation is an indication of a psychological pathology, as are thinking you can be the opposite sex and paraphilias. That there may be significant overlap is no surprise. I think the statistics support this.
time to end "innocent until proven guilty" as that renders surviviour liars when they identify their abusers.
There have also been recent examples in Australia of men abusing children in care and they went through the check and nothing was picked up. Nor were they trans, case in point.
You say 'children in care' Elizabeth. Is that in hospitals or more of the appalling toll of young people in local authority care, like Virginia Roberts? Ian
Childcare scandals in Australia right now:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/04/alleged-childcare-pedophile-joshua-dale-brown-charged-with-83-new-offences-ntwnfb
Thanks. 156 instances I see. Wow. I'll be interested to see how many years imprisonment he gets. Ian
No I mean child care centres.
Thanks. Ian
It seems like the institution itself (ie, the nurseries) have a large responsability in that awful story. They are the ones who were supposed to organize the work and set the rules. Why should an adult, wether man or woman, should be working alone with the children ? Why should places were children are changed or dressed be closed places ? Isn't, in the first place, an incredible lack of caution and common sense ?
Probably money saving Anna. Ian
Yes. Men need to own what other men do in the category of men. And with accountability comes responsibility. Men - don’t be shirkers.
Well I'm quite prepared to publicize the 98 percent of sex abusers being men. What else do you mean by 'own' I wonder? Ian
What on earth are you talking about, you weirdo? I dont need to 'own' anything that other men do.
That’s not how responsibility works. Individuals are responsible for their own actions. It’s wrong to take responsibility for the actions of others.
What do you mean? How should I own what men, who I have never met, do in secret?