weeeeeeeeelllllllllll........ These outliers cover ALL major school districts that our big cities run. And let's not forget leftwing woke white advocates in suburbs. So a majority of students are those outliers so I don't know if I agree with you. But I bet we encounter the same problem we encounter everywhere: tiny blue enclaves vs. everyone.
I honestly think this is more apt to happen in affluent suburbs than urban districts. I live directly outside of Philadelphia. Schools in Philly have much larger issues to contend with than teaching children about gender. I ask my friends who teach in Philly versus the suburbs about the number of trans students they have and it seems far higher in more affluent and white districts.
I literally have no idea what you're responding to, but it's nothing in this piece. I am just absolutely baffled by your comment and highly doubt you read this post.
No, genuinely - what on earth are you responding to? Find me a single sentence in this piece that suggests that I think that LGBTQ rights are secured. Copy and paste it. Your position here is so, so bizarre; you're responding to nothing. Quote some stuff, now.
"Freddie, this piece is written from a completely ahistorical place where the only thing queer kids have to worry about is their school being silent on the topic"
What the fuck are you talking about? COPY AND PASTE QUOTES. I said literally nothing like that!
Okay. At any rate, I'm out. Like I'm not going to sit here wasting my time arguing with a thin-skinned writer who probably shouldn't have comments turned on. Good luck to you.
I really appreciate you pointing out that no one is harmed by texts referencing traumatic human experiences, but rather the fact of and possibility of those events in their own lives and the lives of people they care about. If slavery were an imagined fiction that never happened in history, teaching stories that include it would be like teaching science fiction about time travel or aliens -- still interesting, still compelling, but entirely metaphorical from the perspective of the reader. But people’s exploitation of other people, for labor or power or conquest, is all too real, and these agonies of human life demand our attention - putting fingers in ears and singing la la la to hard reality (whatever that term might mean to you personally) only makes things worse. I fear people have internalized too well the network-“wisdom” that virality is truth, and that control of the “narrative” means controlling what is and is not. I teach college students and fwiw the reality in my classrooms is nothing like what the culture wars suggest. In over 20 years of teaching I’ve never been asked for a trigger warning or topic based accommodation, nor have I been directed that certain texts are off limits. I know it happens, but I don’t think it is the norm🤞🏼
My YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most challenged and banned books of the last 20 years. According to the American Library Association, my novel was the most banned and challenged book in the United States in the decade 2010-2019. So I have more personal experience with the right wing's vilification of books and writers than just about everybody. But I'm also highly aware of the way the left censors and silences writers. And a lot of this silencing and censoring happens before a book is even published, with sensitivity readers who demand changes based on ever-shifting moral standards and definitions of "triggers" and, more dangerously, by creating an environment where writers silence and censor themselves because they fear professional and personal excommunication. As I've written elsewhere, the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.
Having read your book, I laughed my ass off when it popped up on the banned book lists. If those morons actually read the book, as opposed to the odd paragraph here and there that said something salty....oh never mind....don't get me started.
It's a wonderful book by the way--even our fiction-hating son admitted that it was a good story.
You wrote a very good YA novel, with one very icky paragraph about masturbation. This one little paragraph didn't make your novel, and probably did much to detract from it. Its almost as if this were a contrived piece--ordered by your publisher--for the purpose of eliciting a ratings spike by being controversial. Oh how avant-garde is grooming.
But what does an adult leading children in a conversation about sexual proclivities really portend, but adults grooming children. There's a new safe term for enabling child abuse. This new term is intergenerational relationships. This coincides with the UN--that hotbed of evil--deciding to decriminalize child sex.
Go read Margarita Cat to learn how UN workers using UN programs recruit children from remote Java villages and traffic them into sex slavery.
And Mr. Alexie's experience should count for something, too. Some speculation follows.
Going through puberty, fifteen or so years later than Alexie, I was deeply ashamed of masturbation because adults kept telling me it was inappropriate, at best, or just outright morally corrupting. Typical midwestern upbringing, for that time, I think. Maybe Alexie was meant to feel shame at some point and wanted to let others know that masturbation is natural, fine, and healthy.
The right's over and inappropriate use of the word grooming is likely to desensitize everyone to the horribleness that is actual grooming.
The right isn’t alone. I believe Governor Cuomo was accused of “grooming” a full grown woman. You see other examples of this with older men and younger, but adult, women.
How is writing about masturbation in a YA novel grooming? Young adults masturbate. Why shouldn't novels targeted towards them reflect their experiences? How is writing a book that children are free to read or not read "leading a conversation."
Even in a case where adults are leading children in a conversation about sexual proclivities, I can imagine a lot of things that might portend besides adults grooming children. They might be concerned that the children are ignorant about sex and different sexual proclivities, and want to make sure that they are informed so they do it safely. They might want children to be knowledgeable about dating and being in relationships with other children.
In general most of the rhetoric against "grooming" is premised on bizarre falsehoods about how children and childhood works. They act as if children are inherently asexual until informed of sex by adults. They act as if children never want to have sex with other children or engage in sexualized play with other children. They act like the only reason adults would want to talk about sex with kids is to get the kids to have sex with them. They never say these things explicitly of course, because all of those premises are so blatantly idiotic that if they stated them baldly they would immediately lose every argument.
The thing about the UN decriminalizing child sex is just a lie some idiot made up. The very first link when you google that is fact checkers showing that the UN said no such thing.
I don't think that telling kids to keep secrets is good behavior, but it's quite easy to think of other motives about it besides grooming children for sex. The teachers likely believe that this is important information that kids need, but that some parents won't want their kids to learn about it because they are bigoted and controlling.
This is especially true for LGBT issues. Many parents really are controlling bigots who try to stop their children from learning that gay people even exist. And while very young kids are not interested in sex, they do get crushes and romantic feelings towards children their own age, so telling them some basic info about gay people will probably help many of them make sense of what they are feeling.
That being said, I quite agree with you that it's bad policy to keep secrets about the curriculum like that from parents, even if I think the teacher's motives for doing so are noble. It's not good to undermine trust in institutions, even if it's to help out kids with bigoted parents.
I would guess it was some combo of in-house political pressure and an attempt to market to a specific and “new” audience—an audience that I don’t think exists. I don’t think there was any demographic crying out for Roald Dahl rewrites.
I think it is about the many college educated people in institutions everywhere involved with posturing and larping themselves into “doing the work” of purifying the world according to their views of wrongthink and wrongwords. It is a mix of narcissism and artificial politics and raw authoritarianism. Awful.
I want to make it clear that the left and right are engaged in censorsing and silencing. The right is threatening to put librarians in jail! That's Soviet gulag behavior. That's American Mao! When it comes to authoritarian behavior, the far left and far right are fraternal twins.
There should be a word for the current moral obligation to criticize the left only if you also criticize the right, and it better be in the same breath. I suppose it is from fear of being called a rightest, a fear of being expelled from the tribe, a fairly ritualized acknowledgement that there is no “us” without “them”. Or maybe it is a kind of think track that says the lesser evil must be appreciated and is more easily conserved if you always think of it relative to the more evil. I try to think of analogies. I cant say I love my husband without also saying I love my kids? It is a weird phenomenon and it feels very controlling.
I think Freddy has addressed this issue based on his own experience—of folks assuming that I'm on their "team." So I felt the need to assert my individuality. But I certainly get your point! Yup, we should coin a word for the phenomenon. Cancelophobia?
I was shocked when I learned it was banned. Then when I saw you post here, I had to look up why it was banned. Then I had to read it again, because I liked it well enough that I have a hard copy of it.
OK some people don't want their eight year olds reading about masturbation...but it's a young adult book.
I think you're right about the self censoring on the "liberal" side. I was shocked reading posts here that there even was such a thing as sensitivity readers. If people don't like what you've written, put the damn book down. Tell your friends you didn't like it because of xyz, but don't refuse to publish it.
If "sit down and shut the fuck up" isn't a position that works with kids (and any teacher will tell you that it doesn't), it sure as hell isn't going to work with those kids' parents.
Will the Democrats ever figure that out? Gimme a break! Just sit down and...
I agree with your views on access to information, I'm honestly basically an anarchist on the subject as well and think kids will be fine no matter what they read, but I think you're missing what the conservatives are trying to do. They think inclusion in a public school library implies tacit _approval_ of the ideas, and therefore should be banned from there. It's fine if kids learn about it, as long as they know it's not 'normal' and society doesn't approve.
I'm pretty sceptical whether this is even effective from a stigmatising perspective, and I don't really approve of centralised authorities agreeing on what the normative behaviour that should be presented to kids is. But I think the main thrust of their argument isn't about hiding its existence, but making it clear that mainstream society, as they see it, thinks it's morally wrong. And maybe there's a salutary value in kids discovering some 'forbiddne' knowledge on their own? But regardless, I think it's more about making it clear that certain things are _just not done_ by the right sort of people, rather than fully trying to hide their existence.
I think this is basically right, and I think all parents feel the same way--just in different directions. A book about "how to grow up and be a beef cattle farmer" is going to feel like tacit approval of our meat-eating culture to a vegetarian.
And this was essentially my problem with the treatment of transgenderism in our former school. In the book "I Am Jazz," Jazz's explanation for her transgenderism is that she was not a stereotypical boy--she liked rainbows and sparkles and playing with girls and didn't like soccer. That is literally all there is to it. When a teacher reads this to a class, it is a tacit approval of the idea that sparkles = girl and soccer = boy.
I'm on board with everything you wrote except for one thing: we cannot, as a society, avoid normative ideals, which are at the heart of what culture is - even if some ideals are contradictory or in tension with one another.
Beyond that, I think there's a common, fundamental misunderstanding about what authorities can even accomplish in terms of propagating normative standards or stigmatizing various behaviors: it's hard to teach "empathy" effectively, for example (as suggested elsewhere in the comments here), because kids (people, really) internalize the values of people they respect and trust, which is usually only a subset of teachers.
My issue with this, like so many things culturally now is there is no room for shades of grey. Everything is black and white. You are either against children hearing that gay people exist OR you think 3 year olds should be defining their sexuality. There is no room for "gay people exist, they live among us, they are our neighbors, family members, friends. They work at the businesses we frequent, they are parents of students at your school etc.
My son is in first grade, he attends a K-4 school in our very progressive school district. Last week his school had a diversity festival after school that showed all kinds of diversity, racial, ethic, hair, hobbies and yes, gender and sexuality. I did not bring him to the high school's GSA table because their presentation was educating about all the flags and then asking children to make crafts that represent they flag of their identity. No sorry. Children that age don't understand what pansexual is and should not be trying to define themselves. We just visited his gay grandfather, our next door neighbors are a lesbian couple with two sons he plays with. He's asked them why they are two moms. This is how you expose and educate children about differences, not by asking them to identify their differences and wear it as a flag at the age of 6.
I think that many people internally hold more nuanced views, unfortunately if you are in a more left or right wing community (I consider myself on the left and so is my community) people are afraid to express those opinions.
This is exactly how I feel about it as the lesbian mom of a kindergartener. He shouldn't have to hide his family or the fact that two-mom families exist. (And we haven't had that issue. My wife and I visited his classroom for his birthday, so they all know he has 2 moms.)
But it's inappropriate to push young children to label themselves with various queer identities. It's also unnecessary. If you teach them that gay people exist, and that it's okay, they will be fine when they have a realization on their own.
This is how I also feel about straight couples who feel compelled to bring their children to Pride to expose them to gay people. How about we let people have their party and celebrate their community without gawking?
Exactly! I can't help wondering if the backlash by the right is because of all of the "allies" doing dumb shit like having five year olds color a flag that displays their identity (mine would have wondered where the dinosaur flag was), having drag queens read stories to preschoolers, and otherwise using LGBTQ people to show themselves how progressive they are. What they are doing is further "othering" by in effect saying "you're weird; look how accepting I am for accepting you." Feh.
