Being a parent is a burden. You have to explain all kinds of shit to your kids. What you don’t have the right to do is demand that people change their behavior, or worse, not be who they are, just so you won’t have to feel uncomfortable in your ignorance.
Parents are supposed to explain the world to their kids. That’s part of their job.
Any parent who has no problem explaining the thousands of murders and acts of violence kids see on both dramatic and news TV over their developmental years, as well as all the tremendous sex and violence on the internet which is one click away (and don’t pretend like kids don’t have access to it; maybe Amish kids don’t, but I assure you kids in kindergarten know how to get around parental controls or watch on their friends iPhones) - but quails at the thought of explaining gender identity - is IMO undergoing some serious cognitive dissonance.
The Girl Scouts have directly addressed this issue. http://www.girlscouts.org/en/faq/faq/social-issues.html
“Girl Scouts is proud to be the premiere leadership organization for girls in the country. Placement of transgender youth is handled on a case-by-case basis, with the welfare and best interests of the child and the members of the troop/group in question a top priority. That said, if the child is recognized by the family and school/community as a girl and lives culturally as a girl, then Girl Scouts is an organization that can serve her in a setting that is both emotionally and physically safe.”
Do you want to read my 24,000-word research essay on this? The short answer is for students on hormone therapy there are no substantive differences (despite people throwing out without citations claims of “greater muscle density” or “stronger bones” making an effect). For students not on hormone therapy, there could be a difference, but no competitive advantage has really been shown. There are certainly no transgender female students, nor adults, dominating any women’s sport. The sole possible exception is one I discuss in my article with respect to veteran’s women’s epee fencing, and it’s unclear if there is any actual advantage due to the very small number of women in that specific class of that sport (and being a veteran women’s epee fencer myself, I know a little bit about the subject).
We shelter our kids from some information until they are old enough to handle it… all the time. All your screaming and shouting does not change this fact.
So you seem to be acknowledging that there is an age at which kids cannot process some information …but fuck it we’re going to make them process it anyways?
I don’t think you understand what happens to six year olds in school.
You are a horrible ambassador for transgender issues, you should probably stop. All your screaming and shouting really seems like you are trying to turn your problem into everyone’s problem. You aren’t trying to educate of debate, you are just yelling at people who resist you and calling them names.
You can try to achieve change any way you want. I just don’t think that you can use the same tactics you used for gay rights because of the difference in how much transgender issues have penetrated our cultural consciousness. You can’t just rinse and repeat. YMMV.
You are right, my original comment about white people was stupid. I apologize.
A helluva lot of people think that free healthcare is a right.
The Civil Rights Act might cover gender identity as part of the prohibition against “discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” But that is a pretty new interpretation of the term “sex” in the civil rights act. It might hold up, it might not.
As far as the girl scouts are concerned, they are open to transgender girls so we are only speaking theoretically. I agree that there is probably inconsequential harm done by a permissive girl scout policy but some people will claim that a harm exists and their concerns can only be dismissed if they are a relatively small minority of voters.
Perhaps there are things that parents can’t control but we still try to restrict things access to things like pornography or even animal carcasses. I am going to have to think about transgender issues for children, it is not as obvious to me as it seems to others on this board. Just to be clear we are on the same page, I am not talking about high school but I am definitely talking about elementary school.
I suspect that the boy scouts and other federally chartered youth groups will follow suit.
Do you have a link to a shorter essay? Ir maybe a chart or something that is easier to digest than a 24k paper?
When I lecture and talk to and work with the Girl Scout groups, it’s an entirely different attitude. The leaders “get it”, the local chapters do, and the girls get it. “They’re just girls that had to be born boys. It must be really hard for them and we need to help them out” said one 7-year-old to me. The Boy Scouts…not so much. Even my attempt to present a “Trans 101” to a local chapter was rebuffed with how I was spreading “evil”.
