|
|
Wong says the staff at one of Douglas County’s schools is preparing to accommodate the student and answer questions other students might have. “I see this as being a very difficult situation to explain to my daughter to explain why someone would not want to be the gender they were born with,” said Dave M. The student had attended this same school in years prior, but had left to go to classes in another district for about two years. The transgender student will be returning to what is the child’s home school. Dave M. thinks classmates will recognize the change. Wong says teachers are planning to address the student by name instead of using he or she. The child will not use the regular boys or girls bathroom. Instead, two unisex bathrooms in the building will be made available. The school is handing out packets to parents who have questions. The packets contain information about people who are transgender. Pearson says children as young as 5 years old are realizing their true gender identity and her group wants to help parents who may be resisting the acceptance of this.
The fact that the schools will be building unisex bathrooms is a stupid idea and will just make matters worse for the kid. This is a tough call and I see no easy answers. I wonder how this is handled in the more “enlightened” parts of the world? After all, this is Colorado.
#27 – njk –
“So – would a TEACHER be allowed to dress like this?”
Does this answer your question?
• • • •
#26 – Seth
“This is why there’s statutory rape. Children are not able to make these types of decisions.”
You, my friend, are a world-class bozo. This doesn’t have the first or most remote thing to do with sex. It is about whether the kid feels more like a girl than a boy. Only in your primitive, repressed, sex-obsessed “brain” is there any connection between which of two traditional styles of clothing someone feels more comfortable wearing and sex. The kid is not looking to wear fishnet stockings and 6″ heels, you frigging dolt.
Please don’t tell me you were ever allowed to have children.
“It’s not about gay bashing or having a caveman attitude.”
1. Who the fuck brought “gay” into it? Most males who identify with and dress as females are hetero.
2. There are few things more characteristic of subhuman behavior than being frightened of and attacking what is “different.”
“It’s about looking after your children.”
Damn straight it is. Looking after your children – in civilized human society, but not in the jungle – includes making sure they’re not bullied into conforming to some clueless assholes’ ideas of who and what they should be.
“If kids in the third grade can change their sex”
Oh, Jeebus. Now it’s ‘sex changes.’ Try again, Brainiac. It’s about liking a dress more than pants and a shirt.
“can they start having sex now? What if he declares he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. Do we have to respect his rights and let him loaf around?”
Do you actually read the crap you write? What a pathetic straw man. I mean, totally pathetic.
“What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Maybe some of us have principles and aren’t chickenshit cowards who think kids should be strongarmed into becoming scared, bullied, maladjusted conformist sheeple – like you. 🙂
Sorry your hero Huckleberry won’t be Pres..
• • • •
#31 – Jeff –
“I am sorry but there is little evidence of true gender identity being established at the ages published in this story. Gender identity disorders manifesting at this age are likely related to another underlining issue.”
No one is claiming that gender identity is being established at the age of the kid in this story. Only HIS. It’s pretty obvious that you expect that all kids are identically self-aware at any given age, that there is zero individual variation. Go learn something about statistical distribution.
No one said this was a trend; it’s one isolated case. Because one data point falls outside of the expected range does not mean it doesn’t exist. Crikey, what illiteracy.
The most probable “underlying issue” is this instance is a precocious kid with higher than average self-awareness, which is hardly indicative of any underlying pathology.
Don’t quit the day job. You don’t have much of a future in psychological research.
• • • •
#30 – amodedoma –
“…as the father of 3 boys 2 of which have passed 3rd grade I assure you at that age they have none; real, assumed, or imaginary.”
No, all you can assure anyone of is that YOUR boys are average. You have no grounds, scientific, empirical, philosophical or other, to project your uninformed, personally highly biased conclusions from your two data points on the remainder of the population.
It’s accepted and settled, at this point in time, that formation of gender identity commences in infancy.
But please don’t let your total absence of scientific knowledge of the subject stop you from presenting us with your amusingly bogus layman’s theories… 🙂
@#33: Bunch of politically corrected “science”.
I’d stick to the measurable: Person with Y chromosome is a male, one without is a female. If either feels like the other gender – it has mental illness (be it benign in most cases) because the mental state does not functionally match with the physical body.
Obvious example: if one’s mind wants to eat shit only and the body doesn’t get nutrition from it, should we be PC and let the person die because it is their lifestyle and who they are or the effort should be made to repair the malfunction?
I’d say effort should be made to repair the mind (both in the hypothetical shit-eater and the boy in the story).
I’m not going to comment on the quite frankly terrifying responses others have made, but instead quickly offer my own opinion – even though this late in the comment-game it’s usually about the back-and-forth. Sorry if that annoys.
I’m a male-to-female trasgendered person myself, currently going through transition at University. Whilst I certainly don’t speak for all transsexuals, I can say that I was aware of my condition from a very young age, and wish I had been as brave as the child in this story.
I consider everything in my life before my transition to be ‘tarnished’ time, although ‘wasted’ time is pretty close to. Living 19 years in the wrong body is not enjoyable, and fixing the problem(living in the correct gender identity) as early as possible is extremely important.
