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It’s Not Just About Bathrooms
In case you missed it, @bethanymandel brought up some excellent and important points regarding the messages that schools are sending to young girls when they force them to accommodate transgender girls (actual boys) in their formerly sex-segregated spaces.
I’d like to add that our school board has issued the following draft policy for addressing transgender accommodations on field trips:
Extended Instructional Field Trips
Students should be allowed to participate consistent with their asserted gender identity. Sleeping arrangements should be discussed with staff, the student and family (if the family is supportive of the student). Upon request, the student should be provided with a safe alternative sleeping area.
A student’s transgender status is confidential information and school staff members should not disclose a student’s transgender status as it relates to a field trip without the consent of the student and/or the student’s parent/guardian.
In other words, the student with a gender identity other than the one “assigned at birth” is to be accommodated, without regard to the other students and families involved.
My daughter is in high school and attends school-sponsored trips and camps that involve hotel and dorm rooms. She knows of two transgender boys and at least one individual who identifies as non-binary who attend the same overnight activities. This isn’t hypothetical.
The school board policy has no regard for a young girl’s sense of modesty or safety when sharing a bedroom or possibly a bed! While the policy is still in draft form, there’s no reason to believe that it’s not current procedure. Note the chilling parenthetical “if the family is supportive of the student.”
A lot of Ricochetti greet this topic with mockery, and I think it deserves its fair share, but it’s also such a dead serious issue for parents with kids in school, at any age. We know transgender kids in church and school at elementary, middle and high school levels, but we have yet to see how any of this will play out in the long-term. While I want to treat every person with kindness and compassion, I don’t think the school policies show such treatment of young, impressionable and vulnerable boys and girls (especially girls) who identify as they are.
I realize these are local policies and decisions, but certainly the Democratic Party and major Democratic politicians would like to impose them nation-wide. I find it hard to believe that parents truly favor these changes.
Published in Education
Yeah, I was just spitballing. But, I know of too many lefty educators who end up on school boards after they’re finished indoctrinating the little ones. What I’d really like to do is burn down 99% of university education departments.
I’m with you Chauvie. I’m 33+ years teaching…not sure how much more I can take. I keep my head down, and do my thing: teach my students.
as far as transgender topic at school: teaching your child to be kind, teaching your child to be aware of their surroundings, teaching your child about personal space, and appropriate relationships. Connecting with your child, and knowing who their friends are, and about the families is the same as it ever was. It will take extra effort, but parents sending their kids to public school can make it through.
However, I would recommend home school, because the truth is: a reasonably educated parent can get their kid through 6th grade without a lot of extra training, and the kids can get all of it done in way less than 6-7 hours a day.
Run. Run Away.
I doubt there is a law anywhere specifically against convincing a child that they are the opposite gender. This is because it would have been almost unthinkable, and clearly a form of child abuse.
Now it is widely (or narrowly-but-strongly) regarded as a reasonable thing to do. Social workers come out of the same schools educators do.
Home school or a Hillsdale charter. My kids are better educated than 98% of Americans, I’d guess. Including the ones who graduated from the Ivies. Maybe especially them. ;-)
Only 99 percent?
I got my Minnesota teaching certificate after graduating from a conservative Lutheran college in the late 1960s. Much of my education was good; I envy very few people their general college education. The education program was another matter. It was ten years behind the trends elsewhere, but it was on the same track.
@julespa I was going to pick on the use of the word “ban” also, but I think it’s probably meant in a hyperbolic way, typed in the heat of the moment (right, @westernchauvinist?). [saw your responses after I typed this!]
Again, these issues are local as long as Republicans stand in the way of a national policy. In Democratic strongholds, there’s no way to vote these people out.
Hillsdale turns out some great teachers!
I’m opposed to national policy, because that will be used against us, even if not at first. High-level, centralized policy has been the source of many of our problems, going back nearly a hundred years.
I’m not so sure there’s no way to vote people out in Democrat strongholds.
On local issues when I was active in our local school district affairs, one of the main problems was conservatives who bought into centralization and consolidation on the grounds of economic efficiency. Of course, this just centralized control in the hands of the self-interested education establishment, and there was no economic efficiency.
Another problem was parents who got themselves into work situations where they used the school as a glorified day-care center and babysitter. Another is parents who are more interested in educational “programs” that provide them (the parents) with status among their peers than in education for their children. I used to hear a lot about programs, and very little about learning. A lot of reform possibilities were killed under that rubric.
Change the conversation to a discussion of learning, and maybe things will change. (I can already anticipate some of the objections to such an emphasis, and I hope you can, too.)
For a quick solution, there is no requirement that your child attend a field trip. None. The school can give an alternate assignment. You can take your child to Washington DC or your state capitol on your own. Sports, club or extra-curricular field trips are another matter, but if enough parents decline to allow their children to go there will have to be a change in the policy. We had kids simply not show up on travel day…they were out sick. Didn’t open the kids up to ridicule or anything…we even bought souvenirs for them.
