"It’s hard to fathom how or why anyone could have so much hate in their heart that they would want to put kids in danger.."
Nah, not really. Because in their little safety bubble, they're doing no such thing. They're convinced they're out there bravely SAVING poor innocent widdle bebes who have been Groomed and Influenced into believing something that is *not true*, because of course there is no such thing as being trans and being gay is only a sinful choice. So of course parents should know that their precious Jaydens and Kayleighs are under attack. How else can they save them with the redemptive healing power of Jeezus H Key-riste?!
Yes, that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? People who work with children are required to report signs of bodily harm, like abuse and drug use. So these teachers think, should I not also report harm to the child's eternal soul? The problem is, this belief that a child is in danger is a particular religious belief, and has no place in a public school.
People tend to forget that the entire West Coast is deep blue next to the ocean and then trends purple to red the farther east you go, so California needs laws to restrain the Xtian and Conservaturd busybodies that think that it's their calling to police everyone else's sexuality.
It's weird how someone's "firmly held religious belief" always involves forcing someone else to adhere to that belief. Don't believe birth control is moral, fine, don't use birth control. But if you are a clerk selling birth control as well as may other things, you sell the birth control or find another profession. The same is true for trans kids. It's not your job to convert them.
"You might not think that this would be an issue in California, but since July of 2023, more than a dozen school districts there have passed statutes requiring schools to tell parents if a child wishes to change their pronouns, use a different restroom, etc..."
California might be a deep blue state these past thirty-odd years, but we're also a state that's big enough and diverse enough to be a nation-in-waiting. We were also the home of modern conservatism in my adult lifetime. Our forthright Dem-dominant political environment might seem like a bedrock fact of life, but it's still younger than all four of my children. Our citizens have hard lines we refuse to cross when it comes to right-wing persecutions, but a lot of these newer issues are still contentious.
See, when you encourage people to have all the fertility treatments they need to produce their own personal bloodline replicants who can be trained Rightly, then you tell the kids that the old folks are fuddy-duddies with no particular expectation to know what's up with them ... well, bitter conflict can be expected, is what I'm saying. Sad.
So in my ongoing quest to understand people (a failure thus far but I keep trying,) I discuss things like this with people who are my friends and acquaintances. School district reports of gender nonconformity are like parental notification laws for abortion. For some of these friends, they would want to be told so they could help their child through a challenging time.
They initially view these laws without giving a second thought to the fact that all children are not safe in their homes.
For the good friends, the ones I keep, it takes a single mention of this reality for them to realize the problem here, and they stop arguing.
For the bad ones, it’s like those stupid “single parent families are poorer so we should encourage everyone to marry”, “post the Ten Commandments” problem-solvers of the GOP. They can’t remove their heads from the “ideal” situation that they believe is what the law should assume. That is how badly they want to be the norm: because having known only supportive environments, they flat out refuse to believe many families are not that. They never get it because they don’t want to.
A dear friend of mine just lost their transgender child to suicide. I am very sad to me that this child (they were 17yo) took their own life because they were gender transitional.
The saddest part was that, until they took their own innocent life, it was a story of acceptance and understanding.
I know that they had all the love and care and support that their parents, especially my friend, (their mother) could give them, here in the state of Colorado where their rights were respected and protected by law.
They recently began attending university at a liberal arts school in Oregon, another state with a solid record of acceptance and social tolerance. Of course, as we all know, bigotry and intolerance can raise its ugly head anywhere at any time. I have no idea what ugliness this beautiful child might have had to experience in their short and tragic life or what circumstances lead them to believe that suicide was the solution.
I know my friend is blaming herself and wondering what she did wrong, or didn’t do right enough, to save her child’s life, an emotional trap that I’m sure many of us could easily fall into.
I write this to honor my extraordinary friend and her beautiful, sensitive, beloved child.
This war on on children that are nonconforming, transitional or simply too emotionally sensitive to understand the bigotry, hatred, and intolerance that is directed at them, on a daily basis, by people who so emotionally stunted, politically cynical, or just too goddamned stupid and ignorant to understand what a diverse and magical place this world is and could be, must end.
