OK Groomer...

[Starlight]

So gender dysphoria somehow makes a person superior (super cool)

I think you're being inaccurate in translating cool to superior. Bullying of transgender people is a huge problem. One person calling transgenderism cool could be challenging an assumption that it might be something to bully those people for, and obviously the transgender person mentioned above using the term is certainly allowed their own opinion that it's cool, it's not like it's being taught as part of the curriculum that it's "Officially Deemed Cool".

and doctors somehow on occasion don't know what they're talking about with regard to a self evident state.

Unfortunately there is a long history of doctors deciding the sex of intersex babies. Often doctors would perform 'corrective' operations on the babies to 'normalize' their genitalia. Then the child would be brought up in the chosen gender. The most common surgical normalizations removed any pieces of male-like genitalia and enhanced female-like ones, even for people who were genetically male. Unsurprisingly quite a large proportion of such children were very unhappy with their doctor-assigned gender. Wiki has a bit about it here So the idea that the "doctor knows best" in assigning the gender of babies is actually quite a historical medical embarrassment for doctors.

And this is being taught to young children. It's either grooming (a recruitment drive) or brain washing.

All those terms seem wrong, and obviously so.

There are two basic ideas behind teaching these sorts of things:
1. Schools should teach kids facts about the world and the people in it. Obviously gay people and transgender people exist. So obviously their factual existence and basic information about them is something that might be covered at schools. Conservatives appear to me to have delusionally embraced the idea that if schools don't mention the subject to kids then somehow kids will be less likely to be gay or trans (which seems utterly delusional), and since conservatives hate gay and trans people and want there to be less of them, they combine these to want these subjects not mentioned to kids to stop kids becoming them. Thus they talk about "recruitment" in this context. Whereas the left simply doesn't share the conservative delusion that people can be encouraged into being gay or trans, the left thinks people either are or aren't gay or trans and those people who are those can experience different levels of oppression as a result of conservatives being anti-them. So the left views conservative opposition to teaching about these topics as conservatives wanting schools to not teach basic facts due to conservatives' delusional views about what makes people gay and trans combined with the conservatives' immoral hatred of gay and trans people.

2. That it's psychologically important to people growing up that they can see people they identity with represented. There's been more recognition in recent years as to how important it is to everyone to be able to identify themselves with people in their society who are achieving success. I've heard all sorts of stories from women, and from ethnic minorities, about how they struggled through not having a role model they could look to, or how important it was to them when they saw one person like them achieving great things. Applying this to a school class: There are going to be kids in the class who are LGBT, there are going to be kids in the class who have parents of the same sex. It's important for their psychology that they can see themselves represented. If a kid of same-sex parents sees only a mummy and a daddy depicted in every single book they ever see, what message does that send to them? That no one has a family like theirs? Banning the school from having any books or any content that depicts a family like the family that some of the kids have, as the Florida law does, is obviously harmful in that it goes out of its way to harm kids like this by hiding representation of their family from them. If another kid in the class asks the teacher "how come Jenny has two mummies?" is the teacher to be likewise banned from acknowledging that some people have two mummies raising them? These sort book-banning and free-speech banning laws do active harm to kids seeing representation of their own families. Not to mention actively misrepresenting to kids what the diversity of family structures in our society can be like. Equally a kid who is gay or trans and who might be beginning to think through some of what it means for themselves needs to understand the concepts so they can have meaningful thoughts on the issue. The conservative idea of trying to fix the perceived problem by officially having it not talked about seems about as problematic as the idea that if kids are given zero sex education at all then they won't have sex and everything will be fine... but actually the opposite is true because not talking about an issue at all means you're not teaching the things that it is important to know or worth knowing or harmful not to know about the issue.

[NorrinRadd]

The fact that bugs like Star find it "deplorable" is one of the strongest possible arguments to continue and increase the "Ok, Groomer" rhetoric.

[tabibito]

I think you're being inaccurate in translating cool to superior.

Hardly - it says that the thing so described is more desirable than alternatives.

Bullying of transgender people is a huge problem.

It doesn't make any difference what excuses bullies use, the effect on the victim is equally damaging. White cis males are not immune to those effects when they are bullied for any of those attributes.
interesting side note - What is the percentage of whites in America (or other societies where white is the greater proportion) being bullied on the grounds of race? or the percentage of CIS gender being bullied because of it? or males being bullied for being male? Those things happen frequently; where are the studies that investigate them?

One person calling transgenderism cool could be challenging an assumption that it might be something to bully those people for, and obviously the transgender person mentioned above using the term is certainly allowed their own opinion that it's cool, it's not like it's being taught as part of the curriculum that it's "Officially Deemed Cool".

When it is done in a classroom as part of the classwork, it is official. It is being presented to the children by someone introduced to them as an authority figure.