As a gay dad with a kid in kindergarten I’m also exactly on the same page! I increasingly find the hyper identiarianism (is that a word? lol) exhausting and insufferable.
As a not-gay dad of small children, I think there's a flip side to obligate identitarianism* that's extremely disturbing. No, I won't be constructing a White identity for my kids, or teaching them to obsess over gender roles; are these people utterly ignorant of history?!
The blackpilled take would be that "default" identities are quite intentionally promoted as a basis for the secular reinvention of Original Sin.
*There's already a specific right-wing ideology called Identitarianism, but if "my" "side" can get away with redefining simple words like "racism" then I'm totally stealing this one.
writers on the left, such as Adolph Reed Jr, have been using "identitarianism" to describe this... whatever it is, for long time now. Recall Freddie's plea for a name?
"they will be fine when they have a realization on their own"
Well... yes... but. There are some realizations that, if they're going to have them at all, they're much better off having earlier in life. If the "queer identity" (sigh) they end up having is one that involves their gender not matching their physical sex, but they don't realize it until well past puberty, chances are they're going to wish someone had given them the information they needed to realize it sooner, before so many of those unwanted characteristics had developed.
It's a hypothesis, not a valid theory. The proponents of said hypothesis should perform a scientific study and publish their results in respected journals for peer-review. Then the hypothesis can become an objective fact, or theory, if the hypothesis passes scientific muster.
No one should fear the truth, but we can't be expected to accept as true all the guesswork that's flooding us in our brave new world.
And then you should look at the actual scientific studies posted at the SEGM website (the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine), because the WPATH "standards of care" are dangerous, and getting more so with each iteration.
"How can you know whether or not the changes produced by undergoing puberty are a positive or negative without undergoing puberty?"
Indeed. That's why puberty blockers aren't given until after puberty has already started. They block it from progressing, not from starting.
If you're the kind of person for whom the physical characteristics of your birth sex are going to be permanently unwanted, there's a good chance you'll recognize it as soon as they start to appear; you can see that in the writings of countless trans people, describing their own adolescence. You don't need to grow a full ZZ Top beard in order to know that seeing a masculine face in the mirror is going to bother you.
I think the question is whether feelings of alienation, dislocation, disgust, etc. are specific symptoms related to one condition rather than something generally experienced by humanity.
Either way I should warn you that the host here has a policy of not allowing discussion on trans issues in the comments and will punish offenders with a ban. For that reason I am bowing out.
`But it's inappropriate to push young children to label themselves with various queer identities. It's also unnecessary.'
Agreed. In the case of trans children, none of this is necessary at all---they know what they are or will figure it out themselves. All they need is for other children to understand that being trans is OK and not make fun of them for it. And achieving that does not require that all children be aware of the myriad of neo-gender identities now popular/available to them, which they cannot possibly understand.
Great comment. When I feel as though my culture is dogmatically asking me: well are you FOR x or y on this issue my usual feeling is well.. what does that mean? Does it mean providing exposure, relationship, experience, stories in enough space and support for children to consider, discover, respond? Or does it somehow suggest that a stake in the ground is a good thing at an early stage of their humanness?
You bring up a salient feature of our culture, which is that nuance is dismissed out of hand as weakness. You're obliged to support either x or y because to do anything else would be to betray those utterly convinced of the x or y position. As Freddie noted in his article on YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs, this is at the core of social capture. Anything else is fodder for sneering left irony.
And you're right to wonder if, in being exposed to ideas and realities, that children can decide for themselves how to feel about them or if they are being told WHAT to feel and how to react. Let them respond on their own and they'll grow up to be tolerant and kind.
I’m here in Evanston, Illinois and write a blog about our school district’s financial calamity. The biggest feedback that I get in liberal circles is something like: any criticism of the current liberal order means that you by default support all the conservative causes. Complaining about financial mismanagement is thus the same as supporting the banning of books. I’m trying really hard to break us out of this binary - we can be liberal and we can also support good governance. This binary is permitting a lot of bad behavior on the left that long run, is going to hurt the movement.
There are too many superintendents and board members with *skin in the game* when it comes to the culture war fights. Our current school board has 2 professional DEI consultants, 1 university DEI employee, and 1 state DEI employee. The superintendent finally just left after spending two years waging national culture war fights (moved to Dekalb County Georgia). The monetization of this movement has really poisoned the well.
They’re the only people with time on their hands in the post-COVID work era to do a volunteer school board job. Some % these DEI jobs are clearly political patronage roles.
The "make a flag of your sexual identity" is weird, but so is everyone calling my seven year old nephew's female friend "his girlfriend." Let's not speculate about children's sexuality -- whether straight, gay, bi, or pan -- and let them figure it out on their own.
Agreed that it’s probably better if parents don’t push “girlfriend” stuff at that age…but my daughter has been talking since she was 3 about which of her friends she wants to marry, without any prompting from us, and a lot of her friends have been doing the same. I suppose some people would say this is proof of the overwhelming power of heteronormativity, but the good news for them is that she talks about marrying female friends almost as often as she talks about marrying male friends. It doesn’t mean she “already knows she’s bi”—it’s very clear that she doesn’t really understand the difference between friendship and romance—but we’re mostly letting her think that through herself.
Freddie mentions the coverage of these issues and the thing that bothers me is the lack of honesty about what people are reacting to. The backlash in Florida, and elsewhere, isn’t against gay people, gay marriage, etc.
I suspect that journalists are as hesitant to discuss the actual source of the backlash in any real detail as I am. Who needs the headache, the personal attacks, merely for describing something that most of us can see.
The way we talk about gender now, the ideas seem half-formed, arbitrary, difficult to defend empirically. And whatever the acceptable framework for gender is today, I feel certain it will be something entirely different a few years from now. I don’t think we’re ready to provide authoritative classroom instruction on these issues yet.
I also think that hiding important things about kids from their parents, while encouraging the children to make significant changes in their lives, is going to be very unpopular with most parents in most places. Always. I’m not sure if the current line is that it isn’t happening, or that it’s happening and it’s a good thing. An honest accounting of the backlash would answer that question, I think.
I am glad he is allowing his readers the opportunity to discuss this though. I think it shows that there are a variety of beliefs that people hold from different politics persuasions and its not simply cut and dry. Especially if you are a parent in today's climate. My literal job is to nurture, care for and protect this child it shouldn't be a controversy that I want to.
A major part of the problem is the forced-teaming of the "TQetc" with LGB.
LGB are sexual orientations. All the rest are... what? In many cases, it's the denial of the reality of biological sex. So when the writer talks about "LGBTQ rights," what does he mean? I fear a real backlash against the very real gains made in gay and lesbian rights over the past fifty years. Most of the opposition to "LGBTQIA+" is to the denial of reality represented by so much trans activism. Are you surprised when parents get upset, when schools are teaching their very young children idiocies like the "genderbread person"? That children can "born in the wrong body?" Or that school districts implement policies that hide name changes and much more from parents? That boys (males) are using the locker rooms where girls change, or that males are competing in girl's sports? The Right is being handed this issue on a silver platter. There are leftwing and radical feminist groups, including many lesbians and gays, pushing back against this, and have been doing so long before troglodytes like Matt Walsh strutted onto the scene, because the threat to women's rights, and gay/lesbian rights, is clear. Or should be, to anyone who looks beyond "be kind."
There's a fundamental misconception that "trans rights" (whatever they are supposed to be) are just the next step in the fight for justice, building on earlier gay and lesbian struggles. In reality, it's a huge step in the wrong direction. Instead of pushing for "feminine" boys or "masculine" girls to be comfortable in their own bodies, and with their own interests, now kids are told that the path to happiness is to make major, irreversible changes to their bodies, long before their brains have matured. Humans cannot change their sex. It is a huge disservice, to say the least, to tell young children that they can. When schools do that, there will be outrage among parents, the vast majority of whom are connected to reality, and won't accept this. It will show up in elections, from school board races all the way to the White House.
I agree with your point that "feminine boys" and "masculine girls" should be comfortable in their own bodies. There are quite a few people of ambiguous gender who should be able to embrace all of themselves.
The people who are fixated on gender seem to have very concrete ideas of what constitutes masculine and feminine. It doesn't leave much room for the in-between.
I agree with everything here, but (the famous "but") I'm not sure I understand what you think is appropriate or inappropriate for a public school teacher to teach young children, let's say 10 and under. I saw a parody tweet where someone said they were a teacher and they were secretly teaching Christianity and baptizing the kids in a sink, and saying to the kids they should not tell there parents. When looked at this way you can see the fear of parents about how much power teachers have and I think I would agree that they should stick to the three R's and let parents (and the world) teach the rest. At around 11 or 12 than I'd want my kid to be exposed to real life much more, but really before then the exposure they get, and they will get it, should not come from professional teachers.
I tend to agree but keep the books available in the library. I grew up somewhat poor and relied on libraries as a portal to the broader world at least until i was a teenager and we got the internet. An article in Seventeen magazine I read at school is what made me realize I was bisexual. The travel section of the public library is how I figured out I wanted to see the world. You don’t have to jam it down kids’ throats but give them access.
I went to catholic school for 12 years, no one ever told me about contraception. Except YM and Seventeen magazine. I kept those issues and frequently reread them. Kids do need access to resources.
Yeah, but which library? I think Jean Genet's memoir of the time he spent as a male prostitute servicing sailors should be kept in college libraries. High school? Probably. Grade school? Definitely not.
Thank you for making this point so eloquently. I don’t object to the existence of content warnings but to the requirement of them. I choose not to watch shows with gun violence because it deeply upsets me, but that’s what google is for.
Children are not little adults. It’s perfectly reasonable to gradually introduce complex topics in tandem with their cognitive and psychosocial development. We can argue about the boundaries and appropriate ages to expose kids to the realities of domestic abuse or sexuality or the Holocaust. And yes, some kids will be exposed much earlier than is ideal, but that doesn’t magically mean the 7-year-old mind is equipped to process those things. Basically, I don’t think Freddie’s libertarianism would (or should) survive the experience of actual parenting.
With respect to kids over 15ish and college students, I’m completely in agreement with Freddie.
What makes a situation abusive is its lack of respect for a child's autonomy and welfare, not its subject matter. To make an analogy, many children are exposed to hitting people through abuse. That doesn't mean that allowing a child to take karate lessons is "recreating an abusive situation."
I've known children whose parents allowed them to watch R-rated movies and play M-rated videogames at a young age. They did not seem to be harmed by the experience.
Thank you for the pretty evenhanded take on the FL so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. It's really frustrating as an extreme social liberal to watch the "T" take over the LGBTQ and treat transgenderism as if it's in the same category as being gay. I'm fine with teachers talking about gay relationships--who cares if Heather has two mommies? Who cares if one of their teachers brings his husband to the weekend softball game? Not me! I could not care less if my children discover that they are gay or if they discover they are straight and have some gay sex adventures or discover that being bisexual means twice the opportunity for partners!
What I do care about is the very casual treatment of transgenderism in schools. In the school district we fled from, our children were taught, starting in kindergarten, that if they were uncomfortable in their "sex assigned at birth" they might be trans. What does it mean to be "uncomfortable"? In the books they were read, including "I Am Jazz," uncomfortable means liking sparkles and unicorns if you're a boy-assigned-at-birth. It means feeling uncomfortable with your body. And the staff is standing by ready to help your child begin a social transition and to keep it hidden from you. Ready to set your child on a path to a lifetime of medicalization because you defy gender stereotypes!
It's infuriating for people like Julian Sanchez to assume I am anti-gay rights because I don't want our school putting the idea in my 10-year-old daughter's head that she can skip out on the painful rite of passage that is puberty because it's uncomfortable.
Plus don't those personal anecdotes get in the way of actually teaching the course material?
