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And for the last several months, one issue that I have been reading about, and retweeting articles about, is the explosion of transgender identification, especially among children, and its consequences.\u00a0 Now, in the past, I have had a practice of periodically scrolling through my twitter retweets to find the articles I wanted to share, as they functioned as a form of bookmarking, but too many of those articles are too far buried for me to unearth them now.\u00a0 Instead, a few key points for which readers will, I hope, excuse the lack of supporting links:<\/p>\n
Children are being taught \u2014 not everywhere, but in some school districts \u2014 that whether you are a boy or a girl, or both or neither, is a matter of how you feel inside.\u00a0 In some cases, this is a matter of teachers undertaking this of their own initiative, either in their classrooms or through \u201cGender and Sexuality Alliance\u201d clubs, which started as high school clubs to support gay & lesbian kids but moved into middle and now even elementary schools, with as the kids get younger, more teacher initiative, inviting the \u201cmisfits\u201d or even calling it a \u201ccraft club\u201d and keeping the whole thing secret from parents.\u00a0 In other cases, this is an official curriculum \u2014 Evanston\/Skokie in suburban Chicago is an example of this, with a link that circulated not long ago.\u00a0 In other cases, this is a \u201cmodel curriculum\u201d \u2014 this was the case in New Jersey, where a state legislator posted online documents from an organization which purported to be providing a curriculum for use in New Jersey schools which conformed to their state requirements.\u00a0 My own state, Illinois, will require that so-called \u201cstandards based\u201d sex ed be taught (or none at all) starting next year, and it is not yet clear how this will play out, but there are many experts who make the claim that it is an established scientific fact that, indeed, boy-ness or girl-ness, or both\/neither, have nothing to do with your body, but just your self-perception.\u00a0 (The NJ model curriculum went all-in here, promoting the labels Reproductive System One and Reproductive System Two instead of Male and Female, and emphasizing such terminology as \u201cperson with a penis\u201d instead of \u201cboy,\u201d even for very young children.)\u00a0 And there are anecdotal reports that those young children become quite confused with this instruction, taking it literally to mean that if they don\u2019t have a strong sense of \u201cI am a girl\/boy\u201d \u2014 or if they don\u2019t conform to gender stereotypes \u2014 then that means they aren\u2019t one.<\/p>\n
(Side note:\u00a0 a couple years ago, there was a spate of reports about parents declaring they were raising their children wholly-gender neutral, not merely by means of offering them both stereotypical boy and girl toys and activities, but using the pronoun \u201cthey,\u201d not telling those around them what sex the child was and, it appeared, not even explaining to the child that to have a penis meant being a boy, and to have labia meant being a girl, but instead saying, \u201cour child will tell us, one day, whether they are a boy or a girl.\u201d\u00a0 And, sure enough, there was a follow-up report that one such child did declare himself to be a boy \u2014 but it was not remotely clear from the reporting whether that child had said, \u201cenough of this nonsense, I understand that children with penises are boys,\u201d or whether the child was instructed to choose a sex based on feeling more comfortable playing with boys and with boy toys and wearing boy clothes, or the reverse.)<\/p>\n
Not long ago, there was a further report promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics which determined that nearly all children who were deemed to be transgender at a young age and socially transitioned, ended up eventually being given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.\u00a0 This was deemed by the study authors and those who promoted it to be proof that those children \u201creally are\u201d transgender, and therefore that social and eventual hormonal\/surgical transition is the right path \u2014 when it might entirely appropriately be interpreted wholly differently, as proof that social transition (the affirmation of an opposite sex identity, with pronouns, name, bathroom use, etc.) is a path of no return, not \u201creversible\u201d as proponents claim, and that alternate measures, such as permission for gender nonconformist toys, dress, etc., are preferable \u2014 especially since the former path is a path towards life-long medicalization, with consequences that are not being acknowledged by its promoters, who insist that a trans kid without affirmation is doomed to suicide (based on faulty studies, or rather, I believe, a faulty study, singular, from The Trevor Project, both because they\/it survey(s) self-selected groups who are prompted to indicate the desired response, and because they ignore co-morbidities, that is, other unaddressed mental health needs which may be triggering both the suicidality and the discomfort being interpreted as transgenderness), and that any long-term health issues can be remedied by future scientific advancements, such as improved methods of plastic surgery, future fertility medicine solutions, etc.<\/p>\n