Unfortunately there is a long history of doctors deciding the sex of intersex babies. Often doctors would perform 'corrective' operations on the babies to 'normalize' their genitalia. Then the child would be brought up in the chosen gender. The most common surgical normalizations removed any pieces of male-like genitalia and enhanced female-like ones, even for people who were genetically male. Unsurprisingly quite a large proportion of such children were very unhappy with their doctor-assigned gender. Wiki has a bit about it here So the idea that the "doctor knows best" in assigning the gender of babies is actually quite a historical medical embarrassment for doctors.

Doctors making mistakes when there is physical ambiguity is not equivalent to making mistakes when there is none.

There are two basic ideas behind teaching these sorts of things:
1. Schools should teach kids facts about the world and the people in it. Obviously gay people and transgender people exist. So obviously their factual existence and basic information about them is something that might be covered at schools.

Agreed.

Conservatives appear to me to have delusionally embraced the idea that if schools don't mention the subject to kids then somehow kids will be less likely to be gay or trans (which seems utterly delusional), and since conservatives hate gay and trans people and want there to be less of them, they combine these to want these subjects not mentioned to kids to stop kids becoming them. Thus they talk about "recruitment" in this context.

When a given thing is promoted as being more than usually desirable, it is recruitment. Advertising uses the process to sway people to prefer one brand over another, and recruitment uses the same processes.

Whereas the left simply doesn't share the conservative delusion that people can be encouraged into being gay or trans, the left thinks people either are or aren't gay or trans and those people who are those can experience different levels of oppression as a result of conservatives being anti-them.

Conservatives don't share the delusion that a male is a female. Advertising LGBT+ lifestyles as more glamorous does encourage the target groups to adopt those lifestyles. Your scenario could only be considered believable if sexual preference was not a social construct which, unless I am mistaken, would run counter to the LGBT+ narrative. If they don't think that preferences are malleable, all the advertising is wasted effort, and a misuse of time. However, evidence suggests that there is quite a degree of flexibility in orientation for a substantial majority of the population.

So the left views conservative opposition to teaching about these topics as conservatives wanting schools to not teach basic facts due to conservatives' delusional views about what makes people gay and trans combined with the conservatives' immoral hatred of gay and trans people.

My my. Comments like that directly against LGBT+ groups would be rightly termed hate speech. Demonise your opponents, dehumanise them, portray them as despicable low lives ... it helps to enhance the effects of the advertising. When it is targets a given person, it is also rightly termed bullying.

2. That it's psychologically important to people growing up that they can see people they identity with represented. There's been more recognition in recent years as to how important it is to everyone to be able to identify themselves with people in their society who are achieving success. I've heard all sorts of stories from women, and from ethnic minorities, about how they struggled through not having a role model they could look to, or how important it was to them when they saw one person like them achieving great things.

People from those groups now are achieving successes where in the past there were barriers to doing so. Likewise people with LGBT+ orientation. Such successes should be celebrated in the same way as those of more common orientations and groups.

Applying this to a school class: There are going to be kids in the class who are LGBT, there are going to be kids in the class who have parents of the same sex. It's important for their psychology that they can see themselves represented. If a kid of same-sex parents sees only a mummy and a daddy depicted in every single book they ever see, what message does that send to them? That no one has a family like theirs?

If that is what is being done, it is a wrong - and there certainly are a number of people who would support exclusion. That is to say, there are some who are in the wrong.

Banning the school from having any books or any content that depicts a family like the family that some of the kids have, as the Florida law does, is obviously harmful in that it goes out of its way to harm kids like this by hiding representation of their family from them. If another kid in the class asks the teacher "how come Jenny has two mummies?" is the teacher to be likewise banned from acknowledging that some people have two mummies raising them? These sort book-banning and free-speech banning laws do active harm to kids seeing representation of their own families. Not to mention actively misrepresenting to kids what the diversity of family structures in our society can be like. Equally a kid who is gay or trans and who might be beginning to think through some of what it means for themselves needs to understand the concepts so they can have meaningful thoughts on the issue. The conservative idea of trying to fix the perceived problem by officially having it not talked about seems about as problematic as the idea that if kids are given zero sex education at all then they won't have sex and everything will be fine... but actually the opposite is true because not talking about an issue at all means you're not teaching the things that it is important to know or worth knowing or harmful not to know about the issue.

I hold the view that the time to give information about those things is when children express an interest in them. A five year old asks where babies come from, the age appropriate answer is that mums and dads make them, and usually the child will be satisfied with that answer. More detail can wait until they ask for it. The child who asks why another child has two mothers (or fathers) has noted something uncommon. Again, the issue can be addressed when the child raises it. Access to material that deals with a happy family that has an unusual structure shouldn't raise any hackles, and if it does

[Starlight]

It doesn't make any difference what excuses bullies use, the effect on the victim is equally damaging. White cis males are not immune to those effects when they are bullied for any of those attributes.