Martin Gurri quoted somebody that wrote that elites in the modern day are primarily concerned with building their personal brand whereas in the past the main concern was in doing their jobs. Hard not to see this as an extension of that observation.
Do you have a job that you go to 40 hours a week? While you're there do you somehow manage to not learn anything about your co-workers lives? Would hearing about, say, the impending birth of new baby somehow keep you from working?
For normal people, when you spend all day with a group of people, you learn about them.
Discussion for other teachers in the teachers' lounge? Sure.
But students? When I was in grade school I spent the entire day in a single classroom (as compared to later spending a single hour with each teacher) and the only personal anecdote I can remember from that entire period was the time one teacher, a WWII vet, talked about the time a guy got cut in half on the aircraft carrier that he was serving on.
LOL. My friend went to school overseas and remembers his teacher telling the class about how her grandfather would have peasants rolled up in straw mats and then beaten to death. He remember the confused look on his fellow students faces while they looked at each other and wondered "Ok crazy lady, why are you telling us this stuff?"
I think there's something about having a captive audience that has to sit there and listen to you babble that engenders oversharing in some teachers. The current culture probably doesn't help that.
Teachers and students are different. Office workers have a lot more time to talk to each other. A teacher is trying to get through the curriculum and there isn't enough time in the day to do it. One co-worker who used to be an office worker commented about how little down time there was in teaching in comparison.
It depends. I had a Social Studies teacher in 8th Grade who was an absolute master of using personal anecdotes to illustrate various civics principles we were learning about.
I do not think your memory is serving you well. My dad had the same comment but then realized quickly that this was ridiculous.
Here are some normal encounters where we come into contact with teachers' personal lives:
--teachers show up with their families at HS football games or games night
--post-vacation circle time includes sharing what you did for spring break and a teacher mentions traveling to Paris with her boyfriend
--teacher mentions "looking forward to the arrival of my first grandchild"
--teacher will be absent one day to "care for my husband after he has surgery"
--teacher introduces herself to us and shares "I live with my husband and 3rd grade daughter on a 10-acre farm."
--we often run into our kids' teachers around town (Wednesday night music on the green, Christmas tree lighting ceremony, etc.)
--many of our kids' teachers have kids in the same school!
These things are not at all weird or oversharing. And teachers who are gay should be able to go the local ice cream shop with their spouse or mention that they live together on a 10-acre farm without a lot of drama. The polycule dipshit girl is just a dipshit.
My guess is that we're really not very far apart in our thoughts about this (Slaw also). I agree with nearly everything you say. If I have to choose between a polycule dipshit sharing her sex life with my kids and Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill, I'll go with FL.
But I think it is possible to have a professional relationship with students without having an impenetrable firewall of silence between you. I did as a teenager. If only the world hadn't gone mad.
How many teachers really are sharing a lot of their personal life with their students? Couldn't this be a few outliers driving the whole conversation?
When I was a teacher I may have mentioned something about one of my kids but I certainly didn't go into how my divorce was progressing, or who I was dating at the time.
Just teaching the basic academic subjects took more time than I had.
I think the point is that in a previous generation personal life would have been a topic for other adults. Now apparently it's something that adults share with kids in the classroom. What's next? "I got so wasted last weekend and woke up in some strange dude's apartment. I never did find my underwear"?
I'm a Gen Xer and think I can remember the marital/parental status of most of my high school teachers. Maybe because we were a pretty close knit community?
I just don't think it is at all weird for a teacher to mention in passing something like "I'm taking my daughter to tour some colleges over spring break and won't be back til Tuesday." We can't allow the lunatics on TikTok to make this seem abnormal or unhealthy.
Back when I was in junior high school we had exactly one teacher who would do this kind of stuff in class and he was notable precisely because he did this kind of stuff in class. And even then it was stories like how he got robbed delivering pizzas over the summer.
As a student I knew some of the personal details of my teachers but there was a very clear division between adults versus minors and they largely hung out in their world while we kids did our own thing in ours. That, I think, has changed.
Plus I keep coming back to what Gurri said (although he was quoting somebody else). When your primary concern is building your own brand rather than fulfilling your duties it seems to me that the natural extension of that for a teacher is using the kids in your classroom as a captive audience--maybe for practicing your standup routine, maybe for using as a sounding board for your personal life and maybe for promulgating your personal ideology.
I agree with you on this. I'm an Xer too, and I never remember our teachers talking about their personal lives. We didn't know anything about them, they could have all been Mormons with 12 kids for all we knew.
The thing is, that's a good thing. I wouldn't want to know anything about their personal lives because...well...that's personal. What does any of that have to do with their teaching? Nothing, that's what. It's their job, not a facebook group.
To go a bit further, they aren't our friends, nor should they be. That doesn't mean they can't inspire or instill, they certainly can. But there is nothing at all that says a teacher needs to be your buddy. If anything, it's a conflict of interest. I'd rather I know zero about my teacher's personal life because 1) I believe that distance makes a better teacher, and 2) it's none of my damn business.
I share the same concerns as a mother of a child in a progressive school. I talk to him about the reality of sex and the variations of gender expression and presentation. I tell him point blank: no matter what you wear, what toys you play with, who you date you will never be able to have a baby, only girls who become women can do that. That is the main difference between sexes, everything else is just personal preference and expression. We need to set our children firmly in reality. I am heartbroken to read the stories of young trans people who thought they could actually transition into the other sex.
Hi, I'm a trans woman. And while I agree with some of the points raised here about the ham-handed way some of these advocates and curricula discuss gender with young students... the reality is, some people are in fact trans, and every trans adult used to be a kid. That means some kids are trans too, even if they don't quite know what that means yet. And you'll have a hard time finding a trans adult who doesn't wish they'd known what was going on with them sooner, because it really does make a difference in terms of what outcomes they were able to achieve with transition and how much time, expense, and surgical risk it took to get there.
There is a real difference between "defying gender stereotypes" and experiencing gender dysphoria. Unfortunately, curricula presented by well-meaning but naïve cis people might not present it very well. But fortunately, kids' natural and often lamentable drive to indulge stereotypes acts as a countermeasure to those shoddy curricula: typical boys *don't want* to be girls, and don't want to partake in things that are "for girls" (whatever they think that means). We all recognize that; that's why there's been a movement to desegregate the toy aisle, balance gender representation in media, and so on. So the fear that a shoddy curriculum will set kids who aren't trans on a "path to a lifetime of medicalization" seems fairly overblown: the kids wouldn't go along with it anyway.
I want to respond specifically to your mention of autism.
There is, in fact, a correlation between autism and all parts of the LGBT "spectrum". Autistic people are less likely than average to be heterosexual, and also less likely than average to be cisgender. Likewise, people who aren't heterosexual or cisgender are more likely than average to be autistic. I don't think anyone's discovered the exact reason behind it, but the "extreme male brain" theory of autism and the known influence of prenatal hormones on sexual orientation and gender identity suggests a common cause.
But autism isn't a mental illness, it's a developmental condition. It doesn't go away. So when an autistic person experiences gender dysphoria, it makes no sense to say "let's treat the autism first, then we'll see if you still want to be a girl once the autism clears up".
Autism also doesn't make people confused about what their gender is or what they want it to be. Autistic cis boys want to be boys, just like non-autistic cis boys. If autistic boys are more likely than average to say they want to be girls, that's because they're more likely to actually be trans (see, for example, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05517-y).
"If that was true, we wouldn't see autistic detransitioners, which we do. "
It is true, whether you choose to accept it or not. The fault is in your logic: being autistic doesn't by any means imply that one will be unhappy with the outcome of transitioning.
Yes, we see autistic detransitioners. But we also see non-autistic detransitioners. And we see autistic people who transition and are quite happy with the results - just like most people who transition, autistic or not.
If anyone is being told that transitioning will "help their autism symptoms", that sounds like a grave injustice. I'd love to know more about who's been telling people that and when, because it certainly hasn't been in any of the material I've encountered.
At the very profound level autism is unmistakably a very serious and debilitating condition.
But at the other end of the spectrum I think there are some real concerns about whether it's being over-diagnosed or whether a "spectrum" of devastatingly severe symptoms to minor social impediments even makes sense.
My understanding is that it's considered a spectrum because it's considered to have a common cause, both at the "devastatingly severe" end and at the "minor impediments" end. But I agree, it doesn't make a lot of sense to talk about it that way most of the time, and I think it's unfortunate that what used to be called Asperger's syndrome is now lumped in with the very different manifestation that was traditionally called autism.
That said... what might look like a "minor social impediment" may in fact be the result of a lifetime of practice and constant work to appear "normal". It's easy to talk to someone for a while and say, "You can't be autistic, you seem perfectly natural in this conversation", when you aren't seeing the mental effort they're putting in to give that impression by maintaining eye contact or matching body language, the hours they've spent thinking about what went wrong in similar conversations in the past and rehearsing a better approach, and so on.
Not sure what this has to do with gender, though. :)
The question is how do you know that it has the same root cause? I don't think anybody has a good grasp of what produces autism. It is also entirely conceivable numerous disorders/conditions produce "generalized social anxiety" (for lack of a better term). And finally does a diagnosis like Asperger's just pathologize something that in the past would have just been considered to lie in the range of normal human behavior?
I agree that there is a huge difference between "defying gender stereotypes" and gender dysphoria. I probably wouldn't have any problem if, e.g., the I Am Jazz book talked about "feeling like you are in the wrong body" or something like that. But it doesn't, and many active practitioners of gender medicine talk in terms of stereotypes too.
I'm not sure if I understood the second half of your second paragraph correctly. It sounds like you're saying that (for example) girls will not act in stereotypically boyish ways because they don't want the social reprobation that comes with it. And as a corollary, if a girl is acting in boyish ways (whatever that means), she must actually be trans? This I cannot support at all. As a GenX feminist, we worked hard to leave that behind. But maybe I misunderstood?
Finally, with respect to the end of your first paragraph: I think we are way out over our skis in terms of the science of gender transition medicine. Children who transition before puberty will (a) definitely be reproductively dysfunctional. They will not be able to produce mature sex cells and will not be able to create a baby, even with IVF. (b) Possibly (probably? almost certainly?) be unable to orgasm and thus will likely struggle with sexual dissatisfaction for a lifetime. (c) For natal males who wish to go whole hog and create a neovagina, they will lack the penile tissue to do so in the most successful way and will be forced to get tissue from other areas that are less successful (forearm, colon). Whether these negatives are outweighed by the positive of more closely approximating the desired gender seems like a big, ugly, open question.
"It sounds like you're saying that (for example) girls will not act in stereotypically boyish ways because they don't want the social reprobation that comes with it. And as a corollary, if a girl is acting in boyish ways (whatever that means), she must actually be trans?"
Mm, no.
This is a nuanced topic, and that nuance doesn't always fully translate in online discussions, especially once people start drawing lines and picking sides. But I'll do my best.
(1) I'm not saying kids avoid acting in stereotypically "opposite sex" ways because they don't want the social reprobation.
Social reprobation may be a part of it, but I think mostly they avoid acting in those ways because they *want* to learn about societal roles and emulate the kind of people they think they belong with. Boys want to be perceived as boys, so they tend to do the things they think are "for boys", and they tend to avoid doing things that they think are "for girls" because they don't want to be perceived as girls.
(2) I'm not saying that if a girl acts in boyish ways, or a boy acts in girlish ways, they must actually be trans.
Even when they do something that has a gendered connotation, they aren't necessarily doing it *because* of that gendered connotation. They may be doing it in spite of that connotation! But if they *are* doing it because of the connotation, then it's probably worth digging a little deeper.
Imagine a boy whose intolerant parent has just "caught" him wearing a skirt and said "Take that skirt off, that's for girls! You're a boy!" Here are some possible ways he might respond, assuming he's not enlightened enough at that age to challenge the stereotype's premise:
(a) "I didn't know it was for girls. I'll take it off."
