GenderBread Person

[Lootifer]

I don't think it should be their job at all.

Why not? Assuming the teacher is doing their job correctly then there will be no bias and therefore no downside to the learning.

Unless you suppose that simply by knowing about/being comfortable with the concept of a non- "standard hetrosexual existence" is somehow going to bring about the downfall of society then you shouldn't have an issue with it, well no more issue than the value of teaching non-technical kids science or something similar.

Forget junior high school, just look at the overwhelming majority of college graduates 'world view'. Stick to math, science, english, if a whatever student is in the class and it's an issue, sure.....RELEASE genderbread man!

Mate 15-25 year old kids have been thinking dumb stuff since 15-25 year old kids have existed. Its what they do. Sure the current bent is to grow a twirly moustache, hate on CO2 and wear skinny jeans. Again unless you can demonstrate that a generation of skinny jeans clad hipsters is somehow going to ruin the fun for everyone then you're just ranting from a soap box.

[Phatscotty]

I don't think it should be their job at all.

Why not?

Because I think that's the parents and families job. I have a friend whose child has a few issues in this area. His sons situation is delicate, and he simply and specifically does not want a teacher or a teacher's opinion or political correctness or confusion involved with his son as much as he can help it.

Unless you suppose that simply by knowing about/being comfortable with the concept of a non- "standard hetrosexual existence" is somehow going to bring about the downfall of society then you shouldn't have an issue with it, well no more issue than the value of teaching non-technical kids science or something similar.

There is really no need to get all extremefansmax on it. I just think it's for the parents, and if that isn't a possibility then a counselor will suffice.

Forget junior high school, just look at the overwhelming majority of college graduates 'world view'. Stick to math, science, english, if a whatever student is in the class and it's an issue, sure.....RELEASE genderbread man!

Mate 15-25 year old kids have been thinking dumb stuff since 15-25 year old kids have existed. Its what they do. Sure the current bent is to grow a twirly moustache, hate on CO2 and wear skinny jeans. Again unless you can demonstrate that a generation of skinny jeans clad hipsters is somehow going to ruin the fun for everyone then you're just ranting from a soap box.

I don't need to explain anything like that, since I never said anything about ruining the fun, nor did I rant.

It's okay for parents to take the lead with their children, especially when it comes to sexuality.

[Lootifer]

Oh I agree it is something parents should be doing, but since its not something all parents will/can be doing then that information should really be provided somewhere (counselors are good too, but I don't see an issue with high level stuff like this being taught in the classroom - hiding it away in some counselors office stigmatizes it somewhat).

[mrswdk]

@Phats Why is it okay to give a parent the authority to teach children about sexuality but not teachers? The way I see it, distortion of a child's world view or personal development is more likely to occur if you restrict the right to educate to a smaller number of people. Allowing teachers and parents to both play a role in a child's development will expose that child to a broader range of attitudes and perspectives and therefore probably foster a more balanced development.

[Metsfanmax]

I don't think it should be their job at all.

Why not?

Because I think that's the parents and families job. I have a friend whose child has a few issues in this area. His sons situation is delicate, and he simply and specifically does not want a teacher or a teacher's opinion or political correctness or confusion involved with his son as much as he can help it.

Translation: his son is gay, bisexual or transgender, and he does not think this is acceptable.

[saxitoxin]

Lootifer and Mets are just stuck in 17th century thinking. Try joining us in the modern world, guys.

Thomas Hall, born Thomasine Hall (c.1603 – 1629), was an English servant in colonial Virginia whose alternation between male and female attire and mannerisms provoked public controversy in 1629. At various times, Hall used the names Thomas and Thomasine and presented as male or female depending on the work or sexual partner he desired. The local community responded to his inconsistent gender with a physical inspection by several neighbors, and the case reached the Quarter Court at Jamestown, which ruled that Hall was both a man and a woman. It ordered him to dress in male and female clothing simultaneously.

Until the early 19th century, theories of sexual difference were not solely determined by anatomy, according to several scholars. Many early modern medical theorists and scientists emphasized that gender identity was not constant and could be subject to change. They believed that male organs were tucked inside of women because they did not have enough heat to develop external genitalia. They believed that strenuous physical activity or even “mannish behavior” could cause testicles to exit from inside the vagina.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall

* Is this why AoG is so interested in sports?

[codierose]

what country is using this in schools

[thegreekdog]

. It ordered him to dress in male and female clothing simultaneously.

So bra and leiderhosen underneath a dress with a tri-corner hat?

[saxitoxin]

. It ordered him to dress in male and female clothing simultaneously.

So bra and leiderhosen underneath a dress with a tri-corner hat?

You swelling up thinking about that, huh? Join the club. Gonna get my g/f, Es, a Thomasine Hall costume for Halloween instead of the sexy zombie outfit.