This is a bit shorter but still lengthy, but it has photos. http://transascity.org/cross-training-the-history-and-future-of-transgender-and-intersex-athletes-1/
Shit, Miller, he’s right. Here you are, yelling at him and calling him names, IN THE PIT. What’s up with that?
This. Absolutely this. “Johnny decided he’d rather be a girl, so now she’s Julie.” Beyond a, “You can do that?” and a, “Girls are cool,” the discussion pretty much ends. Little kids are especially flexible like this. It’s older people who aren’t. My daughter’s former boyfriend, who had me “fooled” for years, has gone back to her birth name and wearing a bra. Sorry, but she made a much better guy. The worst part is that, since the breakup, I haven’t seen my grand-doggies. 
And can you give one reasonable, intelligent, logically coherent reason that children need to be “sheltered” from knowing that there’s such a thing as transgender people? Because if you can’t, shut the fuck up with this “What about the chiiiiiilldrreeennnn?” bullshit. That dodge is never anything other than a cover for bigotry.
It only seems that way to you, because you are too dumb to understand what words mean.
I think you could have stopped after three words there.
Im not trying to educate, because you are not educatable.
Miller, I (obviously) don’t pry, but, as I recall (after 16 years), you are probably a gay male, and not transgendered. So, based on this thread and others, please try to answer HOW FUCKING STUPID IS Damuri Ajashi? Wasting effort on him seems like a, er, waste of effort.
[quote=“Una_Persson, post:369, topic:754667”]
When I lecture and talk to and work with the Girl Scout groups, it’s an entirely different attitude. The leaders “get it”, the local chapters do, and the girls get it. “They’re just girls that had to be born boys. It must be really hard for them and we need to help them out” said one 7-year-old to me. The Boy Scouts…not so much. Even my attempt to present a “Trans 101” to a local chapter was rebuffed with how I was spreading “evil”.{/quote]
I’m a little surprised. I have heard almost the opposite in little league. People seemed MUCH more comfortable with transboys than transgirls and I just assumed that was the result of cultural misogyny. For example, the term tomboy is not really offensive and people use it to describe their daughters all the time. I cannot think of an anologue that people use to describe their feminine sons. Do you think the reaction would have been different if it was a transman giving the talk?
I was thinking more about high school teams where the transgirl may not have started hormone treatments. There has been discussion on other threads where it was brought up that a team of some of the best high school age boys beat the women’s world cup champions.
I can’t think of any reason that you will ever find acceptable. But you are forcing a conversation and I don’t give a shit whether YOU think that conversation is easy or hard. If people don’t want to have it then who are you to tell them that they must have it?
You do not have public support, Even self identified liberals only agree with you about half the time. So your “convince me (which is impossible) or shut the fuck up” attitude is not going to get you very far.
Public support for
People seem much less concerned about transgender bathroom issues for transgendered people generally but have different views about school age children.
Its not that people are unsympathetic to transgender people. In fact they seem less judgmental of transgender folks that homosexual folks. The tone you use in advancing this issue is going to inform the response to that push.
Then what did you mean with these words:
“Real life isn’t going to hold off on death and violence because a kid is too young to process it.”
OMG, you’re so fucking clever, did you think of that yourself? no? Of course not, you’re just a hack who has never had an original thought in his life.
The notion that 6 year olds beat each other up on the play ground just tells me that you don’t have children. You just think you are an expert on parenting and want to take children away from their parents if the parents disagree with you. What separates you from the fascists?
No, you are not trying to educate because you don’t actually understand why you believe what you believe. You just believe what you are told to believe. You are not only a fascist, you are a tool.
Yes of course anyone that says anything that questions anything you believe is fucking stupid, there is no other conceivable explanation for why someone might not believe everything you believe. :rolleyes: This site has really gone downhill.
