It’s controversial on the right. It’s controversial on the left. And to both, it’s too obvious to dispute.
A recent video made by Massachusetts-area transgender teacher Ray Skyer during an “identity share” Zoom session with kindergartners rather starkly highlights this viewpoint. Skyer, who teaches at a public charter school, explains that when he was a child, his parents and other people wrongly thought he was a girl:
So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or girl, based on what they look like. And most of the time that guess is 100 percent correct—there are no issues whatsoever. But sometimes the doctor is wrong; the doctor makes an incorrect guess. When a doctor makes a correct guess, that’s when a person is called cisgender. When a doctor’s guess is wrong that’s when they are transgender.
Should kindergartners be taught that doctors are making a guess about whether a baby is a boy or girl? After explaining why the efforts to legislate the problem away fail, Cathy Young goes on to explain why that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.
What’s so controversial? While some of the objections have focused on elementary-school materials that include overly explicit descriptions of sexual anatomy, proposed lesson plans dealing with gender identity issues have been a particular lightning rod. Thus, a cartoon video on “Puberty and Transgender Youth” suggested by one local school board as potential viewing material for fifth graders casually discusses the use of puberty blockers and shows a character experiencing anxiety because of by bodily changes (and apparently using a chest binder to hide developing breasts) and getting an injection of puberty blockers.
It’s not that schools haven’t stuck their nose into ideology in the past, which is why kids pledge allegiance to the flag, but is there a distinction to be made about teaching tolerance and teaching elementary school students about the merits of puberty blockers? Are parents rightfully concerned that this isn’t why they send their children to school?
Let’s stipulate that these are difficult subjects to teach, that these are contentious subjects for communities to debate, and that education can play a part in improving the mental health outcomes for transgender individuals. But even a liberal who believes that tolerance requires teaching first and second graders about transgender identities is likely to find these texts rather baffling. The lesson plans do not say that some people, including kids, feel their inner sense of their gender does not match their biological sex or their genitals; rather, the claim is that for some unspecified reason some boys happen to have parts that “some people” associate with girls, and vice versa. This text reflects what has become activist orthodoxy in recent years: that transgender women or girls do not transition from male to female but were always women or girls who happened to be misgendered (and, conversely, trans men and boys were always men/boys). Hence the widespread adoption of the phrase “assigned male/female at birth,” among other terminological shifts.
The problem seems to be that failure to incorporate ideological truisms such as “assigned male/female at birth” or substituting “menstruators” or “birthing persons” for women is deemed erasure of trans and nonbinary people by definition. There is no neutral, non-ideological, way to go that won’t offend or outrage one side or the other.
Is there any middle ground to be had here, that won’t denigrate gender atypical people while not introducing young students to controversial ideologically driven notions? Can schools teach tolerance without teaching students that doctors are just guessing about their gender?
Unfortunately, our toxic political scene is the worst possible arena to address these complicated issues. Right now, the right is screaming “groomer” at anyone who believes sexuality and gender identity should be even mentioned in a school setting, while the left is screaming “murderer of trans kids” at anyone who thinks we should be careful about letting a 16-year-old get a mastectomy to fit a male or nonbinary gender identity.
While many find ourselves in the purgatory between these “toxic” positions, is there an argument to be made where everyone can live and let live? Or is this a zero sum game, where one side wins and the other gets crushed, which is how both extremes have crafted their positions?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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The issue is that schools are not teaching facts, but rather promoting a view of how to think.
Imagine this view being taught:
“Some people debate what it means to be a man or a woman, or male or female; how to apply those categories to others; and what criteria should be used when people disagree about classification.
There is particular debate about how those categories should play out in things which are set aside for the special protection of women, such as woman-specific bathrooms, rape clinics, prisons, special scholarships, or sports.
You’re welcome to form your own views about those things, whether or not others disagree. The most important points are these: 1) you can think and act as you wish in your personal life, no matter what sex or gender you may be; 2) you should recognize that people are different, and that some people may wish to change their sex or gender, or assert they have already changed it; 3) you should strive to be kind and polite to all people in ordinary social settings, whatever opinion you have about their choices; 4) you should demand they are kind and polite to you; and 5) you may adhere to your own views on sex and gender, even if other folks don’t like them.”