Have you ever offered a settlement to the U.S. Tax Court of having your client dress simultaneously in male/female clothing? (Is that how it works?)

[AndyDufresne]

This is why we need PS:

"Only One LGBTQ Person Allowed Per Team In League Of Legends Tournament"

"Garena, operator of League of Legends in places like Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, is hosting an all-women eSports competition. "

1) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of one (1) Gay/Transgendered woman for the entirety of the tournament day. Therefore, teams cannot do the following: Team_A's first game will be 4 female members and 1 gay, then on Team_A's second game, they will have 4 female members and replace with another gay or transgender member.

2) Any team who has violated the above provision, regardless if intentional or otherwise, whether discovered during the day of the event or some time after, will have all their team members (the female members as well as the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered women member) sanctioned with a 1-year ban on all Garena-organized events, including subsequent Iron Solari Tournament.

They are ruining everything!


--Andy

[thegreekdog]

. It ordered him to dress in male and female clothing simultaneously.

So bra and leiderhosen underneath a dress with a tri-corner hat?

You swelling up thinking about that, huh? Join the club. Gonna get my g/f, Es, a Thomasine Hall costume for Halloween instead of the sexy zombie outfit.

Have you ever offered a settlement to the U.S. Tax Court of having your client dress simultaneously in male/female clothing? (Is that how it works?)

Given recent budget projections, I don't think Tax Court would accept that kind of settlement. Maybe the tri-corner hat was worn by women as the 17th century verson of the baseball cap. Hawt.

[Phatscotty]

@Phats Why is it okay to give a parent the authority to teach children about sexuality but not teachers? The way I see it, distortion of a child's world view or personal development is more likely to occur if you restrict the right to educate to a smaller number of people. Allowing teachers and parents to both play a role in a child's development will expose that child to a broader range of attitudes and perspectives and therefore probably foster a more balanced development.

Why is it the parents jobs to provide a roof over their child, to put food on the table, to protect them from harm? And I don't really relate to the way you are speaking....'give' the parents authority?? Parents already have the authority. I suppose it's different where you are/are from. I guess the difference is The State has not taken that authority away from parents. We are in the stage where The State can decide to take over if a parent/parents are refusing their children life saving medicine or treatment The State deems necessary.

Teachers; they do play a role, it's just not a primary one. And If it were ever studied, I would put my money on teachers having a higher rate of failure at proper teaching than police have failure of proper policing.

[crispybits]

PS, I'm going to assume that you don't deny the existence of or validity of the concepts being described in your OP. That people can identify as a gender that is not their biological gender, and that people can express themselves as a gender other than their biological gender and have varying levels of attraction to different genders independent of their biological gender. If you think that one or more of the concepts from the pic in the OP is a fabrication, then ignore the rest of my post and just quote this paragraph and explain which please.

1. Given that these are real, at what age should we introduce people to these concepts? Should they be 18+? 21+?
2. So that we may avoid further "mistakes" on these issues or ones like them in future, what are the kinds of topics that should be taboo for those under the age you suggest in response to (1) and why? (for example X should be included because a child is incapable of making rational judgements about Y)
3. On what basis should we restrict the presentation of demonstrably real concepts to people under any given age? For example would a teacher be allowed to affirm that gay people exist to a 12 year old if asked a direct question?

[Phatscotty]

PS, I'm going to assume that you don't deny the existence of or validity of the concepts being described in your OP. That people can identify as a gender that is not their biological gender, and that people can express themselves as a gender other than their biological gender and have varying levels of attraction to different genders independent of their biological gender. If you think that one or more of the concepts from the pic in the OP is a fabrication, then ignore the rest of my post and just quote this paragraph and explain which please.

1. Given that these are real, at what age should we introduce people to these concepts? Should they be 18+? 21+?
2. So that we may avoid further "mistakes" on these issues or ones like them in future, what are the kinds of topics that should be taboo for those under the age you suggest in response to (1) and why? (for example X should be included because a child is incapable of making rational judgements about Y)
3. On what basis should we restrict the presentation of demonstrably real concepts to people under any given age? For example would a teacher be allowed to affirm that gay people exist to a 12 year old if asked a direct question?

You would be punctilious in assuming that!

1. Everybody is different, nobody is exactly the same. Not even biological twins. Which is the very reason why we don't need to decide which size fits all. I suppose the answer is whenever the concepts need to be introduced. That's a choice for each person/family/group, and you should already know you won't find me dictating to everyone else that this MUST be done at a certain age and it MUST be done within the extremely successful public education system.
2. I'm not about to dictate what is taboo and when or why. If a child is having trouble with something, then that is the time to identify what is troubling as well as to address how best to deal with it.
3. I can reverse that to further the convo (as well as touch on the original point), on what basis did genderbread person be deemed 'need to know'? Obviously, the basis was not there a year ago.