(b) "I know it's for girls, but I like it anyway. Can't I wear it?"
(c) "I know it's for girls, that's why I want to wear it!"
The last one is saying something about gender that the other two aren't. Of course, kids aren't always eloquent, forthcoming, or self-aware enough to give a complete and tidy explanation; it'd be a mistake to assume anything based on one brief statement. But that's why it's worth teaching them about this stuff, I think.
Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. You've conveyed the nuance well and it's helpful food for thought. Your point (2) was especially excellent.
"Children who transition before puberty will [...]"
It's an evolving field of medicine, one that most people have never had to learn much about, and unfortunately a lot of people have formed opinions based on information that isn't quite accurate, or generalizations that don't apply in many cases.
So, I'll briefly respond to a few of the points you raised, but really the best resource would be something like the WPATH or UCSF standards of care, or a discussion with a doctor who actually works with young trans patients.
(1) According to the commonly used standards of care, children shouldn't medically transition until puberty has already started, for various reasons. That means when we talk about children taking puberty blockers (or even cross-sex hormones), we're talking about adolescents who have already had at least some degree of secondary sexual development: they block natal puberty from progressing, not from starting.
(3) The belief that the alternatives to penile inversion vaginoplasty are "less successful", and thus that transitioning without having gone through male puberty must lead to poor surgical outcomes, is also a myth unsupported by evidence; see the link above for details. Besides the intestinal vaginoplasty (not "forearm"; that's used in phalloplasty, for trans men), there's also the option of a peritoneal flap vaginoplasty, which is based on an established technique used for reconstructive surgery in cis women. Both have high rates of patient satisfaction, including sexual function.
Thank you also for this. Here I think we will have to wait for time to tell. Unfortunately there seems to be a real lack of scientific curiosity on the part of gender transition practitioners about the potential risks associated with their work. As a 49-y-o woman trying to understand the benefits and costs of replacing my failing hormones with their exact analogue (does my risk of cancer increase? risk of heart disease decrease? what about bone loss?), I find the recklessness with which we are giving children cross-sex hormones to be crazy.
My friend was on Lupron for endometriosis. That is a standard puberty blocking medication. To say that she has side effects would be an understatement. These drugs are very powerful and have very serious side effects, which includes suicidal ideation in children.
"As a 49-y-o woman trying to understand the benefits and costs of replacing my failing hormones with their exact analogue (does my risk of cancer increase? risk of heart disease decrease? what about bone loss?)"
I'd be interested in hearing what you've learned about this. My understanding is that with bioidentical HRT, and monitoring to keep the levels in the same range as they were before, there ought to be no change in those risks, but the delivery method can have an effect on both the risks and the levels.
"I find the recklessness with which we are giving children cross-sex hormones to be crazy."
I understand why a lot of people focus on the risks or side effects of cross-sex hormones (it's a medical intervention), but I think it's easy to forget that those risks and side effects are caused by the hormones themselves -- no matter whose body they're in, or where they came from.
That is, it's true that (say) testosterone comes with certain risks. But in addition to worrying about adolescent girls being subjected to those risks unnecessarily, maybe we should also take a moment to worry about adolescent *boys* being subjected to those risks unnecessarily.
`I think it's easy to forget that those risks and side effects are caused by the hormones themselves -- no matter whose body they're in, or where they came from.'
And the side effects are not always negative. My understanding is that HRT for trans women increases the risk of osteoporosis, for example, but lowers the risk of heart disease.
People react very differently on hormones. I used Lupron for IVF and it didn't faze me, however, most women found it awful and emotionally disruptive.
The hormones do definitely effect your thinking. I was glad after miscarriage to have my progesterone drop because it became easier to deal with the end of the pregnancy.
Sex cream! Estrace...get it from Canada at a quarter of the price. Use it once a week or just when you feel like your sex drive has fallen off the cliff and you need a parachute.
Hot flashes...cardigan sweaters. Tell yourself you aren't sick you just need to dump heat. Throw off the covers and that sweat will cool you off.
Revel in the joy of not having cramps and bleeding through your clothes.
`And you'll have a hard time finding a trans adult who doesn't wish they'd known what was going on with them sooner'
Agreed, but that doesn't imply that medical treatments need to be started earlier, just that they should be available once one's level of gender dysphoria becomes too severe to treat with other approaches.
Trans kids should be allowed to be depressed/anxious/autistic and still receive treatment for gender dysphoria, as one doesn't necessarily cause or exacerbate the other.
"deal with the depression/anxiety/PTSD/autism, and then see if there's still any lingering dysphoria"
You've said your brother is autistic, so presumably you're aware that autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects people for their entire lives, not an illness to be treated and resolved. Therefore, it makes no sense to say "deal with the autism first and see if there's any lingering dysphoria".
Treatment for autism focuses on things like controlling or redirecting harmful behaviors, practicing emotional awareness and communication skills, developing strategies for navigating difficult situations, etc., none of which have the goal or the effect of alleviating gender dysphoria.
"Then see if counseling can get them to a place of being satisfied with the body they're born with"
This was tried extensively in the past, of course, because it's the first solution that pops into everybody's mind. Problem is, there's no evidence that it's effective.
In my experience gender dysphoria is progressive in nature, so different levels of dysphoria can be treated with different interventions. In milder cases, some form of psychotherapy, followed by social transition, if warranted.
Is there any evidence supporting the effectiveness of psychotherapy alone? The closest I've been able to find is a paper from 2021 arguing that the harmfulness of psychotherapy has been overstated (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2), but nothing to support the belief that it can be an effective alternative to any form of transition for treating gender dysphoria.
When I look back on my childhood I'm pretty sure there were times when my teachers, and even parents, might have thought I was gay. For some reason I really liked to wear flashy clothes for gradeschool P.E. class, I would spend hours at night cutting the shirts and shorts into all sorts of flashy patterns. I would often mirror my mother in the kitchen, mimicking her meal prep because I thought it was fun. Sometimes my neighbor's kid and I would play around in his parents bedroom closet, and I was usually the one wearing the mom's clothes. I even had a 3rd grade teacher who used to call me twinkle toes...even though I had no idea what it meant then.
At some point I distinctly remember my dad trying to get me to ask out girls in high school, he once forced me to buy his buddy's daughter a popcorn and coke at a football game. I still remember the poor girl not knowing what the hell was going on, I clearly didn't know what to do in this awkward situation.
Looking back it makes me laugh. Not because it's funny to think about now as a straight male, but because none of that early-adolescent feminine curiosity panned out to mean anything substantial...it was just a teenager being awkward and ignorant in the ways of the sexual world I was still barely wading in.
My point with all this is this: just because a kid has certain curiosities or interest in things normally associated with the opposite sex, does not automatically presume a non-hetero identity. Sometimes it just means a kid is awkward and ignorant.
I think we’d go a very long way if in the first several years of school the emphasis less on developing one’s personal identity, and more on developing empathy for others.
Anti-bullying regulations that are actually enforced would solve a lot of issues minority, gay, trans kids, or any others might have. And if empathy were taught as a virtue, perhaps they be unneeded.
A couple of typos/phrasing issues you may want to adjust:
"(Pictures that are circulated of the book are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn't true.) "
This is the tension at the heart of higher education: the legacy heterodox movement that supports universities as places to engage in challenging material, even material that upsets, and learn the skills to synthesize and build arguments, vs. the progressive approach that has expanded the definition of harm so broadly, that anything remotely challenging to a worldview, to an ideology, is considered out of bounds. Of being morally wrong.
The latter of these positions is where catastrophism rules the day. If everything not aligned with the correct ideology is harmful, if words are violence, you can justify censorship and restrictions on personal behavior without the slightest pause. After all, who can possibly argue against "But people will die!" and not risk being seen as a monster?
For the most passionate among them, there are no gray areas. Protecting the right people -- those with the right politics -- is an absolute good, and the determination of what those harms look like is applied with absolute certainty.
Underlying these judgments and reactions is the fundamental idea that being upset is....wrong. "It's not my job to educate you" is the response that comes from thinking that having to explain or make an argument is a significant imposition on one's freedom. Where truly harmless social interactions can be couched as "microaggressions" because how someone receives an event -- "living my truth" -- is seen as dispositive of a breach of the social contract and can be litigated in public to the reputational destruction of the offender.
Powering these dynamics are the rewards that accrue to those asserting their right to never experience anything resembling adversity. Elite status gained through victimhood. Institutions so terrified of being canceled, that they label the most censorious among us as "stunning and brave."
I've been looking for the right place in this thread to make this comment, and you've won.
I grew up within a fundamentalist religion. The paralyzed reaction to anything challenging a worldview, the refusal to recognize grey areas, the status-hierarchy of victimhood, and the (truly pathological) lengths to which people will go to "protect" themselves and their children from "harms" are all so, so, *so* familiar to me from that context.
For a few years, long after I'd escaped from that mindset, I taught at a university run by that religion (hey, it was a job! I knew how to navigate that environment, my department was pretty liberal, and I did a lot of good for a lot of students). I continually fought to include on my syllabi material with mature, or (mildly) sexual, content; or "secular" themes; or "bad language". (Many of my classes came with content warnings!) My argument to the "saints" that ran that place was exactly what Freddy described in this post: These things exist; where would you prefer that students first encounter them? Out in the "world", where they'll be ill-equipped to handle them, or in a class-room, where we can discuss them safely, defuse their power, and strategize how to deal with them in a mature fashion? Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost, but I've not lost my belief that that's what education is for.
It discourages me to see secular, "liberal" institutions mirroring the cramped ideological construct in which I was raised.
That poem should come with a trigger warning. I'm not a big poetry reader but I'm sitting here now both trying to find more Linda Pastan to read and also not sure how I'm going to move on with my day. I have the get the kids to school, man! Warn me next time!
Freddie alluded to this idea throughout, and I can't help but remark on it here:
How much of all of this is simply due to children not growing up? Whether it's refusing to, or somehow not being able to, I feel like so much of this is because people can't handle the vulgarities of real life like so many of us 'older' folks learned to so long ago.
If Haidt is right, and kids really are this fragile now, then the easy solution would seem to be to simply tell them to grow up. That's how it's always worked in the past anyway - learn to be an adult and get some thick skin...or you don't get to be in the adult crowd with the rest of us.
The problem with that seems to be that in today's world YA's somehow flipped the script and are the ones running the show now. Adults are too scared to put them in their place, perhaps because YA's figured out you can now link all sorts of 'isms' to anything you disagree with. How they managed that I still can't figure out, but I feel like that should be a chapter in Tzu's Art of War.
Thanks for that poem link, always great to read something new!
weeeeeeeeelllllllllll........ These outliers cover ALL major school districts that our big cities run. And let's not forget leftwing woke white advocates in suburbs. So a majority of students are those outliers so I don't know if I agree with you. But I bet we encounter the same problem we encounter everywhere: tiny blue enclaves vs. everyone.
I honestly think this is more apt to happen in affluent suburbs than urban districts. I live directly outside of Philadelphia. Schools in Philly have much larger issues to contend with than teaching children about gender. I ask my friends who teach in Philly versus the suburbs about the number of trans students they have and it seems far higher in more affluent and white districts.
I literally have no idea what you're responding to, but it's nothing in this piece. I am just absolutely baffled by your comment and highly doubt you read this post.
I read Freddie's post and your entire comment and I also don't see any obvious logical connection between the former and the latter.
No, genuinely - what on earth are you responding to? Find me a single sentence in this piece that suggests that I think that LGBTQ rights are secured. Copy and paste it. Your position here is so, so bizarre; you're responding to nothing. Quote some stuff, now.
"Freddie, this piece is written from a completely ahistorical place where the only thing queer kids have to worry about is their school being silent on the topic"
What the fuck are you talking about? COPY AND PASTE QUOTES. I said literally nothing like that!