You're ignoring that trans people are disproportionately bullied. It's not just usual bullying, it's a problem for them to an abnormal degree.

When it is done in a classroom as part of the classwork, it is official. It is being presented to the children by someone introduced to them as an authority figure.

All individual teachers will have their own opinions about all sorts of issues. Generally they can and do express many of those in class, and generally the kids can and do understand that it is the opinion of individual, not being taught as Official Truth.

Advertising LGBT+ lifestyles as more glamorous does encourage the target groups to adopt those lifestyles... If they don't think that preferences are malleable, all the advertising is wasted effort, and a misuse of time.

Totally wrong.

The concern that LGBT groups have about the psychology of LGBT people in our society is that for decades such people have been marginalized, condemned and shunned, leading them to internalize feelings of shame about themselves. This lack of self-esteem leads to depression, drug use, suicide etc. So there have been strong pushes to try to counter these society-induced internalized feelings of shame, by encouraging self-esteem in LGBT individuals. They are encourage to take pride in themselves rather than feel shame about themselves.

Conservatives, seeing that, tend to misinterpret it through their own false assumptions, and, for example, think that perhaps it's about recruitment, since conservatives at the moment often hold the false belief that being gay might be something someone could be tricked into being through encouragement or might join if it 'looked cool'. Following those false assumptions and bad logic, those conservatives then clutch their pearls whenever they see liberal groups trying to give some self-esteem to LGBT people, because they're unduly paranoid and fearful about making being LGBT "look attractive". In reality, that's not what liberals or LGBT groups are trying to do, nor would it matter one iota if that happened to be an effect of anything they did, because people don't become LGBT through being attracted to it.

Applying this to a school class: There are going to be kids in the class who are LGBT, there are going to be kids in the class who have parents of the same sex. It's important for their psychology that they can see themselves represented. If a kid of same-sex parents sees only a mummy and a daddy depicted in every single book they ever see, what message does that send to them? That no one has a family like theirs?

If that is what is being done, it is a wrong - and there certainly are a number of people who would support exclusion. That is to say, there are some who are in the wrong.

Have you not been paying attention to the threads on these laws? The conservatives are all about the idea of keeping books out of the class that say anything on these topics, and words out of the teachers mouths' that would say anything about these topics.

The point of the law is to keep the classes from containing any such content. It's part book-burning, part free-speech-stifling, part about giving the parents the ability to get rid of teachers they happen not to like, and part being anti-LGBT people.

[oxmixmudd]

It's grooming, sorry.

Grooming here refers to whT pedophiles do to there targets. This is not that. And categorizing this as grooming in that sense is just as wrong as what you are complaining about. Two wrongs don't make a right.

But I will agree it counts as indoctrination to a way of viewing the world that for many is not what they want their children taught. And if freedom of religion truly is to be respected, then the government run public schools can't be allowed to become temples of indoctrination against the religious beliefs of their pupils or their pupil's parents.

[tabibito]

You're ignoring that trans people are disproportionately bullied. It's not just usual bullying, it's a problem for them to an abnormal degree.

All individual teachers will have their own opinions about all sorts of issues. Generally they can and do express many of those in class, and generally the kids can and do understand that it is the opinion of individual, not being taught as Official Truth.

And LGBT+ activists are claiming rights to express their views that are denied to other groups in a broad range of religious and social contexts.

So there have been strong pushes to try to counter these society-induced internalized feelings of shame, by encouraging self-esteem in LGBT individuals. They are encourage to take pride in themselves rather than feel shame about themselves.

Nothing to complain about in that.

Conservatives, seeing that, tend to misinterpret it through their own false assumptions, and, for example, think that perhaps it's about recruitment, since conservatives at the moment often hold the false belief that being gay might be something someone could be tricked into being through encouragement or might join if it 'looked cool'. Following those false assumptions and bad logic, those conservatives then clutch their pearls whenever they see liberal groups trying to give some self-esteem to LGBT people, because they're unduly paranoid and fearful about making being LGBT "look attractive". In reality, that's not what liberals or LGBT groups are trying to do, nor would it matter one iota if that happened to be an effect of anything they did, because people don't become LGBT through being attracted to it.

Preconceptions and stereotyping abound on both sides of the debate. Your own comments here demonstrate the fact.

Have you not been paying attention to the threads on these laws? The conservatives are all about the idea of keeping books out of the class that say anything on these topics, and words out of the teachers mouths' that would say anything about these topics.

Have you been paying attention?