Of course this would never fly. That is because the schools don’t want to teach that “it is polite to refer to Johnny as Jane, and it is polite to treat ‘Jane’ as a girl when it’s easily possible to do so.” They want to teach that there IS NO Johnny; that Jane IS a girl; and that this must be reflected in thoughts as well as politeness.
That’s crazy talk.
“I just want to say, can we all get along?” R. King
The answer is, apparently, no.
As the parent of an adult trans woman, I sometimes find myself in a difficult position. I love my child and I want her to be happy, but I’m sometimes concerned that her transition is more motivated by social pressure than by reality.(she attended and graduated from University of Texas at Austin, need I say more?). More importantly for this debate, I cannot help feel that the current emphasis on “gender education” in elementary schools is misguided, and I am strongly opposed to teaching some of the crap that’s being proposed to be taught to 1st, 2nd or 5th graders.
Moreover, I firmly believe that the current craze on the Left to oppose ANY attempt to regulate use of puberty blockers and reassignment surgery of minors is a form of child abuse. (But of course, I can’t say so in front of my daughter without her becoming hysterical).
Why can’t we just teach that everyone is different in their own way and we should respect others as individuals? Or is that too reactionary for the Progressives?
It is Zero Sum. The schools have decided they raise the children and school ideology supersedes the ideology of the parents. Based on allegations in a recent MA lawsuit, the librarian at Baird Middle School made the determinationn an 11 and 12 year old are trans. The school went with it and intentionally hid this from their respective parents.
I don’t know how we’re going to have public education in this country if the relationship between schools and parents becomes essentially adversarial. The idea of public education is built on trust and on a mutual conception of what a basic education entails; if that doesn’t exist, parents will eventually pull their kids out of school or even refuse to pay taxes and vote to defund schools.
Not so much a comment, but an observation or reading: The agitation for all this is imagination together with the concept of freedom in the American democratic society (which often takes crazy forms) and the often allied traditional idea of self, or that one has a “self”. How to deal with all this?; which is obviously shifty and shifting, nearly continually. Who knows? Sex/sexuality is always a volatile subject.
E. g., I’m free to be me — whee — even though I don’t have a clue who I am.
You’re free to be you, unless you’re a preadolescent in public school whom the faculty has decided should be someone else. Then they will force you into the mold they have chosen and damned what you or your parents want or think.
Trans happens, but let the kids explore and decide for themselves and quit forcing them to make irreversible changes based on transitional development phases and curiosity at an age where their development and personality is not fully gelled. There is always time to transition, but never time to go back if it turns out to not really be the case.
Thanks for the reply — apropos. What gets me is that adults — adults!, or maybe I misspeak — are not recognizing, or better, not admitting, that what their presuming to deal with — arrogantly dealing with for the ideologues — is the period of transition, as you note. I’m old enough to remember when adults (yes, adults!) used to respect such a time of transition, and be tolerant, concerned, mindful, informative. I’m seeing little of this from the so-called professional educators. Most of this is with the parents — hence the mean-spirited denigration of them by many. and cynical misrepresentation of them by many and throughout the media. Ultimately though, I don’t see how the implication that parents are not concerned about their children no matter what the situation or context — i.e., even the classroom — is going to get very far politically or culturally. This doesn’t mean that there are not strenuous, determined efforts to be made by parents. But enough for now — sex and transitional periods for persons such as youth, adolescence, divorce, are fraught topics.
If the issue weren’t crafted as zero sum it wouldn’t have the leverage to be a good culture war divider. It’s troll nation, and the most effective warpaths will encourage the principled objection of one side in proportion to the self-righteousness of the other.
Divide and conquer 101: superiority demands an out-group or it stops functioning as superiority. See Dr. Suess’s Sneetches. Unlike Groucho, partisans do not want to join a club that would have most people as members. Gotta give them compelling reasons to stay out, and with their erasure of sex-based concerns (i.e., feminism before it was co-opted) they’re doing a bang-up job.