Okay. At any rate, I'm out. Like I'm not going to sit here wasting my time arguing with a thin-skinned writer who probably shouldn't have comments turned on. Good luck to you.
I really appreciate you pointing out that no one is harmed by texts referencing traumatic human experiences, but rather the fact of and possibility of those events in their own lives and the lives of people they care about. If slavery were an imagined fiction that never happened in history, teaching stories that include it would be like teaching science fiction about time travel or aliens -- still interesting, still compelling, but entirely metaphorical from the perspective of the reader. But people’s exploitation of other people, for labor or power or conquest, is all too real, and these agonies of human life demand our attention - putting fingers in ears and singing la la la to hard reality (whatever that term might mean to you personally) only makes things worse. I fear people have internalized too well the network-“wisdom” that virality is truth, and that control of the “narrative” means controlling what is and is not. I teach college students and fwiw the reality in my classrooms is nothing like what the culture wars suggest. In over 20 years of teaching I’ve never been asked for a trigger warning or topic based accommodation, nor have I been directed that certain texts are off limits. I know it happens, but I don’t think it is the norm🤞🏼
There are no trigger warnings for life. Great piece.
My YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most challenged and banned books of the last 20 years. According to the American Library Association, my novel was the most banned and challenged book in the United States in the decade 2010-2019. So I have more personal experience with the right wing's vilification of books and writers than just about everybody. But I'm also highly aware of the way the left censors and silences writers. And a lot of this silencing and censoring happens before a book is even published, with sensitivity readers who demand changes based on ever-shifting moral standards and definitions of "triggers" and, more dangerously, by creating an environment where writers silence and censor themselves because they fear professional and personal excommunication. As I've written elsewhere, the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.
Thanks for sharing that story!
Having read your book, I laughed my ass off when it popped up on the banned book lists. If those morons actually read the book, as opposed to the odd paragraph here and there that said something salty....oh never mind....don't get me started.
It's a wonderful book by the way--even our fiction-hating son admitted that it was a good story.
Thank you, Jenn. I think the book sometimes gets banned only because it's already been banned. It has a mythology now.
Would love to read your piece on vikings and ninjas if you have a link handy.
Right now, my viking-ninja analogy is just a one-liner that I need to expand.
Love your books and your insight.
You wrote a very good YA novel, with one very icky paragraph about masturbation. This one little paragraph didn't make your novel, and probably did much to detract from it. Its almost as if this were a contrived piece--ordered by your publisher--for the purpose of eliciting a ratings spike by being controversial. Oh how avant-garde is grooming.
But what does an adult leading children in a conversation about sexual proclivities really portend, but adults grooming children. There's a new safe term for enabling child abuse. This new term is intergenerational relationships. This coincides with the UN--that hotbed of evil--deciding to decriminalize child sex.
Go read Margarita Cat to learn how UN workers using UN programs recruit children from remote Java villages and traffic them into sex slavery.
Pretty sure masturbation isn't the problematic "proclivity" here.
And Mr. Alexie's experience should count for something, too. Some speculation follows.
Going through puberty, fifteen or so years later than Alexie, I was deeply ashamed of masturbation because adults kept telling me it was inappropriate, at best, or just outright morally corrupting. Typical midwestern upbringing, for that time, I think. Maybe Alexie was meant to feel shame at some point and wanted to let others know that masturbation is natural, fine, and healthy.
The right's over and inappropriate use of the word grooming is likely to desensitize everyone to the horribleness that is actual grooming.
The right isn’t alone. I believe Governor Cuomo was accused of “grooming” a full grown woman. You see other examples of this with older men and younger, but adult, women.
Some people have trained themselves to not even think about sex, so any mention of it is automatically dirty. Guilt is a hell of a drug.
"Icky" is a part of human life
How is writing about masturbation in a YA novel grooming? Young adults masturbate. Why shouldn't novels targeted towards them reflect their experiences? How is writing a book that children are free to read or not read "leading a conversation."
Even in a case where adults are leading children in a conversation about sexual proclivities, I can imagine a lot of things that might portend besides adults grooming children. They might be concerned that the children are ignorant about sex and different sexual proclivities, and want to make sure that they are informed so they do it safely. They might want children to be knowledgeable about dating and being in relationships with other children.
In general most of the rhetoric against "grooming" is premised on bizarre falsehoods about how children and childhood works. They act as if children are inherently asexual until informed of sex by adults. They act as if children never want to have sex with other children or engage in sexualized play with other children. They act like the only reason adults would want to talk about sex with kids is to get the kids to have sex with them. They never say these things explicitly of course, because all of those premises are so blatantly idiotic that if they stated them baldly they would immediately lose every argument.
The thing about the UN decriminalizing child sex is just a lie some idiot made up. The very first link when you google that is fact checkers showing that the UN said no such thing.
I don't think that telling kids to keep secrets is good behavior, but it's quite easy to think of other motives about it besides grooming children for sex. The teachers likely believe that this is important information that kids need, but that some parents won't want their kids to learn about it because they are bigoted and controlling.
This is especially true for LGBT issues. Many parents really are controlling bigots who try to stop their children from learning that gay people even exist. And while very young kids are not interested in sex, they do get crushes and romantic feelings towards children their own age, so telling them some basic info about gay people will probably help many of them make sense of what they are feeling.
That being said, I quite agree with you that it's bad policy to keep secrets about the curriculum like that from parents, even if I think the teacher's motives for doing so are noble. It's not good to undermine trust in institutions, even if it's to help out kids with bigoted parents.
How would you characterize the Dahl changes/edits? Were those in service of a viewpoint, or just generic CYA for anything "problematic"?
I would guess it was some combo of in-house political pressure and an attempt to market to a specific and “new” audience—an audience that I don’t think exists. I don’t think there was any demographic crying out for Roald Dahl rewrites.
I think it is about the many college educated people in institutions everywhere involved with posturing and larping themselves into “doing the work” of purifying the world according to their views of wrongthink and wrongwords. It is a mix of narcissism and artificial politics and raw authoritarianism. Awful.
I want to make it clear that the left and right are engaged in censorsing and silencing. The right is threatening to put librarians in jail! That's Soviet gulag behavior. That's American Mao! When it comes to authoritarian behavior, the far left and far right are fraternal twins.
There should be a word for the current moral obligation to criticize the left only if you also criticize the right, and it better be in the same breath. I suppose it is from fear of being called a rightest, a fear of being expelled from the tribe, a fairly ritualized acknowledgement that there is no “us” without “them”. Or maybe it is a kind of think track that says the lesser evil must be appreciated and is more easily conserved if you always think of it relative to the more evil. I try to think of analogies. I cant say I love my husband without also saying I love my kids? It is a weird phenomenon and it feels very controlling.
I think Freddy has addressed this issue based on his own experience—of folks assuming that I'm on their "team." So I felt the need to assert my individuality. But I certainly get your point! Yup, we should coin a word for the phenomenon. Cancelophobia?
I was shocked when I learned it was banned. Then when I saw you post here, I had to look up why it was banned. Then I had to read it again, because I liked it well enough that I have a hard copy of it.
OK some people don't want their eight year olds reading about masturbation...but it's a young adult book.
I think you're right about the self censoring on the "liberal" side. I was shocked reading posts here that there even was such a thing as sensitivity readers. If people don't like what you've written, put the damn book down. Tell your friends you didn't like it because of xyz, but don't refuse to publish it.
Yup, I agree.
If "sit down and shut the fuck up" isn't a position that works with kids (and any teacher will tell you that it doesn't), it sure as hell isn't going to work with those kids' parents.
Will the Democrats ever figure that out? Gimme a break! Just sit down and...
I agree with your views on access to information, I'm honestly basically an anarchist on the subject as well and think kids will be fine no matter what they read, but I think you're missing what the conservatives are trying to do. They think inclusion in a public school library implies tacit _approval_ of the ideas, and therefore should be banned from there. It's fine if kids learn about it, as long as they know it's not 'normal' and society doesn't approve.
I'm pretty sceptical whether this is even effective from a stigmatising perspective, and I don't really approve of centralised authorities agreeing on what the normative behaviour that should be presented to kids is. But I think the main thrust of their argument isn't about hiding its existence, but making it clear that mainstream society, as they see it, thinks it's morally wrong. And maybe there's a salutary value in kids discovering some 'forbiddne' knowledge on their own? But regardless, I think it's more about making it clear that certain things are _just not done_ by the right sort of people, rather than fully trying to hide their existence.
I think this is basically right, and I think all parents feel the same way--just in different directions. A book about "how to grow up and be a beef cattle farmer" is going to feel like tacit approval of our meat-eating culture to a vegetarian.
And this was essentially my problem with the treatment of transgenderism in our former school. In the book "I Am Jazz," Jazz's explanation for her transgenderism is that she was not a stereotypical boy--she liked rainbows and sparkles and playing with girls and didn't like soccer. That is literally all there is to it. When a teacher reads this to a class, it is a tacit approval of the idea that sparkles = girl and soccer = boy.
I'm on board with everything you wrote except for one thing: we cannot, as a society, avoid normative ideals, which are at the heart of what culture is - even if some ideals are contradictory or in tension with one another.
Beyond that, I think there's a common, fundamental misunderstanding about what authorities can even accomplish in terms of propagating normative standards or stigmatizing various behaviors: it's hard to teach "empathy" effectively, for example (as suggested elsewhere in the comments here), because kids (people, really) internalize the values of people they respect and trust, which is usually only a subset of teachers.
My issue with this, like so many things culturally now is there is no room for shades of grey. Everything is black and white. You are either against children hearing that gay people exist OR you think 3 year olds should be defining their sexuality. There is no room for "gay people exist, they live among us, they are our neighbors, family members, friends. They work at the businesses we frequent, they are parents of students at your school etc.
My son is in first grade, he attends a K-4 school in our very progressive school district. Last week his school had a diversity festival after school that showed all kinds of diversity, racial, ethic, hair, hobbies and yes, gender and sexuality. I did not bring him to the high school's GSA table because their presentation was educating about all the flags and then asking children to make crafts that represent they flag of their identity. No sorry. Children that age don't understand what pansexual is and should not be trying to define themselves. We just visited his gay grandfather, our next door neighbors are a lesbian couple with two sons he plays with. He's asked them why they are two moms. This is how you expose and educate children about differences, not by asking them to identify their differences and wear it as a flag at the age of 6.
I think that many people internally hold more nuanced views, unfortunately if you are in a more left or right wing community (I consider myself on the left and so is my community) people are afraid to express those opinions.
Media earn lots of money by playing "Let's You And Him Fight." The more eyeballs attracted, the bigger the cash flow.
You just summed up the American 21st century in two sentences. Congrats!
This is exactly how I feel about it as the lesbian mom of a kindergartener. He shouldn't have to hide his family or the fact that two-mom families exist. (And we haven't had that issue. My wife and I visited his classroom for his birthday, so they all know he has 2 moms.)
But it's inappropriate to push young children to label themselves with various queer identities. It's also unnecessary. If you teach them that gay people exist, and that it's okay, they will be fine when they have a realization on their own.
This is how I also feel about straight couples who feel compelled to bring their children to Pride to expose them to gay people. How about we let people have their party and celebrate their community without gawking?
Exactly! I can't help wondering if the backlash by the right is because of all of the "allies" doing dumb shit like having five year olds color a flag that displays their identity (mine would have wondered where the dinosaur flag was), having drag queens read stories to preschoolers, and otherwise using LGBTQ people to show themselves how progressive they are. What they are doing is further "othering" by in effect saying "you're weird; look how accepting I am for accepting you." Feh.
As a gay dad with a kid in kindergarten I’m also exactly on the same page! I increasingly find the hyper identiarianism (is that a word? lol) exhausting and insufferable.
As a not-gay dad of small children, I think there's a flip side to obligate identitarianism* that's extremely disturbing. No, I won't be constructing a White identity for my kids, or teaching them to obsess over gender roles; are these people utterly ignorant of history?!