Yeah, that\u2019s a long sentence.\u00a0 Sorry.<\/p>\n
And teenagers?\u00a0 Hoo-boy.\u00a0 The reports of teen girls, with teenage angst about their bodies, who have a perfectly natural dislike of menstruation (in addition to being a nuisance, it is particularly unpredictable in the early years, and can result in embarrassment, especially for a girl who bleeds-through and has stained clothes, and results in cramps which can be difficult to manage), going down a rabbit hole of tumblr and tiktok and God-knows-what-else to find affirmation that if you feel this way, there\u2019s an answer, and that\u2019s that you\u2019re trans, or nonbinary, and surreptitiously beginning hormone administration (or doing so \u2014 well, they worry me greatly, especially since I see it in action, indirectly, anyway, through the reports from my children and through theater programs which bios of the student actors in which, predictably, some number are using the \u201cthey\u201d pronoun and some of the male parts are taken by students who are clearly girls.\u00a0 Oh, and that\u2019s not to mention the boys who deem themselves trans because they don\u2019t conform to \u201cboy\u201d stereotypes.\u00a0 (One such kid had a distinctive enough adopted name that I googled him after he went off to college, and he had a youtube page with a self-written song the content of which was basically proclaiming serious mental illness\/depression.)<\/p>\n
At the same time, so far as I understand, among those adults who identified as transgender in adulthood, there are some who genuinely consider themselves to truly *be* the sex they identify as.\u00a0 Thus we have the saga of the \u201cpregnant man,\u201d and all the new terminology such as \u201cchestfeeding,\u201d \u201cpregnant person,\u201d and people who insist that because a transwoman who hasn\u2019t had surgery has a penis, there is nothing about a penis which identifies it as a \u201cmale\u201d body part.\u00a0 At the same time, there are others who, quite sensibly it seems to me, say, \u201clook, I know I am a man even though I have a transgender identity; I dress and strive to appear as a woman because it improves my well-being and life satisfaction, but I\u2019m not a fool.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s my understanding that for these latter individuals, the degree of hormonal or surgical intervention they undergo varies based on their own preferences.<\/p>\n
Which gets me to the question: how should I (and you, dear reader) respond?\u00a0 And that means both in terms of politics, state and local, as well as in our daily lives.<\/p>\n
Locally, each school district in Illinois will now be making decisions on how \u201cgender identity\u201d is taught in the classroom.\u00a0 From what I can tell from community Facebook groups I\u2019m a part of, this is not something that\u2019s on anyone\u2019s radar, and it seems to be treated as offensive to suggest that there are reasons for concern.\u00a0 To what extent do people in the community truly believe that \u201cto be a boy or girl or both or neither\u201d is an innate matter of identity that is not related to one\u2019s chromosomal makeup or body parts, and wish to affirm kids who identify in non-traditional ways?\u00a0 Do they simply believe that reports of even neighboring school districts formally teaching this doctrine, are all overblown and of no concern because no child would ever be negatively affected by this instruction, and, likewise, that reports of teenagers suddenly identifying as trans are so small in number as to be a nonconcern?\u00a0 Or are people afraid of sounding like \u201cright-wingers\u201d for voicing concern, and figure it\u2019s a cause for someone else to take up as long as they feel confident their own kids are \u201csafe\u201d?<\/p>\n
But there are other issues besides political activism, namely, when the issue comes home.\u00a0 A classmate of my son\u2019s claimed to be nonbinary at the beginning of the year; now she has adopted a male name.\u00a0 Ignoring issues of locker rooms or sports teams (which is, of course, not an issue for girls asserting new identities, with the exception of cases in which they begin the administration of testosterone), how is a child, and how is an adult, to respond, both in the case of children and adults?<\/p>\n
After all, the emerging demand is that it is obligatory to use that individual\u2019s chosen pronouns \u2014 whether those of the opposite sex, the \u201cthey\/them\u201d construction, or even neo-pronouns such as the sort that the twitter account Libs of TikTok highlights (yes, including \u201ctree\u201d gender, \u201ccake\u201d gender, \u201ccat\u201d gender, and so on).\u00a0 \u00a0There are even reports of children being disciplined for failing to do so, with respect to classmates \u2014 and, indeed (yes, I now have a link), as a Federalist author wrote today, \u201cFairfax, Virginia Schools May Expel Elementary Students For \u2018Misgendering\u2019 People<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Citing a school district document up for approval by the school board, the author reports,<\/p>\n