The 5 year old in this story is so very lucky to have parents that are supportive, and a school system that is too. She isn’t going to be hurting anyone by transitioning at this point in life, and fixing the problem this early in life will help in massive ways.
I think that the most important thing for people offended or enraged by this story should consider is the fact that this is just a human being trying to be happy, and not hurting anyone else in the process. How could that rub anyone up the wrong way?
So what happens to the kid in the next few years? As long as he’d got a pair of testes pumping out testosterone with the onset of puberty, there will be a drastic impact to his self-image as a girl. So, as long as this expressed desire to be a girl has been ongoing now for some number of years, does the government let the kid get them removed and schedule him for estrogen so his body can develop from the start of the puberty period as much as a real girl’s would as possible, or does it pretend it knows best and keep him on the path to developing like a boy only to have him spend years after trying to reverse it?
That, Sea Lawyer, is a significant issue that the TG community continues to struggle with. There are people of all genders to be found on either side of that question. It’s not an easy one, no…
• • • • • •
dusan maletic
I know you can reason better than that, so I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.
Whatever gender is, the one thing it absolutely is NOT is a binary, one-or-the-other, all-or-nothing thing. It’s a continuum of shades of gray, and very rare (and very dysfunctional) are those who are totally male or totally female in every respect. THAT is an unnatural condition.
Nearly all of humanity lies somewhere along the scale but few not at the extreme endpoints. Most people are IN THE VICINITY of one endpoint or the other, but the variation is considerable. Insecurity and societal pressure to conform to one type or the other causes many people to unnaturally repress the opposite-gender component of their personality, and the problems that causes are as old as humanity itself.
What I’m telling you is, most people cluster around the 90/10 and 10/90 points – there’re plenty of 80/20 and 20/80s in the world too, but they are usually compelled to try to hide it. And your genes usually indicate which end of the scale you fall on, but it’s never a guarantee.
Here. Learn something basic about the topic, starting with those 50/50s. 🙂
“This is Colorado” … what does that mean? Has the Mason Dixon line been extended?
Colorado is in the top five states (tied mind you) with more college graduates per capita than most other states…backwater it is not.
#39. It is where I live, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, I love Colorado.
the Three-Headed Cat, you really need to get better control of your emotions. Someone who obviously holds at least a M.S., if not a PhD in psychology really needs to take it easy on us layman. Maybe, you could even insight us by showing us some of your peer reviewed work.
As for me, the funny thing is I do remember taking a couple of stat classes in college. You, however, are right… I am not a psychologist (BA or BS). I did have an interest in it, but I really never wanted to pursue my dad’s education (psychiatry). My interests are more legal in nature. Though, I do remember reading many of his journals and some of his published writings. Finally, the undergraduate degree I complete did require about forty credits in psychology and sociology, you know the whole criminal justice/pre-law route.
Back to the issue, yes, I am aware of the differences in acute awareness of an individual (Mead?). This, however, does not dismiss that early gender identification issues are often brought up through social pressures from family (external stimuli). I was in no way suggesting that anyone write the kid off, but rather consider the situation and apply limits to behavior to be more in line with what will benefit him the most without causing him more emotional distress than is necessary to adapt to his current environment. At the very least take incremental steps prior to exposing him to this threshold of change.
#35 Avery, I was about to attempt a brief rejoinder to one of the replies here, but there’s no way I can come close to the eloquence of a first person account like yours.
Congratulations.
I watched a PBS show about transsexuals/gender unspecific people hosted by this successful burly male doctor who were made one gender or another at the whim of a doctor at an early age…then lived their lives as society/scared parents/homophobic people expected them to be…could not figure why they felt so crappy….then when they grew up they figured out they were male/not/female or female/not/male….and life was easier….so give the kid a break and get off your republican (homosexual repressed) bent…and oh the big burly doc was a female who had gender correction surgery at a young age and you could see the pain in her eyes.
Poor kid,
It’s pretty obvious that the kid is a result of his/her environment. Second graders don’t come up with this by themselves. This is a real issue, but nor for this kid, not at 8.
#34, Dusan,
I’d stick to the measurable: Person with Y chromosome is a male, one without is a female. If either feels like the other gender – it has mental illness (be it benign in most cases) because the mental state does not functionally match with the physical body.
Geeze, I’d really like to play some cards with you. For money.
FYI, as THC suggests in #36, most things measured in the social sciences are shades of gray. As for gender, we don’t know yet what all makes up a person’s gender. Is it in the DNA, hormones, or even pituitary glands. And unless you are a gender scientist and know something the rest of us don’t,
You are correct though. This can sometimes be a mental ILLNESS. The cure that works the best is often acceptance of their true gender and a physical change to match their mental makeup. The surgery is easier to perform than is the mental change.
Where you cross the line is your breakfast preference has nothing to do with a TG’s hard wiring and everything to do with the biased, “cave dweller”, bigoted, bible thumping blind point of view a few people have.
