Kevin Jennings Courtesy Asterisk
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What do kindergartners know of transsexuals?
The Maine Human Rights Commission is backing away from controversial plans to issue new guidelines for how schools should accommodate transgender students. President Obama’s ‘safe schools’ czar, Kevin Jennings, sees his transgender plans for public and private schools within reach in a move developing in the state of Maine.
Commission members decided Monday to cancel a public hearing on the issue and to shelve, at least temporarily, work on a guidance document called “Sexual Orientation in Schools and Colleges.”
The proposed guidelines have sparked a heated debate over what steps, if any, schools should take to accommodate students who identify with the opposite gender rather than with their biological sex. The issue becomes particularly thorny when dealing with questions over transgender students’ use of locker rooms and bathrooms and ability to play on athletics teams.
Among the draft advisory’s recommendations are that transgender students be allowed to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender with which they identify.
“I certainly would hope that the commission continues to consider the issue because it is clear that guidance is needed for the schools,” said Jennifer Levi, director of the transgender rights project at Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.
GLAD, which is a New England-based legal organization focused on discrimination issues, has argued that it is important for the commission to hear from experts and teachers on the educational needs of transgender students.
Sec. Jennings has been a prominent advocate for LGBT teens, founding the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990.
Courtesy The Bangor Daily News
“GLAD, which is a New England-based legal organization focused on discrimination issues…”
Har! God Bless The South! God Bless Oklahoma!
woody
Fine, so he wants to make sure kids aren’t bullied.
What I really want to know is: What are his ideas for improving education for all children? If he wants to get rid of the POS “standard” of No Child Left Behind which essentially means no child gets ahead then I’m all for him.
I know that some have advocated for a ‘gay’ highschool, which gets shouted down by both sides. One as “gay apartheid” and the other as “recruitment and indoctrination”.
That is about as far as my 1970s born mind can think, transgendered just causes a buffer overflow.
Someone that is genetically a male has to be considered a male.
I think it would just be easier to make every school single sex and keep them seperated.
Mind you, I also want to impose a business dress themed dress code. But I am also an atheist raised agnostic who was sent to a Catholic boys only shirt and tie high school.
Personal agenda? What personal agenda?
This guy seems to be a one trick pony.
The guy is reaching out, trying to help teenagers who are disenfranchised from education.
+1 wiener; -1 wiener.
Good luck with that. Seriously. Even most transvestite I have met are … for the lack of a better term … outside the norm.
Not Normal =! Normal. It doesn’t matter how you trying to define the question.
Only wanting the best for all our kiddies, AND believing all god’s kiddies are of equal worth and potential, I still honestly wonder “what is best for the kiddies.”
The OP lays it out: mainstream or stigmatize (I don’t buy the “recruit.”)
And just sipping on my beer, I “remembered” my answer: quit trying to decide things for other people and instead: LET THOSE AFFECTED MAKE THE DECISION.
In this case, offer segregated education for those that want to be with their own self selected kind, or let them mainstream in the general population. Only “real” issue I see is the scheduling challenges to maintaining all the different populations, especially as the groups become smaller?===but what else do we owe our kiddies but the best childhood we can manage?
So, the remaining challenge is creating the categories of choices. Sure–allowing male gays to choose male gay classes is find but should hetero males be allowed the same choice?–ie only other hetero males, or hetero boys and hetero girls as well? The number of combinations really does go up fast if some forcing is not made.
Is it “fair” to lump all gays together and should transgenders be put in that group as well or something else?
Its tough when the main rule is “we are all the same” but the ying/yang of it is that we are all different as well.
Its the work of the Devil I tells ya!
Sounds like he plans on helping the LGBT crowd at the expense of the hermaphrodites and eunichs. Just another politically correct bigot!
Speaking of “fairness.” If we take “dealing with questions over transgender students’… ability to play on athletics teams” as, genetic males will be able to play on female sports teams; is it fair to the other team that has to play against them? Identity and sex related physical capability are two separate issues, and the concerns of the latter issue, when determining participation in non co-ed sports, shouldn’t be overlooked so that people can feel better about themselves because of the former.
I like the idea of Maine addressing this equality issue, however complicated. Kudos to Maine for addressing this despite the effort being shelved, for now.
My guess is the issue was floated to spur debate with the intellectuals on how to best drive for a solution.
The by-product of stirring the yahoos at the same time is also not bad. Perhaps 1-2pct of them may ponder that human sexuality is more complicated than the external wrapper we all come in.
I wish I was in high school again for this.
“Hey principal, I feel like I am a woman. Everything inside me says “you are a pretty girl”.
Now can I go change in the girl’s locker room and see boobs, I mean breasts?”
There’s opportunity for error. Where I work, somebody who said they thought of themselves as female got permission from the assistant manager to start using the ladies room. So, he’s in there at 4:30 AM when a genuine female starts screaming bloody murder. I’m not calling the assistant manager wishy-washy, but she did reverse her decision.
Maine Human Rights Commission. Sounds a bit pretentious and full of itself…oh wait!
The real question if you are a teenage boy, do you say you’re a transgender teen to be able to use the women’s locker and see boobies.
When I was going to school, as far as I remember boys were boys and girls were girls.
What happened?
Not trying to be critical. I am just soooo confused…..
I’m not so educated about how any of this stuff works… but wouldn’t sports teams become a little… I dunno… awkward? If they knew?
I’m willing to say I’m queer to spend time in the girls locker rooms. .. I would of course be very clean, being the first in the shower and the last out. Gee, best I could do 65 years ago was to argue I should take cooking classes instead of woodworking. Wonder if I could go back to school in Maine.
If don’t ask don’t tell is changed to go ahead and brag, maybe I could join the army and be a queer in the womens barracks. This is getting interesting. Providing of course no one gets to stick their dick up my ass, sounds like winner to me.
So, gay girls can shower with gay and straight girls. Gay boys can shower with gay and straight boys. Straight and boys and girls must shower seperately?
TGs are free to shower with whomever?
Why not give every kid privacy?
#18 Father: I’m afraid the first time a teenage girl goes home and tells their dandy a teenage boy was in the shower with them, the lawsuits will start with the outcome being private showers and changing rooms for everybody. Now there’s an expense the education system will welcome!
By the way, just because a teenage boy hopped up on adolescent hormones thinks he’s a woman, does not promise he will not become sexually excited at the sight of naked female bodies in the showers. And what if he’s also lesbian?
Are there really so many?