The blackpilled take would be that "default" identities are quite intentionally promoted as a basis for the secular reinvention of Original Sin.
*There's already a specific right-wing ideology called Identitarianism, but if "my" "side" can get away with redefining simple words like "racism" then I'm totally stealing this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement
writers on the left, such as Adolph Reed Jr, have been using "identitarianism" to describe this... whatever it is, for long time now. Recall Freddie's plea for a name?
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
It's a word now. Good one.
"they will be fine when they have a realization on their own"
Well... yes... but. There are some realizations that, if they're going to have them at all, they're much better off having earlier in life. If the "queer identity" (sigh) they end up having is one that involves their gender not matching their physical sex, but they don't realize it until well past puberty, chances are they're going to wish someone had given them the information they needed to realize it sooner, before so many of those unwanted characteristics had developed.
How can you know whether or not the changes produced by undergoing puberty are a positive or negative without undergoing puberty?
It's a hypothesis, not a valid theory. The proponents of said hypothesis should perform a scientific study and publish their results in respected journals for peer-review. Then the hypothesis can become an objective fact, or theory, if the hypothesis passes scientific muster.
No one should fear the truth, but we can't be expected to accept as true all the guesswork that's flooding us in our brave new world.
Those studies have been done. You can find citations in the standards of care from WPATH, UCSF, etc., or on Google Scholar.
And then you should look at the actual scientific studies posted at the SEGM website (the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine), because the WPATH "standards of care" are dangerous, and getting more so with each iteration.
https://segm.org/studies
"How can you know whether or not the changes produced by undergoing puberty are a positive or negative without undergoing puberty?"
Indeed. That's why puberty blockers aren't given until after puberty has already started. They block it from progressing, not from starting.
If you're the kind of person for whom the physical characteristics of your birth sex are going to be permanently unwanted, there's a good chance you'll recognize it as soon as they start to appear; you can see that in the writings of countless trans people, describing their own adolescence. You don't need to grow a full ZZ Top beard in order to know that seeing a masculine face in the mirror is going to bother you.
I think the question is whether feelings of alienation, dislocation, disgust, etc. are specific symptoms related to one condition rather than something generally experienced by humanity.
Either way I should warn you that the host here has a policy of not allowing discussion on trans issues in the comments and will punish offenders with a ban. For that reason I am bowing out.
People have these things called "imaginations" that allow them to visualize what it is like to experience something without actually experiencing it.
I imagine getting my hair cut is akin to having your finger nails pulled off. Who's to say?
`But it's inappropriate to push young children to label themselves with various queer identities. It's also unnecessary.'
Agreed. In the case of trans children, none of this is necessary at all---they know what they are or will figure it out themselves. All they need is for other children to understand that being trans is OK and not make fun of them for it. And achieving that does not require that all children be aware of the myriad of neo-gender identities now popular/available to them, which they cannot possibly understand.
Great comment. When I feel as though my culture is dogmatically asking me: well are you FOR x or y on this issue my usual feeling is well.. what does that mean? Does it mean providing exposure, relationship, experience, stories in enough space and support for children to consider, discover, respond? Or does it somehow suggest that a stake in the ground is a good thing at an early stage of their humanness?
You bring up a salient feature of our culture, which is that nuance is dismissed out of hand as weakness. You're obliged to support either x or y because to do anything else would be to betray those utterly convinced of the x or y position. As Freddie noted in his article on YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs, this is at the core of social capture. Anything else is fodder for sneering left irony.
And you're right to wonder if, in being exposed to ideas and realities, that children can decide for themselves how to feel about them or if they are being told WHAT to feel and how to react. Let them respond on their own and they'll grow up to be tolerant and kind.
I’m here in Evanston, Illinois and write a blog about our school district’s financial calamity. The biggest feedback that I get in liberal circles is something like: any criticism of the current liberal order means that you by default support all the conservative causes. Complaining about financial mismanagement is thus the same as supporting the banning of books. I’m trying really hard to break us out of this binary - we can be liberal and we can also support good governance. This binary is permitting a lot of bad behavior on the left that long run, is going to hurt the movement.
Its almost as if its manufactured....
There are too many superintendents and board members with *skin in the game* when it comes to the culture war fights. Our current school board has 2 professional DEI consultants, 1 university DEI employee, and 1 state DEI employee. The superintendent finally just left after spending two years waging national culture war fights (moved to Dekalb County Georgia). The monetization of this movement has really poisoned the well.
“Our current school board has 2 professional DEI consultants, 1 university DEI employee, and 1 state DEI employee.”
Holy shit
They’re the only people with time on their hands in the post-COVID work era to do a volunteer school board job. Some % these DEI jobs are clearly political patronage roles.
Thank you, I think this is the crux of what Freddie missed with this post.
The last thing humans need is more flags.
The "make a flag of your sexual identity" is weird, but so is everyone calling my seven year old nephew's female friend "his girlfriend." Let's not speculate about children's sexuality -- whether straight, gay, bi, or pan -- and let them figure it out on their own.
Agreed that it’s probably better if parents don’t push “girlfriend” stuff at that age…but my daughter has been talking since she was 3 about which of her friends she wants to marry, without any prompting from us, and a lot of her friends have been doing the same. I suppose some people would say this is proof of the overwhelming power of heteronormativity, but the good news for them is that she talks about marrying female friends almost as often as she talks about marrying male friends. It doesn’t mean she “already knows she’s bi”—it’s very clear that she doesn’t really understand the difference between friendship and romance—but we’re mostly letting her think that through herself.
Freddie mentions the coverage of these issues and the thing that bothers me is the lack of honesty about what people are reacting to. The backlash in Florida, and elsewhere, isn’t against gay people, gay marriage, etc.
I suspect that journalists are as hesitant to discuss the actual source of the backlash in any real detail as I am. Who needs the headache, the personal attacks, merely for describing something that most of us can see.
The way we talk about gender now, the ideas seem half-formed, arbitrary, difficult to defend empirically. And whatever the acceptable framework for gender is today, I feel certain it will be something entirely different a few years from now. I don’t think we’re ready to provide authoritative classroom instruction on these issues yet.
I also think that hiding important things about kids from their parents, while encouraging the children to make significant changes in their lives, is going to be very unpopular with most parents in most places. Always. I’m not sure if the current line is that it isn’t happening, or that it’s happening and it’s a good thing. An honest accounting of the backlash would answer that question, I think.
I am glad he is allowing his readers the opportunity to discuss this though. I think it shows that there are a variety of beliefs that people hold from different politics persuasions and its not simply cut and dry. Especially if you are a parent in today's climate. My literal job is to nurture, care for and protect this child it shouldn't be a controversy that I want to.
A major part of the problem is the forced-teaming of the "TQetc" with LGB.
LGB are sexual orientations. All the rest are... what? In many cases, it's the denial of the reality of biological sex. So when the writer talks about "LGBTQ rights," what does he mean? I fear a real backlash against the very real gains made in gay and lesbian rights over the past fifty years. Most of the opposition to "LGBTQIA+" is to the denial of reality represented by so much trans activism. Are you surprised when parents get upset, when schools are teaching their very young children idiocies like the "genderbread person"? That children can "born in the wrong body?" Or that school districts implement policies that hide name changes and much more from parents? That boys (males) are using the locker rooms where girls change, or that males are competing in girl's sports? The Right is being handed this issue on a silver platter. There are leftwing and radical feminist groups, including many lesbians and gays, pushing back against this, and have been doing so long before troglodytes like Matt Walsh strutted onto the scene, because the threat to women's rights, and gay/lesbian rights, is clear. Or should be, to anyone who looks beyond "be kind."
There's a fundamental misconception that "trans rights" (whatever they are supposed to be) are just the next step in the fight for justice, building on earlier gay and lesbian struggles. In reality, it's a huge step in the wrong direction. Instead of pushing for "feminine" boys or "masculine" girls to be comfortable in their own bodies, and with their own interests, now kids are told that the path to happiness is to make major, irreversible changes to their bodies, long before their brains have matured. Humans cannot change their sex. It is a huge disservice, to say the least, to tell young children that they can. When schools do that, there will be outrage among parents, the vast majority of whom are connected to reality, and won't accept this. It will show up in elections, from school board races all the way to the White House.
I agree with your point that "feminine boys" and "masculine girls" should be comfortable in their own bodies. There are quite a few people of ambiguous gender who should be able to embrace all of themselves.
The people who are fixated on gender seem to have very concrete ideas of what constitutes masculine and feminine. It doesn't leave much room for the in-between.
I agree with everything here, but (the famous "but") I'm not sure I understand what you think is appropriate or inappropriate for a public school teacher to teach young children, let's say 10 and under. I saw a parody tweet where someone said they were a teacher and they were secretly teaching Christianity and baptizing the kids in a sink, and saying to the kids they should not tell there parents. When looked at this way you can see the fear of parents about how much power teachers have and I think I would agree that they should stick to the three R's and let parents (and the world) teach the rest. At around 11 or 12 than I'd want my kid to be exposed to real life much more, but really before then the exposure they get, and they will get it, should not come from professional teachers.
I tend to agree but keep the books available in the library. I grew up somewhat poor and relied on libraries as a portal to the broader world at least until i was a teenager and we got the internet. An article in Seventeen magazine I read at school is what made me realize I was bisexual. The travel section of the public library is how I figured out I wanted to see the world. You don’t have to jam it down kids’ throats but give them access.
I went to catholic school for 12 years, no one ever told me about contraception. Except YM and Seventeen magazine. I kept those issues and frequently reread them. Kids do need access to resources.
Yeah, but which library? I think Jean Genet's memoir of the time he spent as a male prostitute servicing sailors should be kept in college libraries. High school? Probably. Grade school? Definitely not.
Thank you for making this point so eloquently. I don’t object to the existence of content warnings but to the requirement of them. I choose not to watch shows with gun violence because it deeply upsets me, but that’s what google is for.
Children are not little adults. It’s perfectly reasonable to gradually introduce complex topics in tandem with their cognitive and psychosocial development. We can argue about the boundaries and appropriate ages to expose kids to the realities of domestic abuse or sexuality or the Holocaust. And yes, some kids will be exposed much earlier than is ideal, but that doesn’t magically mean the 7-year-old mind is equipped to process those things. Basically, I don’t think Freddie’s libertarianism would (or should) survive the experience of actual parenting.
With respect to kids over 15ish and college students, I’m completely in agreement with Freddie.
Correct, children who are exposed too early are usually exposed through abuse. Lets not try to recreate an abusive situation in the name of freedom.
What makes a situation abusive is its lack of respect for a child's autonomy and welfare, not its subject matter. To make an analogy, many children are exposed to hitting people through abuse. That doesn't mean that allowing a child to take karate lessons is "recreating an abusive situation."
I've known children whose parents allowed them to watch R-rated movies and play M-rated videogames at a young age. They did not seem to be harmed by the experience.
Thank you for the pretty evenhanded take on the FL so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. It's really frustrating as an extreme social liberal to watch the "T" take over the LGBTQ and treat transgenderism as if it's in the same category as being gay. I'm fine with teachers talking about gay relationships--who cares if Heather has two mommies? Who cares if one of their teachers brings his husband to the weekend softball game? Not me! I could not care less if my children discover that they are gay or if they discover they are straight and have some gay sex adventures or discover that being bisexual means twice the opportunity for partners!
What I do care about is the very casual treatment of transgenderism in schools. In the school district we fled from, our children were taught, starting in kindergarten, that if they were uncomfortable in their "sex assigned at birth" they might be trans. What does it mean to be "uncomfortable"? In the books they were read, including "I Am Jazz," uncomfortable means liking sparkles and unicorns if you're a boy-assigned-at-birth. It means feeling uncomfortable with your body. And the staff is standing by ready to help your child begin a social transition and to keep it hidden from you. Ready to set your child on a path to a lifetime of medicalization because you defy gender stereotypes!