I like your optimism. I’d like to be more involved in theory, but in practice I need to be with my kids at night when all the school board policy meetings happen.
I agree & reserve the option to pull her out if necessary, but the overnights are for extracurricular activities she loves. I have just made sure she’s staying with people she likes and trusts before letting her stay overnight. Still, I think the policy is insane. As someone commented, the kids all know who the transgender non-binary kids are, but the parents don’t always know.
This is likely more of an issue for artsy kids, who tend to be thrown in with more alternative and creative types. I don’t know how it’s playing out in regards to sports yet in our schools, but it promises to harm girls in terms of competition.
It’s become fashion. And the fashion destroys the entire “born this way” narrative. There were a small handful of gay students in my entire high school 20 years ago. Even those were question marks. Someone in high school identifying as “neither gender” is beyond comprehensible to 1999 me. Today it seems like 1 in 10 students identifies somewhere on the LGBTQ “spectrum.”
If something occurs naturally, social acceptance should not make it more or less prominent. The same ratios would apply.
Yes, it is interesting how the transgender argument undermines the immutability-based argument for gay rights. So much of this has developed since the Obergefell decision, so it seems to fulfill the needs of a movement with other purposes than just dealing with a few existing trans people. Douglas Murray’s book, The Madness of Crowds is next on my reading list.
If a 100 parents show up at a school board meeting, they should make clear that all of their children will be taken out immediately, butts not in seats, dollars not flowing because attendance is down. Teachers strike to get what they want. Parents have the same power, but choose not to use it.
Strike, strike, strike, strike!!! But, it has to be done on Count Day, because the funding flows once the kids are counted whether they’re in their seats or not.
My late stepfather had his PhD in Education and taught at the university level. He would probably agree with you . . .
A story on trans with regrets. Just read this today and of course the trans-pushers are concerned that it might blunt their message of making switches easier and more acceptable; but the posts above about autism and other emotional problems reminded me of it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50548473
A related piece at AG today:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/25/transgenderism-and-the-politics-of-irreparable-harm/
This transgender nonsense is not some strange new thing, actually. Monty Python saw this coming at least 40 years ago. It is an obvious and predictable consequence of the second-wave feminist ideology that emerged in the 1960s. The underlying idea, which I find to be frankly ludicrous, is the counterfactual rejection of the existence of important biological and social differences between the sexes.
The mainstream acceptance of homosexuality, which I find to be almost equally bizarre, is another manifestation of the same ideology.
I’m not sure that second-wave feminism itself is the actual root cause. It appears to be a manifestation of a deeper underlying ideology, probably post-modernism, which gives rise to a relentless attack against every existing cultural institution. The attack seems to be focused on marriage and family.
I recently listened to a podcast by Victor Davis Hanson, whom I greatly admire. He was talking about same-sex marriage, and the general consensus in its favor on the part of conservative pundits and commentators, followed by their surprise when immediately on the heels of the outrageous SCOTUS decision on the issue, matters proceeded to persecution of the Christian cake-baker.
I could not believe how obtuse he was. I recall being appalled at the perceptual inability of most so-called conservative voices during what passed for a “debate” about SSM, as if they did not understand the arguments being made by the pro-homosexuality advocates and their allies on the Left. These radicals were arguing relentlessly, for at least 25 years, that any objection to homosexual activity was irrational animus and bigotry, as if no reasonable person could disagree. This argument was even adopted by SCOTUS, in the absurd Romer decision, as early as 1996. Where did our conservative thought leaders expect such an argument to lead?
David French was particularly annoying on this issue, as he claims to speak as an Evangelical Christian, and yet supported SSM right up until the Obergefell decision, and then changed his mind when he saw the result. Which a blind man should have seen coming, quite frankly.
I think that I understand the problem (at least, I consider it a problem from my perspective). Radical individualism has been so successful that a significant majority of purportedly conservative thinkers are not really conservative at all. They are libertarian. They think that they are conserving America’s founding principles, and they are historically wrong about this.
Their historical error is demonstrated by the fact that, on virtually every policy issue relating to marriage, family, and sexuality, the overwhelming legal consensus across the country favored the traditional conservative position until the 1960s. Abortion, homosexuality, divorce, illegitimacy, and cross-dressing were all disfavored, often by criminal sanction.
My libertarian friends are free to disagree with these traditional values. But when they disagree, yet claim to be preserving the founding principles of America, I think that they are stating a falsehood.
I watched that MP movie last year and was amazed at the scene with the man wanting to be called “Loretta” (I think it was). Reality was still a strong argument against absurdity at that point.
Yes, much of what has been troubling me about the transgender rights movement is that it writes the unique creative capacity of women out of the story. Not to mention that it relies on gender stereotypes rather than biological sex as the key markers of gender identity. What happened to women and men being free to live as they choose without having to fit into rigid stereotypes?
Possibly more to come later…