[mrswdk]

@Phats Why is it okay to give a parent the authority to teach children about sexuality but not teachers? The way I see it, distortion of a child's world view or personal development is more likely to occur if you restrict the right to educate to a smaller number of people. Allowing teachers and parents to both play a role in a child's development will expose that child to a broader range of attitudes and perspectives and therefore probably foster a more balanced development.

Why is it the parents jobs to provide a roof over their child, to put food on the table, to protect them from harm?

For the same reason as pet owners are required to take good care of their dog or cat - children are unable to take full physical care of themselves, so responsibility for that is given to someone else.

The default is for that responsibility to go to the biological parents of the child, seeing as they're the ones who decided to create the child in the first place, but they are free to relinquish that responsibility and put the child up for adoption at any time if they wish.

And I don't really relate to the way you are speaking....'give' the parents authority?? Parents already have the authority.

My point was that I don't understand why you want to prevent teachers from teaching kids about sexuality on the grounds that they might screw up the child and distort its world view, but you're comfortable letting parents teach kids about sexuality even though there is obviously a risk of a parent doing the exact same thing.

And as I said before, there's less chance of a child growing up with a distorted world view if it has been exposed to a variety of different views and perspectives.

[crispybits]

You would be punctilious in assuming that!

1. Everybody is different, nobody is exactly the same. Not even biological twins. Which is the very reason why we don't need to decide which size fits all. I suppose the answer is whenever the concepts need to be introduced. That's a choice for each person/family/group, and you should already know you won't find me dictating to everyone else that this MUST be done at a certain age and it MUST be done within the extremely successful public education system.
2. I'm not about to dictate what is taboo and when or why. If a child is having trouble with something, then that is the time to identify what is troubling as well as to address how best to deal with it.
3. I can reverse that to further the convo (as well as touch on the original point), on what basis did genderbread person be deemed 'need to know'? Obviously, the basis was not there a year ago.

OK. I guess where we disagree then is the role of the education system. I think the role of the education system can be defined something like:

To provide children with a well rounded understanding of reality, including differing views on cultural issues within their culture and between their culture and other cultures.

In history classes we already teach children about concepts like war, slavery, murder and genocide and various political systems. In sex ed classes we already teach children about things like STDs and rape/ consent. We don't find children en masse committing murder, genocide or rape because they have been educated about the reality of those topics. In fact by raising these troubling issues we find that children, even young teenagers, are able to understand these topics quite well and I would argue that most 13 year olds would be able to give a fairly good explanation for why these things are considered wrong and the justification for why we consider them wrong.

Given that we agree that the concepts from the OP are valid, on what basis do children need to know about genocide and slavery in a way they don't need to know about how to understand the very basic concepts about people who do not conform to the standard majority case of being a heterosexual who identifies and expresses as their actual biological gender? Even from a super-religious view (which I am not accusing you of holding here btw) where all these things are sins, I struggle to see the difference between X being a sin that it's fine for children to learn about, and Y being a sin that children shouldn't be learning about. Surely the children would benefit from having a grounding in all the topics so that they can be aware of the concepts and parents can then teach them why X or Y is wrong in their view the same way they are able to teach children about other ethical or political standpoints and their justifications for why the child should believe that X or Y is wrong or right.

[Lootifer]

@Phats Why is it okay to give a parent the authority to teach children about sexuality but not teachers? The way I see it, distortion of a child's world view or personal development is more likely to occur if you restrict the right to educate to a smaller number of people. Allowing teachers and parents to both play a role in a child's development will expose that child to a broader range of attitudes and perspectives and therefore probably foster a more balanced development.

Why is it the parents jobs to provide a roof over their child, to put food on the table, to protect them from harm?

For the same reason as pet owners are required to take good care of their dog or cat - children are unable to take full physical care of themselves, so responsibility for that is given to someone else.

The default is for that responsibility to go to the biological parents of the child, seeing as they're the ones who decided to create the child in the first place, but they are free to relinquish that responsibility and put the child up for adoption at any time if they wish.

And I don't really relate to the way you are speaking....'give' the parents authority?? Parents already have the authority.

My point was that I don't understand why you want to prevent teachers from teaching kids about sexuality on the grounds that they might screw up the child and distort its world view, but you're comfortable letting parents teach kids about sexuality even though there is obviously a risk of a parent doing the exact same thing.

And as I said before, there's less chance of a child growing up with a distorted world view if it has been exposed to a variety of different views and perspectives.

HERE HERE! (or is it her her?!)

[Phatscotty]

Besides my overall point that parents know their children best... What makes you think teachers will all teach the same thing? That this won't lead to one teachers opinion clashing with another's? How many problems do you think this would cause with parents? Having teachers tell the students the opposite of what the parents teach?