It's infuriating for people like Julian Sanchez to assume I am anti-gay rights because I don't want our school putting the idea in my 10-year-old daughter's head that she can skip out on the painful rite of passage that is puberty because it's uncomfortable.
Plus don't those personal anecdotes get in the way of actually teaching the course material?
Martin Gurri quoted somebody that wrote that elites in the modern day are primarily concerned with building their personal brand whereas in the past the main concern was in doing their jobs. Hard not to see this as an extension of that observation.
Do you have a job that you go to 40 hours a week? While you're there do you somehow manage to not learn anything about your co-workers lives? Would hearing about, say, the impending birth of new baby somehow keep you from working?
For normal people, when you spend all day with a group of people, you learn about them.
Discussion for other teachers in the teachers' lounge? Sure.
But students? When I was in grade school I spent the entire day in a single classroom (as compared to later spending a single hour with each teacher) and the only personal anecdote I can remember from that entire period was the time one teacher, a WWII vet, talked about the time a guy got cut in half on the aircraft carrier that he was serving on.
LOL. My friend went to school overseas and remembers his teacher telling the class about how her grandfather would have peasants rolled up in straw mats and then beaten to death. He remember the confused look on his fellow students faces while they looked at each other and wondered "Ok crazy lady, why are you telling us this stuff?"
I think there's something about having a captive audience that has to sit there and listen to you babble that engenders oversharing in some teachers. The current culture probably doesn't help that.
Teachers and students are different. Office workers have a lot more time to talk to each other. A teacher is trying to get through the curriculum and there isn't enough time in the day to do it. One co-worker who used to be an office worker commented about how little down time there was in teaching in comparison.
It depends. I had a Social Studies teacher in 8th Grade who was an absolute master of using personal anecdotes to illustrate various civics principles we were learning about.
The problem with imagination is this: the easiest person to lie to is yourself.
I do not think your memory is serving you well. My dad had the same comment but then realized quickly that this was ridiculous.
Here are some normal encounters where we come into contact with teachers' personal lives:
--teachers show up with their families at HS football games or games night
--post-vacation circle time includes sharing what you did for spring break and a teacher mentions traveling to Paris with her boyfriend
--teacher mentions "looking forward to the arrival of my first grandchild"
--teacher will be absent one day to "care for my husband after he has surgery"
--teacher introduces herself to us and shares "I live with my husband and 3rd grade daughter on a 10-acre farm."
--we often run into our kids' teachers around town (Wednesday night music on the green, Christmas tree lighting ceremony, etc.)
--many of our kids' teachers have kids in the same school!
These things are not at all weird or oversharing. And teachers who are gay should be able to go the local ice cream shop with their spouse or mention that they live together on a 10-acre farm without a lot of drama. The polycule dipshit girl is just a dipshit.
My guess is that we're really not very far apart in our thoughts about this (Slaw also). I agree with nearly everything you say. If I have to choose between a polycule dipshit sharing her sex life with my kids and Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill, I'll go with FL.
But I think it is possible to have a professional relationship with students without having an impenetrable firewall of silence between you. I did as a teenager. If only the world hadn't gone mad.
How many teachers really are sharing a lot of their personal life with their students? Couldn't this be a few outliers driving the whole conversation?
When I was a teacher I may have mentioned something about one of my kids but I certainly didn't go into how my divorce was progressing, or who I was dating at the time.
Just teaching the basic academic subjects took more time than I had.
I think the point is that in a previous generation personal life would have been a topic for other adults. Now apparently it's something that adults share with kids in the classroom. What's next? "I got so wasted last weekend and woke up in some strange dude's apartment. I never did find my underwear"?
I'm a Gen Xer and think I can remember the marital/parental status of most of my high school teachers. Maybe because we were a pretty close knit community?
I just don't think it is at all weird for a teacher to mention in passing something like "I'm taking my daughter to tour some colleges over spring break and won't be back til Tuesday." We can't allow the lunatics on TikTok to make this seem abnormal or unhealthy.
Back when I was in junior high school we had exactly one teacher who would do this kind of stuff in class and he was notable precisely because he did this kind of stuff in class. And even then it was stories like how he got robbed delivering pizzas over the summer.
As a student I knew some of the personal details of my teachers but there was a very clear division between adults versus minors and they largely hung out in their world while we kids did our own thing in ours. That, I think, has changed.
Plus I keep coming back to what Gurri said (although he was quoting somebody else). When your primary concern is building your own brand rather than fulfilling your duties it seems to me that the natural extension of that for a teacher is using the kids in your classroom as a captive audience--maybe for practicing your standup routine, maybe for using as a sounding board for your personal life and maybe for promulgating your personal ideology.
I graduated high school in 1994 and knew absolutely nothing about my teachers lives outside of school.
I agree with you on this. I'm an Xer too, and I never remember our teachers talking about their personal lives. We didn't know anything about them, they could have all been Mormons with 12 kids for all we knew.
The thing is, that's a good thing. I wouldn't want to know anything about their personal lives because...well...that's personal. What does any of that have to do with their teaching? Nothing, that's what. It's their job, not a facebook group.
To go a bit further, they aren't our friends, nor should they be. That doesn't mean they can't inspire or instill, they certainly can. But there is nothing at all that says a teacher needs to be your buddy. If anything, it's a conflict of interest. I'd rather I know zero about my teacher's personal life because 1) I believe that distance makes a better teacher, and 2) it's none of my damn business.
I share the same concerns as a mother of a child in a progressive school. I talk to him about the reality of sex and the variations of gender expression and presentation. I tell him point blank: no matter what you wear, what toys you play with, who you date you will never be able to have a baby, only girls who become women can do that. That is the main difference between sexes, everything else is just personal preference and expression. We need to set our children firmly in reality. I am heartbroken to read the stories of young trans people who thought they could actually transition into the other sex.
Hi, I'm a trans woman. And while I agree with some of the points raised here about the ham-handed way some of these advocates and curricula discuss gender with young students... the reality is, some people are in fact trans, and every trans adult used to be a kid. That means some kids are trans too, even if they don't quite know what that means yet. And you'll have a hard time finding a trans adult who doesn't wish they'd known what was going on with them sooner, because it really does make a difference in terms of what outcomes they were able to achieve with transition and how much time, expense, and surgical risk it took to get there.
There is a real difference between "defying gender stereotypes" and experiencing gender dysphoria. Unfortunately, curricula presented by well-meaning but naïve cis people might not present it very well. But fortunately, kids' natural and often lamentable drive to indulge stereotypes acts as a countermeasure to those shoddy curricula: typical boys *don't want* to be girls, and don't want to partake in things that are "for girls" (whatever they think that means). We all recognize that; that's why there's been a movement to desegregate the toy aisle, balance gender representation in media, and so on. So the fear that a shoddy curriculum will set kids who aren't trans on a "path to a lifetime of medicalization" seems fairly overblown: the kids wouldn't go along with it anyway.
I want to respond specifically to your mention of autism.
There is, in fact, a correlation between autism and all parts of the LGBT "spectrum". Autistic people are less likely than average to be heterosexual, and also less likely than average to be cisgender. Likewise, people who aren't heterosexual or cisgender are more likely than average to be autistic. I don't think anyone's discovered the exact reason behind it, but the "extreme male brain" theory of autism and the known influence of prenatal hormones on sexual orientation and gender identity suggests a common cause.
But autism isn't a mental illness, it's a developmental condition. It doesn't go away. So when an autistic person experiences gender dysphoria, it makes no sense to say "let's treat the autism first, then we'll see if you still want to be a girl once the autism clears up".
Autism also doesn't make people confused about what their gender is or what they want it to be. Autistic cis boys want to be boys, just like non-autistic cis boys. If autistic boys are more likely than average to say they want to be girls, that's because they're more likely to actually be trans (see, for example, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05517-y).
"If that was true, we wouldn't see autistic detransitioners, which we do. "
It is true, whether you choose to accept it or not. The fault is in your logic: being autistic doesn't by any means imply that one will be unhappy with the outcome of transitioning.
Yes, we see autistic detransitioners. But we also see non-autistic detransitioners. And we see autistic people who transition and are quite happy with the results - just like most people who transition, autistic or not.
If anyone is being told that transitioning will "help their autism symptoms", that sounds like a grave injustice. I'd love to know more about who's been telling people that and when, because it certainly hasn't been in any of the material I've encountered.
At the very profound level autism is unmistakably a very serious and debilitating condition.
But at the other end of the spectrum I think there are some real concerns about whether it's being over-diagnosed or whether a "spectrum" of devastatingly severe symptoms to minor social impediments even makes sense.
My understanding is that it's considered a spectrum because it's considered to have a common cause, both at the "devastatingly severe" end and at the "minor impediments" end. But I agree, it doesn't make a lot of sense to talk about it that way most of the time, and I think it's unfortunate that what used to be called Asperger's syndrome is now lumped in with the very different manifestation that was traditionally called autism.
That said... what might look like a "minor social impediment" may in fact be the result of a lifetime of practice and constant work to appear "normal". It's easy to talk to someone for a while and say, "You can't be autistic, you seem perfectly natural in this conversation", when you aren't seeing the mental effort they're putting in to give that impression by maintaining eye contact or matching body language, the hours they've spent thinking about what went wrong in similar conversations in the past and rehearsing a better approach, and so on.
Not sure what this has to do with gender, though. :)
The question is how do you know that it has the same root cause? I don't think anybody has a good grasp of what produces autism. It is also entirely conceivable numerous disorders/conditions produce "generalized social anxiety" (for lack of a better term). And finally does a diagnosis like Asperger's just pathologize something that in the past would have just been considered to lie in the range of normal human behavior?
Tara, thank you for this thoughtful reply.
I agree that there is a huge difference between "defying gender stereotypes" and gender dysphoria. I probably wouldn't have any problem if, e.g., the I Am Jazz book talked about "feeling like you are in the wrong body" or something like that. But it doesn't, and many active practitioners of gender medicine talk in terms of stereotypes too.
I'm not sure if I understood the second half of your second paragraph correctly. It sounds like you're saying that (for example) girls will not act in stereotypically boyish ways because they don't want the social reprobation that comes with it. And as a corollary, if a girl is acting in boyish ways (whatever that means), she must actually be trans? This I cannot support at all. As a GenX feminist, we worked hard to leave that behind. But maybe I misunderstood?
Finally, with respect to the end of your first paragraph: I think we are way out over our skis in terms of the science of gender transition medicine. Children who transition before puberty will (a) definitely be reproductively dysfunctional. They will not be able to produce mature sex cells and will not be able to create a baby, even with IVF. (b) Possibly (probably? almost certainly?) be unable to orgasm and thus will likely struggle with sexual dissatisfaction for a lifetime. (c) For natal males who wish to go whole hog and create a neovagina, they will lack the penile tissue to do so in the most successful way and will be forced to get tissue from other areas that are less successful (forearm, colon). Whether these negatives are outweighed by the positive of more closely approximating the desired gender seems like a big, ugly, open question.
"It sounds like you're saying that (for example) girls will not act in stereotypically boyish ways because they don't want the social reprobation that comes with it. And as a corollary, if a girl is acting in boyish ways (whatever that means), she must actually be trans?"
Mm, no.
This is a nuanced topic, and that nuance doesn't always fully translate in online discussions, especially once people start drawing lines and picking sides. But I'll do my best.
(1) I'm not saying kids avoid acting in stereotypically "opposite sex" ways because they don't want the social reprobation.
Social reprobation may be a part of it, but I think mostly they avoid acting in those ways because they *want* to learn about societal roles and emulate the kind of people they think they belong with. Boys want to be perceived as boys, so they tend to do the things they think are "for boys", and they tend to avoid doing things that they think are "for girls" because they don't want to be perceived as girls.