I once worked with someone whose child transitioned in high school and he was the last to find out. The person who in his mind was his oldest son, future football player, following in his dad's footsteps was actually his oldest daughter. When he spoke about it, he was accepting and loving, but it also sounded as if the young woman needed some space to define herself away from her dad. He loved her and accepted her, but she needed to figure it out away from him. And the school gave her that space. It is not always drama. Sometimes young people just need a safe environment to explore who they are on their own
Apparently times actually have changed some things. I cannot conceive being willing to tell one of my (long ago) teachers anything about my sexuality, whether or not there was anything non-mainstream about it. But all that was far from my main concern when I was in public school anyway.
'Plenty in the hidden room below the coal cellar. Help yourself Gestapo Grupenfuhrer Himmler! We also have some American and British soldiers we're hiding too!'
'So many! Is your truck working?'
'Nope - no petrol'
'You have shovels then?'
I assume that the other part of the 1st Amendment is shutting the fuck up when you should.
My religious teaches that marriage is between two or more people who support public education. It violates my First Amendment Rights for the government to say Republicans can get "married."
In a nutshell, if your kid feels safer telling a teacher than you about their sexuality/gender identity, you’re a shitty parent, no matter the eventual outcome.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I'd imagine a lot of kids expect the worst from their parents, just because they're the parents and parents overreact when you don't put your laundry in the hamper, y'know?
This reminds me about how my fifth grader was discussing unplanned pregnancy recently. She and her friend had talked themselves up into believing that if either of them had sex and were pregnant teenagers, their parents would be SO ANGRY. I had to just disagree calmly and then come back to the conversation later, to make sure she understood: we would NOT be angry if she had sex as a teenager, we would NOT be angry if she were a pregnant teenager. That we understood that teenagers are likely to have sex, and we hope she will choose to have safe sex, and we were happy to help her access information about that. That sometimes people get pregnant who are very young and unmarried, and that while we might be sad about that, we would want to help her decide what she would want to do, because it would be her decision. And the difficulty in making that decision would be why we would be sad, because that’s hard. But at no point would we be angry at her!
What would make my kid think that as open, atheist, non-authoritarian parents who are willing to talk about just about anything, even the hard things, we would be angry at her for choosing to have sex as a teenager, when we have always discussed that teenagers often want to have sex, is beyond me. It’s a reminder that they don’t get all their information from us.
I always tell my kid that it is okay if she doesn’t want to talk to me about something, and here are the people school makes available for her to talk to, and here are friends’ parents who are good eggs too. I know teachers are mandated reporters, but I would hope that if she came to one of them on a sensitive topic, they’d be willing to help her without telling me before she was ready to do so herself.
To begin with, how does a teacher know that a kid is gay? Because I doubt a lot of teachers catch students actually having sex. Is it up to a teacher's discretion? Does the student simply need to behave in stereotypically gay ways to get "outed" to their parents?
I understand that but that doesn't answer my question.
Unless the student tells them, how does the teacher KNOW that a student is gay? They don't. So they'll almost certainly be "outing" kids who don't conform to standard gender norms, regardless of whether those kids are gay or not.
Teachers know a lot of things about kids they teach. They spend more awake time with them than their actual parents do 5 days out of every 7 for up to 3/4 of the year. I’m pretty sure my high school teachers knew I was gay even though I didn’t tell anyone until college. (Plus the kids these days are coming out way before they have sex… like as young as elementary school in some cases.)
I just worry that overzealous teachers will start "outing" kids who aren't sufficiently hetero or cis for them.
Teachers may suspect, they may think they know, they may have heard other kids talking, they may even be right in their suspicions a lot of the time. But unless the kid comes out to them directly, they don't KNOW...and if you're going to out a kid, you really ought to KNOW.
"It’s hard to fathom how or why anyone could have so much hate in their heart that they would want to put kids in danger.."
Nah, not really. Because in their little safety bubble, they're doing no such thing. They're convinced they're out there bravely SAVING poor innocent widdle bebes who have been Groomed and Influenced into believing something that is *not true*, because of course there is no such thing as being trans and being gay is only a sinful choice. So of course parents should know that their precious Jaydens and Kayleighs are under attack. How else can they save them with the redemptive healing power of Jeezus H Key-riste?!