Damuri, you are confused. Which is understandable, as it is your default state. But it’s not that I want everyone on this subject to shut up or agree with me. It is that I want you, in particular, to shut up, period. I don’t care if you agree with me. Hell, the worst thing I can imagine, here, is having you on my side of any argument. I’m sick of your tedious, thick headed, clumsy pastiche of reasoning. Watching you try to think your way around a problem is like having my teeth drilled. You shit up every thread you participate in with your lugubrious, stumbling logic, your invincible resistance to reading comprehension, and the constant drone of your asinine, picayune “concerns” that have been addressed over and over and over and over. Nobody cares. Your opinions are not interesting. Your insights are not penetrating. Your contributions are not useful, helpful, or wanted. You are a mental vacuum: you draw in reasoned, earnest thought, and emit nothing.
I don’t care if you hate transgender people. I don’t care if you are transgendered. All I want is for you to shut. The. Fuck. Up.
Not exactly; we believe it should be.
Also, what does this have to do with the price of jism in Las Vegas? Is “non sequitur” now the new orange?
What team of high school boys beat which women’s champions in which sport? Is there a team of transgender girls beating women somewhere?
I gather from your response you don’t want to read the overall issue. This alleged inequity has not been demonstrated to exist to any point that it remotely threatens any sport, other than a theoretical level which seems based upon a fear that somewhere out there are entire cadres of transgender girls, and fakers backed by some Svengali, who want to compete in sports just to beat cisgender girls.
If you accept that as many as 1 in 200 MAAB are transgender at the high school level, and you take a school with 1,000 students (pretty much par for the course around here), and assume half are MAAB, then you have about 2.5 transgender girls at the school. Somewhere between 52-62% of girls 8th grade-12th grade participate in sports (although these are not broken down by competitive or varsity sports. Other estimates I found place this number at being about 20% of the total sports participation figure for girls, so say at most about 12.4% of high school girls might even participate in a competitive or varsity sport.
With 2.5 transgender girls per school, you might come across 1 transgender girl participating in competitive or varsity sports every 3.2 high schools.
And then we have perhaps one of the largest fallacies of the belief that transgender girls will dominate all other girls - just because one participates in competitive sports in high school doesn’t mean that one is 1) enthused or driven to train and win, 2) skilled enough at it, or 3) isn’t playing with others who are their peers or betters in the sport.
KCMO has one of the most liberal policies for transgender accommodation in the nation. I have and do work directly with their attorneys and counselors and facilitators there for transgender children. Over their 8 high schools, and over nearly 6 years of continuous accommodation, there has never been a case of a transgender girl (or boy) competing in sports who ever even was near the top of their events. As far as I’ve heard, they tend to compete about in the middle of the “pack” of their events.
So setting all else aside, setting aside everything about the medicine and mechanics, how significant of a threat are we talking about here? When I was 6th grade a kid I knew very well was already greater than 6 feet, and by junior high he was 6’5" and about 230 pounds of muscle. At the first track event we went to (I was a long-distance runner), he took the shot put and threw it like a softball, it was so light to him, shattering the district record. Because of his crazy genetics he was also able to break the records for discus too, as well as some weightlifting records. The reason for his size and strength was a hormone disorder, something allowed under the rules…sort of like a hormone disorder of a transgender girl. I also knew a cisgender girl Gretchen who was about 5’11 and massively built, who set several records, and would have made a clean sweep of most track events except she hated track and quit competing as soon as she could talk her parents into it. Was it unfair for her to compete? She was a cisgender girl, sure, but she also had a genetic difference of some sort which made her a relative giant (compared to us 9th-grade girls who were mostly 5’5" and under 150 pounds).
And even if you have an outlier every now and again in the future…so what? I cannot believe the amount of hang-wringing vapors conservatives have had over a (almost entirely) non-existent threat. All of the essay and articles opposing transgender children competing in sports just smack of throwing out FUD to try to marginalize a very vulnerable population, because they’re “icky.”
From your lack of response I take that as “yes.” Sorry, but the past few weeks I’ve had to play “Man or Woman?” based only on first name and voice.
“And you identify as male? Thank you.”