"It is really important to remember we are all different and it is good to like ourselves for what makes us different from each other," Redfern told about 20 children aged one to five at a central London pre-school.
Redfern is one 30 cross-dressing male performers touring British schools as part of Drag Queen Story Time, telling stories that spread a message of self-acceptance to promote diversity in early education.
The idea originated in the United States in 2015 when writer and LGBT+ parent Michelle Tea was looking for ways to introduce her young son to "queer culture".
"Drag queens are a no-brainer for kids' events," Tea told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Los Angeles.
"They are larger than life, fantastical, beautiful and take everything kids like about princess culture out of the box (and) make it kind of radical, feminist and more fun."
Used to the limelight of nightclubs and bars, they also know how to handle a raucous crowd, she added.
In a few years the format has spread all over the world. Also known as Drag Queen Story Hour, the group has opened more than 25 chapters worldwide, holding readings at hundreds of nurseries, schools, libraries and other venues across the Americas, Asia and Europe, Tea said.
But story hours have also drawn controversy in some corners of America, where conservative groups have criticised the initiative as amoral and inappropriate for children.
A U.S. group named Common Sense Campaign Tea Party organised a small protest outside a library in Mobile, Alabama, where a story time was held earlier in September - but it was outnumbered by a counter-demonstration, local media reported.
In Lafayette, Louisiana, plans to hold a reading at a public library have sparked controversy. The city's Republican mayor has said he would look to cancel or move the October event.
Tea said drag queens, like any artists, were capable of adapting their act and making it appropriate for young audiences. "Drag isn't by definition adult entertainment," she said.
Teaching children about diversity made them better citizens, she added - a view echoed by LGBT+ activists in Britain.
Young LGBT+ people are less likely to experience bullying in schools that create inclusive environments and celebrate difference, said Sidonie Bertrand-Shelton, head of education at British rights group Stonewall.
"Bringing in LGBT role models like drag queens and teaching about diversity means children from all families feel welcome and helps every young person understand that LGBT people are part of everyday life," she said.
Almost half all British teenagers who are LGBT+ or questioning their sexuality have self-harmed, according to a study released in August that found homophobic bullying and "highly gendered" environments were partially to blame.
At the London nursery, Redfern's gender appeared of little concern to the children, who were much more interested in the flashy jewellery worn by the performer.
At one point, a heavily made-up Redfern acted out an adapted version of the "The Three Little Pigs" - replacing the pigs of the fairytale with "little misses", who outsmart the wolf.
"Generally in fiction and children's fiction, the boy is the hero. The boy saves the girl, (while) the girls are submissive characters, whereas that story is empowering," said the cabaret artist and actor trained in musical theatre.
Gregory Lane, who manages the nursery run by the London Early Years Foundation, said there were educational benefits to Drag Queen Story Time.
"Drag queens happen to be very good at telling a story and making that story come alive for young children so that it's not just words on the page and it's a story that they can stretch their imagination," he said.
For Redfern, who spoke of the difficulty of not being allowed to wear girls' clothes outside home when growing up, the focus was on showing children it is ok to be different.
Almost a third of those aged between 18 and 21 in the United States and 17 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds in Britain identify as LGBT, according to separate surveys.
"In every class there's going to be a girl who's a tomboy (or) a boy who likes running about in a Princess Elsa dress," Redfern said, referring to the Disney movie "Frozen".
"It is about giving them different role models and showing that's fine. Not everyone has to fit into a black and white mould."
Meanwhile, scientists from around the world called for stepped-up efforts to use forests to keep global warming to the lowest limit agreed by governments in 2015, as a key report on how to meet that goal is finalised in South Korea this week.
"Forests really are the unsung hero of our struggle to address climate change," said Deborah Lawrence, a University of Virginia professor and one of 40 scientists who backed a statement emphasising how the Earth's climate depends on forests.
The natural processes by which forests suck in and store carbon help reduce levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - and forests also underpin key parts of the world's economy, the scientists said.
Yet humans have let forests become degraded, even as the resulting risks of disaster and the costs of repairing the damage rise, they added.
"We must protect and maintain healthy forests to avoid dangerous climate change and to ensure the world's forests continue to provide services critical for the well-being of the planet and ourselves," said the statement, signed by researchers mainly from the United States, Brazil and Europe.
"Our planet's future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forests," they concluded.
The flagship report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be published on Monday, will outline ways of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times, the most ambitious goal in the Paris climate pact.
One key route is to protect virgin forests, restore those that have suffered logging, fires or other harm, and expand the amount of land covered by trees, the report is expected to say.
In this week's statement, scientists noted that forests remove about a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere, keeping climate change from getting even worse.
Destroying forests not only releases the carbon they contain but also eliminates their ability to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the statement said.
It noted that the world's forests contain more carbon than exploitable oil, gas and coal deposits.
But deforestation rates are rising again in most of the tropics, due to expanded production of commodities such as palm oil, beef and grains, said Carlos Nobre, a University of Sao Paulo professor and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Forests produce water vapour, boost rainfall and cool down local temperatures by as much as 3 degrees Celsius, Nobre noted.
"This is a critical element for growing food," he said. "By keeping a wetter climate throughout the year, (forests) also mitigate the impacts of drought and are less vulnerable to fires."
Scientists and environmental campaigners said policy makers often overlook the importance of forests in regulating the climate, meaning forest protection had received far too little funding.
But as the urgency of curbing rising temperatures increases, that is starting to change, they added, with attention shifting not just to forests but also to how land is deployed to produce crops for food and energy.