The Babylon Bee takes on the same question today and perfectly encapsulates in their title how at least one old goat feels about this question. “18-Year-Old Trying To File Her Taxes Wishing Her Teachers Had Spent Less Class Time On Polyqueer Trans Theory.”
Even engaging with the extremes is difficult enough, let alone deciding a victor, but I do think a middle ground or compromise is possible yet. It would take everyone leaving something behind that they now hold dear, but it’s the way it goes.
Easy enough for me to say with no dogs in the fight, or so I’m told, but I have my own sort of kennel still.
Whatever you would like to say about what’s being taught in schools one way or the other, it is still knowledge. Some people sincerely believe these things to be true, so it’s useful to know about them if for no other reason than to try to understand the people that believe these things. Then perhaps Catholic schooling prepared me for this sort of being taught one thing and believing another well. I don’t know.
I’ve been away too long to have anything harsh or funny or illuminating to say, and I’m trying my own sort of maximal kindness these days. Communicating and compromising are hard as hell, especially when the opposing sides seem as far apart as they are. The emotions this topic raises can be white hot and deeply personal.
It’s annoying my fellow commenters so far are seeming to buy into the idea that this is zero sum. That won’t lead anywhere good. We have to make sure words like “groomer” and “murderer” still mean something if we want to address those very real problems too.
It’s more tail wagging the dog, spawned by the do-gooder conviction that children must be taught to “empathize” with every tiny little splinter group of statistically anomalous people. Well, actually just the ones who have been recognized by the passionate as “marginalized.”
The main function of religion is to limit the expression of human sexuality using the social control emotions of guilt and shame. One consequence is the concern to limit children’s knowledge about sex and reproduction in case they will start practising it, In primitive tribal societies this may have been possible but in societies with writing, books magazines etc it is impossible. However the attempt to do so results in most people being neurotic about sex some to to an extreme level. Have you ever wondered about those 80 year old bachelors and spinsters who never marry. Some may just have a low libido but some have absorbed enough religious brainwashing that guilt and shame prevents them ever having anything to do with sex.
Twofer Tuesday.
SHG.
This post may seem off topic but it is part of a much longer argument relevant to your original post. I would appreciate a reply but you do not need to accept it, you have my email address and can reply that way from a disposable gmail address. This time I am not putting the full argument into one post but splitting into a sequence of bite sized ones.
When I left school I was of the belief that any sexual activity was cause for extreme guilt and extreme shame. If I found a girl attractive I would go to considerable lengths to avoid her. How did I get this weird belief which I know is silly but still have? It was the taboo about letting children know anything about sex. Now a taboo is a very strong negative message and to the extent that the the taboo itself was incomplete I filled in the gaps with messages from religious antisex crusaders like the Welfare and Decency League and Mary Whitehouse. I never once spoke about sex to any adults including my parents who died at 93 and 95 years or any teachers so I never spoke to anyone who could have argued that my beliefs were silly. In early 1990 I accidentally married a really nice girl from China who was only in the country for sixth months to study English. My next door neighbour was a Masters Student in Oceanography who got residence in Australia after the Tiananmen massacre and he brought his girlfriend out and they married. Sometime later the wife’s little sister came out mainly for a visit but ostensibly to learn English at one of the private English colleges that were proliferating at the time to exploit foreign (mainly Chinese) students. Because she was only staying for six months I thought it was safe to make friends with her as an experiment, normally I only made friends of females who were off limits for being too young or in a relationship or not attractive to me. I thought Xiao Mei was safe for being only in the country for 6 months so I experimented with making friend with a girl to whom I was actually attracted. Within two weeks we were living together and in 4 months we were married and before this I believe love at first site to be both imaginary and absurd. I was astonished to find that my wife actually enjoyed sex as I had always believed that homo sapiens sapiens females found sex revolting disgusting and to be something to which they only submitted from a bloody minded determination to produce offspring. I found that I on the other hand did not enjoy sex from a fear of appearing to other people to be too interested in it. Masturbation or sex play with people unlikely to tell, namely boys of own (primary school) age with whom I discussed the mystery of girls monthly bleeding.