(2) I'm not saying that if a girl acts in boyish ways, or a boy acts in girlish ways, they must actually be trans.
Even when they do something that has a gendered connotation, they aren't necessarily doing it *because* of that gendered connotation. They may be doing it in spite of that connotation! But if they *are* doing it because of the connotation, then it's probably worth digging a little deeper.
Imagine a boy whose intolerant parent has just "caught" him wearing a skirt and said "Take that skirt off, that's for girls! You're a boy!" Here are some possible ways he might respond, assuming he's not enlightened enough at that age to challenge the stereotype's premise:
(a) "I didn't know it was for girls. I'll take it off."
(b) "I know it's for girls, but I like it anyway. Can't I wear it?"
(c) "I know it's for girls, that's why I want to wear it!"
The last one is saying something about gender that the other two aren't. Of course, kids aren't always eloquent, forthcoming, or self-aware enough to give a complete and tidy explanation; it'd be a mistake to assume anything based on one brief statement. But that's why it's worth teaching them about this stuff, I think.
Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. You've conveyed the nuance well and it's helpful food for thought. Your point (2) was especially excellent.
"Children who transition before puberty will [...]"
It's an evolving field of medicine, one that most people have never had to learn much about, and unfortunately a lot of people have formed opinions based on information that isn't quite accurate, or generalizations that don't apply in many cases.
So, I'll briefly respond to a few of the points you raised, but really the best resource would be something like the WPATH or UCSF standards of care, or a discussion with a doctor who actually works with young trans patients.
(1) According to the commonly used standards of care, children shouldn't medically transition until puberty has already started, for various reasons. That means when we talk about children taking puberty blockers (or even cross-sex hormones), we're talking about adolescents who have already had at least some degree of secondary sexual development: they block natal puberty from progressing, not from starting.
(2) The belief that people who transition as kids will be unable to orgasm as adults is a myth, unsupported by evidence; it seems to be based mostly on a single assertion by one person who offered no data to back it up. For a complete rebuttal, including citations to data disproving the myth, see https://genderanalysis.net/2022/04/abigail-shrier-and-surgeon-marci-bowers-falsely-claimed-trans-girls-on-puberty-blockers-lack-sexual-response-after-vaginoplasty/
(3) The belief that the alternatives to penile inversion vaginoplasty are "less successful", and thus that transitioning without having gone through male puberty must lead to poor surgical outcomes, is also a myth unsupported by evidence; see the link above for details. Besides the intestinal vaginoplasty (not "forearm"; that's used in phalloplasty, for trans men), there's also the option of a peritoneal flap vaginoplasty, which is based on an established technique used for reconstructive surgery in cis women. Both have high rates of patient satisfaction, including sexual function.
Thank you also for this. Here I think we will have to wait for time to tell. Unfortunately there seems to be a real lack of scientific curiosity on the part of gender transition practitioners about the potential risks associated with their work. As a 49-y-o woman trying to understand the benefits and costs of replacing my failing hormones with their exact analogue (does my risk of cancer increase? risk of heart disease decrease? what about bone loss?), I find the recklessness with which we are giving children cross-sex hormones to be crazy.
My friend was on Lupron for endometriosis. That is a standard puberty blocking medication. To say that she has side effects would be an understatement. These drugs are very powerful and have very serious side effects, which includes suicidal ideation in children.
"As a 49-y-o woman trying to understand the benefits and costs of replacing my failing hormones with their exact analogue (does my risk of cancer increase? risk of heart disease decrease? what about bone loss?)"
I'd be interested in hearing what you've learned about this. My understanding is that with bioidentical HRT, and monitoring to keep the levels in the same range as they were before, there ought to be no change in those risks, but the delivery method can have an effect on both the risks and the levels.
"I find the recklessness with which we are giving children cross-sex hormones to be crazy."
I understand why a lot of people focus on the risks or side effects of cross-sex hormones (it's a medical intervention), but I think it's easy to forget that those risks and side effects are caused by the hormones themselves -- no matter whose body they're in, or where they came from.
That is, it's true that (say) testosterone comes with certain risks. But in addition to worrying about adolescent girls being subjected to those risks unnecessarily, maybe we should also take a moment to worry about adolescent *boys* being subjected to those risks unnecessarily.
`I think it's easy to forget that those risks and side effects are caused by the hormones themselves -- no matter whose body they're in, or where they came from.'
And the side effects are not always negative. My understanding is that HRT for trans women increases the risk of osteoporosis, for example, but lowers the risk of heart disease.
People react very differently on hormones. I used Lupron for IVF and it didn't faze me, however, most women found it awful and emotionally disruptive.
The hormones do definitely effect your thinking. I was glad after miscarriage to have my progesterone drop because it became easier to deal with the end of the pregnancy.
Sex cream! Estrace...get it from Canada at a quarter of the price. Use it once a week or just when you feel like your sex drive has fallen off the cliff and you need a parachute.
Hot flashes...cardigan sweaters. Tell yourself you aren't sick you just need to dump heat. Throw off the covers and that sweat will cool you off.
Revel in the joy of not having cramps and bleeding through your clothes.
`And you'll have a hard time finding a trans adult who doesn't wish they'd known what was going on with them sooner'
Agreed, but that doesn't imply that medical treatments need to be started earlier, just that they should be available once one's level of gender dysphoria becomes too severe to treat with other approaches.
What "other approaches" do you have in mind for treating gender dysphoria? I'd love to see some data on their effectiveness.
Trans kids should be allowed to be depressed/anxious/autistic and still receive treatment for gender dysphoria, as one doesn't necessarily cause or exacerbate the other.
"deal with the depression/anxiety/PTSD/autism, and then see if there's still any lingering dysphoria"
You've said your brother is autistic, so presumably you're aware that autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects people for their entire lives, not an illness to be treated and resolved. Therefore, it makes no sense to say "deal with the autism first and see if there's any lingering dysphoria".
Treatment for autism focuses on things like controlling or redirecting harmful behaviors, practicing emotional awareness and communication skills, developing strategies for navigating difficult situations, etc., none of which have the goal or the effect of alleviating gender dysphoria.
"Then see if counseling can get them to a place of being satisfied with the body they're born with"
This was tried extensively in the past, of course, because it's the first solution that pops into everybody's mind. Problem is, there's no evidence that it's effective.
In my experience gender dysphoria is progressive in nature, so different levels of dysphoria can be treated with different interventions. In milder cases, some form of psychotherapy, followed by social transition, if warranted.
Is there any evidence supporting the effectiveness of psychotherapy alone? The closest I've been able to find is a paper from 2021 arguing that the harmfulness of psychotherapy has been overstated (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2), but nothing to support the belief that it can be an effective alternative to any form of transition for treating gender dysphoria.
Well, they're not talking about Heather having two mommies in algebra class, right?
When I look back on my childhood I'm pretty sure there were times when my teachers, and even parents, might have thought I was gay. For some reason I really liked to wear flashy clothes for gradeschool P.E. class, I would spend hours at night cutting the shirts and shorts into all sorts of flashy patterns. I would often mirror my mother in the kitchen, mimicking her meal prep because I thought it was fun. Sometimes my neighbor's kid and I would play around in his parents bedroom closet, and I was usually the one wearing the mom's clothes. I even had a 3rd grade teacher who used to call me twinkle toes...even though I had no idea what it meant then.
At some point I distinctly remember my dad trying to get me to ask out girls in high school, he once forced me to buy his buddy's daughter a popcorn and coke at a football game. I still remember the poor girl not knowing what the hell was going on, I clearly didn't know what to do in this awkward situation.
Looking back it makes me laugh. Not because it's funny to think about now as a straight male, but because none of that early-adolescent feminine curiosity panned out to mean anything substantial...it was just a teenager being awkward and ignorant in the ways of the sexual world I was still barely wading in.
My point with all this is this: just because a kid has certain curiosities or interest in things normally associated with the opposite sex, does not automatically presume a non-hetero identity. Sometimes it just means a kid is awkward and ignorant.
I think we’d go a very long way if in the first several years of school the emphasis less on developing one’s personal identity, and more on developing empathy for others.
Anti-bullying regulations that are actually enforced would solve a lot of issues minority, gay, trans kids, or any others might have. And if empathy were taught as a virtue, perhaps they be unneeded.
A couple of typos/phrasing issues you may want to adjust:
"(Pictures that are circulated of the book are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn't true.) "
"If a kid I gay, they're gonna figure that out."
thanks
This is the tension at the heart of higher education: the legacy heterodox movement that supports universities as places to engage in challenging material, even material that upsets, and learn the skills to synthesize and build arguments, vs. the progressive approach that has expanded the definition of harm so broadly, that anything remotely challenging to a worldview, to an ideology, is considered out of bounds. Of being morally wrong.
The latter of these positions is where catastrophism rules the day. If everything not aligned with the correct ideology is harmful, if words are violence, you can justify censorship and restrictions on personal behavior without the slightest pause. After all, who can possibly argue against "But people will die!" and not risk being seen as a monster?
For the most passionate among them, there are no gray areas. Protecting the right people -- those with the right politics -- is an absolute good, and the determination of what those harms look like is applied with absolute certainty.
Underlying these judgments and reactions is the fundamental idea that being upset is....wrong. "It's not my job to educate you" is the response that comes from thinking that having to explain or make an argument is a significant imposition on one's freedom. Where truly harmless social interactions can be couched as "microaggressions" because how someone receives an event -- "living my truth" -- is seen as dispositive of a breach of the social contract and can be litigated in public to the reputational destruction of the offender.
Powering these dynamics are the rewards that accrue to those asserting their right to never experience anything resembling adversity. Elite status gained through victimhood. Institutions so terrified of being canceled, that they label the most censorious among us as "stunning and brave."
I've been looking for the right place in this thread to make this comment, and you've won.
I grew up within a fundamentalist religion. The paralyzed reaction to anything challenging a worldview, the refusal to recognize grey areas, the status-hierarchy of victimhood, and the (truly pathological) lengths to which people will go to "protect" themselves and their children from "harms" are all so, so, *so* familiar to me from that context.
For a few years, long after I'd escaped from that mindset, I taught at a university run by that religion (hey, it was a job! I knew how to navigate that environment, my department was pretty liberal, and I did a lot of good for a lot of students). I continually fought to include on my syllabi material with mature, or (mildly) sexual, content; or "secular" themes; or "bad language". (Many of my classes came with content warnings!) My argument to the "saints" that ran that place was exactly what Freddy described in this post: These things exist; where would you prefer that students first encounter them? Out in the "world", where they'll be ill-equipped to handle them, or in a class-room, where we can discuss them safely, defuse their power, and strategize how to deal with them in a mature fashion? Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost, but I've not lost my belief that that's what education is for.
It discourages me to see secular, "liberal" institutions mirroring the cramped ideological construct in which I was raised.
That poem should come with a trigger warning. I'm not a big poetry reader but I'm sitting here now both trying to find more Linda Pastan to read and also not sure how I'm going to move on with my day. I have the get the kids to school, man! Warn me next time!
Freddie alluded to this idea throughout, and I can't help but remark on it here:
How much of all of this is simply due to children not growing up? Whether it's refusing to, or somehow not being able to, I feel like so much of this is because people can't handle the vulgarities of real life like so many of us 'older' folks learned to so long ago.
If Haidt is right, and kids really are this fragile now, then the easy solution would seem to be to simply tell them to grow up. That's how it's always worked in the past anyway - learn to be an adult and get some thick skin...or you don't get to be in the adult crowd with the rest of us.
The problem with that seems to be that in today's world YA's somehow flipped the script and are the ones running the show now. Adults are too scared to put them in their place, perhaps because YA's figured out you can now link all sorts of 'isms' to anything you disagree with. How they managed that I still can't figure out, but I feel like that should be a chapter in Tzu's Art of War.
Thanks for that poem link, always great to read something new!