Funny, nobody took the position a year ago that teachers should ask students if they are gay or not. It was more along the lines of 'that will never happen phatscotty is just using fear tactics!'

[Metsfanmax]

Since you haven't yet provided a single shred of evidence that this "genderbread person" is actually being used by teachers, "fear tactics" is actually the least of your problems.

[Lootifer]

Besides my overall point that parents know their children best... What makes you think teachers will all teach the same thing? That this won't lead to one teachers opinion clashing with another's? How many problems do you think this would cause with parents? Having teachers tell the students the opposite of what the parents teach?

Funny, nobody took the position a year ago that teachers should ask students if they are gay or not. It was more along the lines of 'that will never happen phatscotty is just using fear tactics!'

We didn't address it a year ago because it has no relevance to the marriage debate which was the topic of the time.

This is a freedom thing where you are asserting the parent should be free to teach their children as they see fit. That unfortunately does (and should) have limitations as we don't want parents causing irreparable harm to children. Now how much in the way of limits are for us, as a society, to decide.

I share your view that apart from obvious forms of neglect you should be able to raise your child as you see fit with very few limitations; however consequently we should also, then, be equipping the child with the critical thinking tools and the raw data/information such that the child is fully exposed to life's many learning's and can establish their own position. This may very well cause disagreement between teachers and parents, but this isn't an unhealthy situation.

[crispybits]

PS, to make an analogy, I doubt you would deny that there are many racist people out there who have kids.

Now the schools will teach the kids about the civil rights movement and the ethical topics relevant to that and why the US decided to change laws and enforce the constitution in a certain way, and as a result the child will not only get taught brainless intolerance by their parents, but they will see that the issues are not as black and white (pun intended) as their parents might portray them and that it's a more complex topic with much deeper social nuances than "all non-whites are sub-human animals". As a result, over generations racism is slowly becoming less and less of a societal problem. It's not been eradicated yet, but plot the graph for how many people agree with the statement "skin colour/race should not be used as a method for judging people" (tho the poll people would probably word that better) and you'll see a steady upward trend. This is because once someone's mind is set in a certain way it's very difficult to get them out of that mindset, but if you can reach people before they make their minds up then they are more likely to make a well informed and rational decision to reject racist philosophies. (Note I am not suggesting the indoctrination of infants here, we're talking about teenagers past the age where they gain critical thinking skills of their own.)

It's the same with anything. Nobody is suggesting it should be OK for someone to push an agenda on kids, what we are saying is we are happy for kids to be taught any and all facts we can get them to have access to. As you agree that these gender distinctions are fact based distinctions and reflections of what is actually happening in reality, then I don't think we disagree on this point.

Are there bad teachers who would persist in trying to push an agenda? Of course there are. But as Neil de Grasse Tyson said about creationist science teachers, that's not an issue of getting bad information out of the classroom, it's an issue of getting bad teachers out of the classroom (slightly paraphrased). Given the number of known cases of gay people being found to be attempting to indoctrinate or push an agenda vs the number of known cases of religious people (who make up the vast majority of anti-gay people) found to be attempting to indoctrinate or push an agenda from behind the teacher's desk, I'd say that your worries are unfounded, and although I can't prove it I'd be willing to bet a decent wodge of cash on the fact that if we had a magic wand that identified this kind of bad teaching behaviour and we tallied up the pro-gay vs anti-gay bad teachers we'd find the majority of the agenda pushing is being done in the opposite direction to the one you complain about.

[thegreekdog]

As communication becomes less controllable, it's going to matter less what parents teach their kids. For example, I'm convinced that the speed with which gays have been accepted is directly related to television, radio, and the internet. Unfortunately, there are also bad examples of unrestricted communications.

[crispybits]

Not sure about that TGD. I think the parents, at least the ones that give a crap about their kids, will always provide a sort of lens through which the child views the world during those formative years.

imo you are right that the speed of uptake of LGBT equality is partly due to modern communication technology, but I think it also has a fair bit to do with the suffrajette and civil rights movements. The activists now have had a chance to learn lessons from the activisits back then in making pretty much the same sort of point and are able to skip much quicker to the most effective tactics (also it's quicker and easier to take the same principles through the courts based on the fundamental equality precedents set in these other cases)

[Metsfanmax]

but plot the graph for how many people agree with the statement "skin colour/race should not be used as a method for judging people" (tho the poll people would probably word that better) and you'll see a steady upward trend.

inb4 "no, I wouldn't, there are plenty of people who voted for Obama because he's black"

[crispybits]

but plot the graph for how many people agree with the statement "skin colour/race should not be used as a method for judging people" (tho the poll people would probably word that better) and you'll see a steady upward trend.

inb4 "no, I wouldn't, there are plenty of people who voted for Obama because he's black"

backb4 that then with this