A few years ago I had this older (mid 50s) guy working for me. He didn’t push his bible thumping at work, though he let his position be known, so we got along. One day he told me bold as can be that homosexuals are made, not born. Their mothers are the reason these pansies turn out that way. About a month later I had to fire the guy for making sexual comments to a 19 yr old intern.
His intolerance for one group was part of his disrespect for all others.
So what does that have to do with your comment? Simple. You both eat the same breakfast.
I wonder how many people commenting here are parents. I only have my own children to go by. They are all grown now some with kids of there own. All of my kids “five of my own and two who showed up on my door” exhibited both male and female identitys growing up irregardless of there sex organs. I neither encouraged nor discouraged them. All are in commited relationships. most with members of the opposit sex. While parents should not be freaking out about this they should not be pushing one way or other. My children all found thier identitys in there late teen and early twentys. I feel this is not something you need to push on kids. I also feel you can influance such things. I guess what I am trying to say kids should be allowed to grow up before pushing them one way or another.
When you look around this world, it’s pretty plain that, given the right conditions, people – including children – can be led to believe anything.
That aside, Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Thought His Wife Was A Coat” illustrates we’ll remedy all kinds of behavioral disorders, except the ones that reek of personal sexual politics.
Treating mysterious conditions with snake oil has a fine human tradition. Nothing new here.
RBG
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, not a psychiatrist. He deals with broken hardware, not software.
Allowing someone to act on their own, uncoerced feelings regarding their own identity, to the loss, detriment or harm of no one, without bullying, peer pressure or shame – yep. Sure sounds like ‘snake oil’ to me.
Oh, brother. That’s beyond lame, RBG.
#48, Jennifer,
Thank you. I am not familiar with Sacks and you saved me the task of researching some background on him.
#47, RBG,
Is there a portion of Sack’s book that relevant that you wanted to quote or just get us all to read something we wouldn’t read otherwise? What is the “snake oil” about allowing someone to be them self?
Hey c’mon, my eight yr old daughter wanted to play baseball. Nope. Only boys. Girls have to play soft ball.
A friends daughter wanted to play middle school football. A great kicker. Nope. Only boys. Girls can play volley ball.
Did you want to suggest these girls they are gender challenged?
#50, Girls were created to stay at home and quietly wait for the onset of menses.
It’s called God’s Perfect Plan™, Mr. Catshit. The script cannot be changed 😉
#48 Jennifer. “Software”? Oh, you mean that stuff you program.
49. THC: What blissful snake oil user thinks he or she was coerced? I mean before the letdown.
50 MC. Maybe that explains how the boy’s genetics knows what girls dress like in order for him to be compelled to do so. /s
RBG
#51, Gary,
It’s called God’s Perfect Plan™, Mr. Catshit. The script cannot be changed
So much for the writers being on strike.
Are you people fucking KIDDING ME! THIS IS AN 8 YEAR OLD BOY! Not GIRL! This is the most unnacceptable BULLSHIT I have ever heard of! What kind of message is this school sending the rest of the kids? Tolerance? HORSESHIT! Talk about poisoning the minds of children! This 8 yr old BOY is fucked in the head and needs HELP! Serious mental help and the parents need to be held accountable for this crap. Shame on the Douglas County school district for endorsing such behavior and not having the BALLS to put down their foot and say “THIS IS WRONG!”.
When I was little I wanted to use the bathroom like a boy. I can’t believe my family didn’t fight the school system to let me go into the boys bathroom!!! I think that scared me for life.
This has to be a joke. We need to quite all this PC CRAP and stand up for what is right and what makes sense. Shame on the school district for allowing this to happen. What happens when the boys wants to be a boy again, does everything just go back to normal. HE is 8-years old for goodness sakes. Whip is BUTT and tell him to quit the crap and live NORMAL. Yes, I am a conservative Christan and feel this is WRONG!!!!! Let’s quit the PC stuff and get back to the basics.
I wanted to be a dog when I was in third grade. Thank God my paremts were intelligent enough to teach me better. Thechild needs to be taken away from the parents and raised by someone who has a brain.
I notice that whenever trannies dress up like women, it is always to look like whores.
Is this the only image they have of femininity?
So how is this third-grader going to dress? Also like a whore?
Here is the story of this particular family:
http://www.highlandsranchherald.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=19343530&BRD=2713&PAG=461&dept_id=559878&rfi=8
Here is a story explaining some basics of transgenderism:
http://www.highlandsranchherald.com/site/tab9.cfm?newsid=19343398&BRD=2713&PAG=461&dept_id=560243&rfi=6
#58, I’m surprised this thread is still alive. After all the stories I hear about how mean kids can be, it’s amazing to read how accepting Jamie’s classmates have been since her return. Especially amazing, when contrasted with some of the adult commenters in this thread whose sad parenting skills would apparently have led them to yell “act normal” to a child who just wanted to die instead.
However, I don’t completely dismiss the possibility that some of these would rise to the occasion if it were their child. One can only hope.
wow omg i cant believe it. the jonas brothers are sooo hott. i want to lick nicks abs ok bye lovers.