Not by half, as I'm a recognised expert only in my particular field, but the difference between the public behaviour, and the way the story was reported in the Sun, is strikingly different to many similar cases in the USA, in which the responses are very different.

Here, for example, is the response of a right-wing Texas blog to a roughly parallel situation:

Transgender child disrupts school

Notice that the child is blamed by the "paper" for "disrupting" the school. By way of comparison, the Sun seems positively compassionate and thoughtful.

Here's another from Southern California:

School's Homophobic Atmosphere Fostered Hate Protest

Here's a fairly typical example of a like "coming out" by a transgender child in New York City:

Transgender Murder Trial Opens In New York

Here's an article about US-based hate groups who planned to encourage their children to skip school and create signs with hateful slogans instead of listening to the US President Obama's message to schoolchildren, in which he was likely (according to the nutcases) to reveal his secret homosexual agenda, and for which no official action can or will be taken in the USA:

SistersTalk Blog

Here's a similar story from the Times:

Parents face prosecution

All in all, with the possible exception of certain members of the BNP and violent football firms, the citizens of the UK seem both more temperate and civilised than the general run of the mill in the USA.

Not perfect, by any means, and there are many fine people in the US who far surpass the bad example of the worst, but in general I would say that if one has to be any sort of odd, the UK is the better place to be.

Whilst the world is not now and has never been a bed of roses, I think that looking for the good is more productive than decrying every lapse from angelic perfection, which finally appears, after all, only when thoroughly dead.

As has been noted by others in this thread, the row is mostly about the lack of planning for an orderly integration of the child involved, not whether or not either the school or the parents were inspired by Satan, which is surely an improvement over generations past and many other parts of the world.

When I was young, "queers" were still being given electroshock "therapy" to "cure" them, or injected with insulin to induce convulsions and life-threatening pain, with similar expectations of therapeutic conversion to "normality" through torture. One supposes they too were "lucky," as not too many years previous, lobotomies were all the rage, and within recorded history the rack and burning at the stake.

We must count our blessings as well as our grievances.

Human beings are "hard-wired" to care for and protect other human beings, and must be manipulated by fear and fairly sophisticated mental coercion into behaving differently.

In the Fifties, Harry Harlow, at the University of Wisconsin, conducted his famous Monkey Experiments in which he indentified a probable precursor for inhumane maladjustment in humans, a harsh and unloving environment, which turns out to produce fearful, hateful monkeys as well as people.

The opposite, a secure and loving environment turns out to be absolutely necessary for human beings and monkeys to thrive and achieve their full potential as caring adults, yet various societies* have, over the ages, instituted child-rearing practises that deliberately create harsh conditions for inants and babies, not least of which are "parental rights" partisans who insist that children be kept in perpetual, but serially-disruptive, foster care until the parent or parents children deserve come back from whatever journey they took off on, and deliberately harsh treatment of boys, even those of tender years, to "toughen them" for the "real world."

The problem is that loving parents are quite easy to find, since it's instinctual, and the "real world" is one of love and compassion. Wherever one finds the opposite, one finds a sick individual, and sometimes a sick group within a larger society.

Cheers,

Puddin'
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* The Spartans, for example, who quite deliberately brutalised male children until they were either dead or strong and ruthless.

All You Need Is Love
--- John Lennon, 1967