Yes, that's the crux of the matter, isn't it? People who work with children are required to report signs of bodily harm, like abuse and drug use. So these teachers think, should I not also report harm to the child's eternal soul? The problem is, this belief that a child is in danger is a particular religious belief, and has no place in a public school.
People tend to forget that the entire West Coast is deep blue next to the ocean and then trends purple to red the farther east you go, so California needs laws to restrain the Xtian and Conservaturd busybodies that think that it's their calling to police everyone else's sexuality.
Fuck the ghost of Ronald Reagan.
It's weird how someone's "firmly held religious belief" always involves forcing someone else to adhere to that belief. Don't believe birth control is moral, fine, don't use birth control. But if you are a clerk selling birth control as well as may other things, you sell the birth control or find another profession. The same is true for trans kids. It's not your job to convert them.
"You might not think that this would be an issue in California, but since July of 2023, more than a dozen school districts there have passed statutes requiring schools to tell parents if a child wishes to change their pronouns, use a different restroom, etc..."
California might be a deep blue state these past thirty-odd years, but we're also a state that's big enough and diverse enough to be a nation-in-waiting. We were also the home of modern conservatism in my adult lifetime. Our forthright Dem-dominant political environment might seem like a bedrock fact of life, but it's still younger than all four of my children. Our citizens have hard lines we refuse to cross when it comes to right-wing persecutions, but a lot of these newer issues are still contentious.
See, when you encourage people to have all the fertility treatments they need to produce their own personal bloodline replicants who can be trained Rightly, then you tell the kids that the old folks are fuddy-duddies with no particular expectation to know what's up with them ... well, bitter conflict can be expected, is what I'm saying. Sad.
So in my ongoing quest to understand people (a failure thus far but I keep trying,) I discuss things like this with people who are my friends and acquaintances. School district reports of gender nonconformity are like parental notification laws for abortion. For some of these friends, they would want to be told so they could help their child through a challenging time.
They initially view these laws without giving a second thought to the fact that all children are not safe in their homes.
For the good friends, the ones I keep, it takes a single mention of this reality for them to realize the problem here, and they stop arguing.
For the bad ones, it’s like those stupid “single parent families are poorer so we should encourage everyone to marry”, “post the Ten Commandments” problem-solvers of the GOP. They can’t remove their heads from the “ideal” situation that they believe is what the law should assume. That is how badly they want to be the norm: because having known only supportive environments, they flat out refuse to believe many families are not that. They never get it because they don’t want to.
I knew Roger Benitez. He was the father of a friend I had growing up. This ruling did not surprise me in the least. 😐
A dear friend of mine just lost their transgender child to suicide. I am very sad to me that this child (they were 17yo) took their own life because they were gender transitional.
The saddest part was that, until they took their own innocent life, it was a story of acceptance and understanding.
I know that they had all the love and care and support that their parents, especially my friend, (their mother) could give them, here in the state of Colorado where their rights were respected and protected by law.
They recently began attending university at a liberal arts school in Oregon, another state with a solid record of acceptance and social tolerance. Of course, as we all know, bigotry and intolerance can raise its ugly head anywhere at any time. I have no idea what ugliness this beautiful child might have had to experience in their short and tragic life or what circumstances lead them to believe that suicide was the solution.
I know my friend is blaming herself and wondering what she did wrong, or didn’t do right enough, to save her child’s life, an emotional trap that I’m sure many of us could easily fall into.
I write this to honor my extraordinary friend and her beautiful, sensitive, beloved child.
This war on on children that are nonconforming, transitional or simply too emotionally sensitive to understand the bigotry, hatred, and intolerance that is directed at them, on a daily basis, by people who so emotionally stunted, politically cynical, or just too goddamned stupid and ignorant to understand what a diverse and magical place this world is and could be, must end.
It must end!