I loathe Christianity but now believe other religions are worse. No human religions is compatible with normal expression of sexuality. Humans are living things and there is no essential difference in function between a virus, a human and a blue whale. They all are produced by natural selection to reproduce their kind, anything else is superfluous. Most humans succeed in reproducing but there are a minority that are so screwed up that they do not reproduce or can only express sex alongside hate. A considerable number of homo sapiens sapiens males hate females to whom they are attracted because they are full of religion derived guilt and shame. This explains incels rapists and serial killers.
The guilt/shame/fear ideology that humans need in order to protect children from knowledge of sex drives the culture war. Both sides in my opinion are equally silly. Both sides in the war are doing psychological damage to children. There is truth in the argument that some children at birth are of indeterminate sex but they are EXCEEDINGLY few. The current wave of sexual dysphoria may be due in part to woke trans ideology brainwashing, part due to a fad and part due to the strong need by some children to be interesting and cool by being different. But the antitrans people are doing the same damage that religion has always been doing.
Not sure what it is that calls for a reply, Carlyle. If you needed to get this out of you, here it is. It doesn’t have anything to do with the post, but TT rules apply.
It does have something to do with your post. The culture war about sex in schools is but one more sympton of religiosity caused dysfunction in the human race. All humans are messed up about sex and they project their neuroticism onto others. There is hierarchy of sexual demonology. People who only have sex inside marriage for the bloody minded determination to produce children despise those who do sex for pleasure who in turn …… at the bottom are extreme sexual deviants who can only do sex with under age arthropods of the same sex.
Not all humans are equally troubled but some definitely are and this explains everything from anti pornography crusaders to serial killers.
I did not realize my cold streak could be attributed to the above. I will have playing in my head for the rest of the day Luke Kelly’s “Hand Me Down My Bible”.
Just want to say that I love Tuesday Talk. Seeing this small cross-section of humanity is one of the better parts of my week….yes I know, sad life.
What’s a good beginner entry level scotch for an inexperienced drinker?
Glenfiddich 12
Excellent choice. Glenfiddich has the added benefit of if you pass out drunk on your couch and the bottle on the floor gets knocked over then it won’t roll away too far. Specifically designed with this intent in mind.
A while back I was out riding my bicycle when I stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Glenfiddich 12. I put the bottle in the basket on my bike and realized, if I fall off the bike the bottle will break on the pavement. Didn’t want that to happen, so I drank the scotch. Good thing I did, because I fell off my bike about a dozen times on the way home.
As a former professional drinker I would second this…..
Thanks!
I think most people(normal people, not twitter people) would agree that kids need to learn about things like sex and gender and identity at some point in time, but kindergarten ain’t that time. It seems like talking to 1st graders about calculus. They don’t understand the point, they don’t know what any of the words mean, and they would rather go play.
There is a reason concepts taught in school get increasingly difficult, and a reason that kids are not allowed to make a lot of major decisions for themselves. I would bet that a sufficiently determined lunatic could convince a middle school kid of almost anything, including that they are really the opposite sex and should consent, or even demand, surgery to “fix” themselves.
This seems to be yet another instance of Progressives dictating to various groups how they are supposed to feel, similar to how the Civil Rights movement was fucked over by affluent, well-meaning whites telling Blacks how they should respond to issues instead of, I dunno, actually listening to what Blacks had to say. Actual trans people are being fucked over by cisgendered trans activists who are hell-bent on pushing all remotely related issues into an all-or-nothing worldview of how trans people should live. It’s just an ideological war at this point, which is why the vitriol is dialed up to 11 when folks like Chappelle or JK Rowling speak up an say “hey, slow down here, maybe we need to approach this rationally here…” If there’s anything to be learned from transgender issues, it’s that maybe putting people into boxes isn’t a great idea. But the activists insist on just pumping trans kids with puberty blockers and lopping off body parts of 13 year olds, all so they can be forced into a completely different box.
It’s the height of lunacy to declare that your outsides don’t dictate your true self, only to turn around and push folks to change their outsides to match their true selves. That clear and obvious conflict should be a massive red flag of cognitive dissonance, but Progressives won’t let you dare discuss it, cause you’re “not being a good ally.” Fuck that. A “good ally” would let trans people figure out what they actually need, instead of dictating it to them.