"There is a greater recognition in society as a whole that the land-use sector makes a difference - and the way that happens in people's everyday lives is what they eat," said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International.
More people now understand the need to consume less meat and dairy products, she told reporters.
That is one strategy recommended in a separate report to be published in mid-October by the Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA), a coalition of environment and development groups.
Its main findings, released this week, show greater efforts to move to more sustainable food systems, restore forests and secure land rights for local people can help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The measures proposed - ranging from planting more trees on farms to feeding animals with agricultural leftovers and restoring major areas of forest - would cut emissions by 21 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent per year by 2050, or about two-fifths of total greenhouse gas emissions in 2016.
The alliance said that would eliminate the need for largely untested technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Those methods include growing trees and crops to produce energy and then capturing and storing underground the carbon dioxide they release when harvested, an approach known as BECCS.
Kate Dooley of the University of Melbourne's Climate and Energy College, and the main author of the CLARA report, said scientific models show BECCS would require a huge amount of land to be effective in meeting temperature limits, which would be "problematic".
Opponents of BECCS argue it would take away land and water needed to end hunger and meet other global development goals, and could lead to abuses of indigenous land rights, among other risks.
"We can achieve the 1.5C pathways in the IPCC report - the safest pathways - through natural (land) sink enhancement," Dooley told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes, more than 200 girls kidnapped from their school by Boko Haram militants in April 2014. Since then, about half of the girls have been found or freed, and an unknown number have died
It was hearing about her sore eyes that convinced Lawal Zannah his daughter Aisha was still alive, the first sliver of good news to emerge after months of nervy silence enveloped Nigeria's kidnapped Chibok girls.
Word of 21-year-old Aisha's persistent eye problem came via a newly released captive, Jumai, who had shared a militant encampment with her in northeastern Nigeria.
Aisha was among the more than 200 girls kidnapped from their school by Boko Haram militants in April 2014. Since then, about half of the girls have been found or freed, dozens have been paraded in propaganda videos and an unknown number have died.
Reports of forced marriages and indoctrination have kept rumours alive about the captors and their brutal lifestyle.
But the welfare of Zannah's daughter, along with the other captives taken from their school in Chibok, had remained uncertain as the kidnapping ordeal dragged past its fourth year.
"(Jumai) told me that she was in the same camp as my daughter and five other Chibok girls," Zannah told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the ex-captive's Chibok home.
"She said my daughter has been suffering from eye problems and I knew it was true because the eye trouble started before she was kidnapped."
It was the first confirmation his daughter was alive that he had received since May, when more than 80 of Aisha's classmates were freed following negotiations between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram.
Zannah was not the only local hoping for an update. Once word got out that a Chibok woman had escaped from the Sambisa Forest hideout of the jihadist group, parents rushed to her home in the hope of any news, be it good or bad.
Zannah said he had jumped into his car and driven at speed. When Jumai revealed the telling eye detail, he was elated.
To be doubly sure, he had driven home for a photo of his daughter.
Seeing the image from happier days, 35-year-old Jumai once again confirmed that Aisha was alive and living in her camp, mother to a baby boy and remarried to a militant after her first husband was killed in battle.
Zannah burst into tears of relief.Yana Galang, another parent who had rushed to see Jumai, shed tears for a different reason.
Jumai revealed that she had no news of Galang's daughter, Rifkatu, and had never seen nor heard of her in the past two years of sharing a camp with six of the lost Chibok girls.
"My body just shut down. We spent more than an hour interviewing the woman," said Rifkatu's mother Galang. "She said she can't talk about my daughter because she didn't see her."
Instead she clung to the only hope that was offered by Jumai, who said 38 girls were held in one location and another 25 Chibok girls corralled in a separate camp.
"I never saw them (the second batch) but that is what I heard," Jumai told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
"In the Sambisa (camp), we don't have free movement. Our husbands don't allow us move around freely."
The only woman she knew who could move about freely was Dorcas Yakubu, she said, one of the Chibok girls to feature in a Boko Haram propaganda video declaring that she was unwilling to return to her parents whom she described as infidels.
"She takes a gun and goes out on operations with the men. She attends committee meetings with them," Jumai said.
Not part of the dramatic school kidnapping that captured world headlines, Jumai said she grew close to the six Chibok girls after they heard her speaking to her children in their local language, Kibaku.
She was captured from Askira, a town near to Chibok, by Boko Haram in April 2014, around the same time as the infamous abduction of the girls from their school dormitory which sparked a global 'Bring Back Our Girls' campaign.
Her husband was killed while she was taken into the forest with her six children. Her oldest son was forced to join Boko Haram, she was forcefully married to a militant with whom she had a two-year-old, and was pregnant when the man was killed by the Nigerian military a few months ago.
Her son who was now part of Boko Haram facilitated his mother's escape, leading her and his younger siblings through the forest in the middle of the night before returning to rejoin the militant group.
After weeks of trekking through dense bushes, Jumai said she had arrived at her brother's house in Chibok with her children, unleashing jubilation from family members who had given up hope.
"There was a lot of suffering in the forest," she said. "The military has blocked everywhere so our husbands don't have free movement to go out and find food for us. We were eating leaves and shrubs."
After listening to Jumai, the parents of the six Chibok girls she had identified as safe met to decide on next steps. In the end, they knew everything hinged on the government.
"Now that we have confirmed that our daughters are alive, we are begging them to try and rescue them," Zannah said.
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