The complaints that I have seen on threads (here) to date have centred on the content of the material being proffered. Those same complaints would have been aired if similar material had been introduced for straights. In reality, rather than in publicity releases, LGBT activists are doing just what you claim they are not. Videos of teachers who brag about their activities and share the techniques they employ are by no means thin on the ground. Some have been linked on other threads. Backlash against that kind of action is likely to have resulted in collateral damage to reasonable approaches, admittedly.

The point of the law is to keep the classes from containing any such content. It's part book-burning, part free-speech-stifling, part about giving the parents the ability to get rid of teachers they happen not to like, and part being anti-LGBT people.[/QUOTE]

Possibly - the laws to date have been aimed at preventing dissemination of that kind of material to junior primary to junior primary school students. Claims that the laws are aimed at preventing (appropriate) material from being used in schools seem to be false.

You're ignoring that trans people are disproportionately bullied. It's not just usual bullying, it's a problem for them to an abnormal degree.

I'm not ignoring anything. Bullying and other forms of hatred expressed in speech or in action are not effectively addressed piecemeal. The right** of individuals to go about their lawful business in peace needs to be asserted across the board. To that end, the definitions of hate speech need to be narrowed to advocating or conducting violence against others. Just as a BTW - when activists call for people to be cancelled because they express unsavoury views they are engaging hate speech - the perpetrators refuse to extend rights to others that they demand for themselves. Last I heard, it is LGBT+ groups that engage in that kind of behaviour by orders of magnitude over right wingers.

(**not that it is a right explicitly enshrined in constitutions or law anywhere in the English speaking world, as far as I know.)

[seer]

Indeed that definition doesn't apply.

So it's just disgusting slander and bigotry to call it "grooming" because you're projecting your own hatred of gay and trans people into false statements made about others.

Don't be an idiot, it is grooming by definition, but even so I don't mind using hyperbole after all the left does it all the time. Recently our Secretary of Transportation,Buttigieg said the Florida law will "kill kids." So get off your hypocritical high horse...

https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-...will-kill-kids

[seer]

The fact that bugs like Star find it "deplorable" is one of the strongest possible arguments to continue and increase the "Ok, Groomer" rhetoric.

Yes, the term is gaining popularity - good...

[rogue06]

A podcaster I was listening to was arguing that calling it "grooming" is morally deplorable, and I tend to agree. You can dislike what they are teaching the kids if you like. But they aren't trying to have sex with them. Seems pretty slanderous to call it "grooming".

It is hilarious listening to folks like you whine about the term "groomer" (which FWIU, Social Media is banning) considering all of the things y'all thought it was okay to call anyone you disagree with the over the last half of a decade.

[rogue06]

So gender dysphoria somehow makes a person superior (super cool), and doctors somehow on occasion don't know what they're talking about with regard to a self evident state. And this is being taught to young children. It's either grooming (a recruitment drive) or brain washing.

I'll go with "insanity" or maybe just old-fashioned "evil."

[rogue06]

Grooming here refers to whT pedophiles do to there targets. This is not that. And categorizing this as grooming in that sense is just as wrong as what you are complaining about. Two wrongs don't make a right.

But I will agree it counts as indoctrination to a way of viewing the world that for many is not what they want their children taught. And if freedom of religion truly is to be respected, then the government run public schools can't be allowed to become temples of indoctrination against the religious beliefs of their pupils or their pupil's parents.

278171378_1017834505785408_729565222207441353_n.jpg

[oxmixmudd]

278171378_1017834505785408_729565222207441353_n.jpg

Rogue - it is clear you have lost your capacity to think objectively. This cartoon is nothing more than conservative hate propaganda. Its purpose is to cultivate hatred of those 'not like us'

[seer]

Rogue - it is clear you have lost your capacity to think objectively. This cartoon is nothing more than conservative hate propaganda. Its purpose is to cultivate hatred of those 'not like us'

Actually we should hate those who attempt to indoctrinate our children.

[Gondwanaland]

Have you been paying attention?

The complaints that I have seen on threads (here) to date have centred on the content of the material being proffered. Those same complaints would have been aired if similar material had been introduced for straights. In reality, rather than in publicity releases, LGBT activists are doing just what you claim they are not. Videos of teachers who brag about their activities and share the techniques they employ are by no means thin on the ground. Some have been linked on other threads. Backlash against that kind of action is likely to have resulted in collateral damage to reasonable approaches, admittedly.

And even then it's not even just the content but the age of the children being targeted by that content. It would be far less of an issue if it were, say, high school aged kids. But they are deliberately targeting Kindergartners, 1st graders, etc., at a time when their minds are particularly malleable.

[oxmixmudd]

Actually we should hate those who attempt to indoctrinate our children.

No more than they should hate us for trying to evangelize their children.