I once worked with someone whose child transitioned in high school and he was the last to find out. The person who in his mind was his oldest son, future football player, following in his dad's footsteps was actually his oldest daughter. When he spoke about it, he was accepting and loving, but it also sounded as if the young woman needed some space to define herself away from her dad. He loved her and accepted her, but she needed to figure it out away from him. And the school gave her that space. It is not always drama. Sometimes young people just need a safe environment to explore who they are on their own
Apparently times actually have changed some things. I cannot conceive being willing to tell one of my (long ago) teachers anything about my sexuality, whether or not there was anything non-mainstream about it. But all that was far from my main concern when I was in public school anyway.
I think they noticed more than we gave them credit for.
Teachers in junior high school were apparently aware I was depressive before anyone else, including myself.
'Herr Van Vries. Any Jews on zis property?'
'Plenty in the hidden room below the coal cellar. Help yourself Gestapo Grupenfuhrer Himmler! We also have some American and British soldiers we're hiding too!'
'So many! Is your truck working?'
'Nope - no petrol'
'You have shovels then?'
I assume that the other part of the 1st Amendment is shutting the fuck up when you should.
Brilliant. Thank you, Robyn!
My religious teaches that marriage is between two or more people who support public education. It violates my First Amendment Rights for the government to say Republicans can get "married."
In a nutshell, if your kid feels safer telling a teacher than you about their sexuality/gender identity, you’re a shitty parent, no matter the eventual outcome.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I'd imagine a lot of kids expect the worst from their parents, just because they're the parents and parents overreact when you don't put your laundry in the hamper, y'know?
This reminds me about how my fifth grader was discussing unplanned pregnancy recently. She and her friend had talked themselves up into believing that if either of them had sex and were pregnant teenagers, their parents would be SO ANGRY. I had to just disagree calmly and then come back to the conversation later, to make sure she understood: we would NOT be angry if she had sex as a teenager, we would NOT be angry if she were a pregnant teenager. That we understood that teenagers are likely to have sex, and we hope she will choose to have safe sex, and we were happy to help her access information about that. That sometimes people get pregnant who are very young and unmarried, and that while we might be sad about that, we would want to help her decide what she would want to do, because it would be her decision. And the difficulty in making that decision would be why we would be sad, because that’s hard. But at no point would we be angry at her!
What would make my kid think that as open, atheist, non-authoritarian parents who are willing to talk about just about anything, even the hard things, we would be angry at her for choosing to have sex as a teenager, when we have always discussed that teenagers often want to have sex, is beyond me. It’s a reminder that they don’t get all their information from us.
I always tell my kid that it is okay if she doesn’t want to talk to me about something, and here are the people school makes available for her to talk to, and here are friends’ parents who are good eggs too. I know teachers are mandated reporters, but I would hope that if she came to one of them on a sensitive topic, they’d be willing to help her without telling me before she was ready to do so herself.
Yay Cali🥳
To begin with, how does a teacher know that a kid is gay? Because I doubt a lot of teachers catch students actually having sex. Is it up to a teacher's discretion? Does the student simply need to behave in stereotypically gay ways to get "outed" to their parents?
Well, bring gay is not just about having sex.
I understand that but that doesn't answer my question.
Unless the student tells them, how does the teacher KNOW that a student is gay? They don't. So they'll almost certainly be "outing" kids who don't conform to standard gender norms, regardless of whether those kids are gay or not.
Teachers know a lot of things about kids they teach. They spend more awake time with them than their actual parents do 5 days out of every 7 for up to 3/4 of the year. I’m pretty sure my high school teachers knew I was gay even though I didn’t tell anyone until college. (Plus the kids these days are coming out way before they have sex… like as young as elementary school in some cases.)
I just worry that overzealous teachers will start "outing" kids who aren't sufficiently hetero or cis for them.
Teachers may suspect, they may think they know, they may have heard other kids talking, they may even be right in their suspicions a lot of the time. But unless the kid comes out to them directly, they don't KNOW...and if you're going to out a kid, you really ought to KNOW.
Juvenile lawyers? I remember one kid who filed for divorce from his parents. Can that become a thing?
In some places, it already is (emancipation).