Transgender CHILD confusion

[One Bad Pig]

OBP, my lengthy post to you was sincere. What was tongue-in-cheek was the first sentence where I said "Oh, I definitely have a problem with it." The joke was that I was taking the position that you'd said I would while ironically playing on an ambiguity in your sentence to appear I was disagreeing with it. Apart from that one humorous sentence, the remainder of the post was 100% sincere, as you correctly thought.

Ok. Thanks for the clarification.

[One Bad Pig]

I wish someone would explain how paperwork is a violation of religious belief.

[Carrikature]

There's no good way to put this, so I'll just jump in with both feet knowing full well I'll land in the muck.

At some point in relatively recent history, people figured out that they can avoid doing anything they don't like just by claiming it's against their religious belief. It doesn't even matter if what they're asked to do is actually related to their religion (usually isn't). It doesn't matter if there are intelligent ways to go about things, either. The point seems to be making a fuss.

There's a lot of things that other people do that I think are flat out wrong. There are things I don't think any person should be doing. There are things people say and do that directly violate my religious beliefs. What you don't see me doing is try to make them act the way I think they should be acting, or prevent them from doing things I don't think they should be doing. You don't see me stomping my feet and shouting "you can't make me" when asked to do those things.

You know who does those things? Christians.

And they're championed for it.

Championed for making a mountain out of a molehill. Championed for not using their brains to find a way to keep the peace without being forced to do things they don't approve of. It's downright idiotic for any parent to decide that their kid is a transgender at the age of 6. It's idiotic for a random adult to decide they know better than the parent. It's also idiotic for a bunch of adults to worry about boys being in the girl's bathroom at the age of 6. For that matter, most daycares don't even have gender-specific bathrooms. They're just bathrooms. It's idiotic for parents to come in and insist that certain paperwork be filed. It's fine to not want to do it. What's not fine is insisting that other parents need to be told or that you need to 'protect' the other kids. It's idiotic to think that calling a girl by a boy's name is child abuse (won't my MIL be surprised to learn that one, given that she's been called by a boy's name her whole life). But fine. If you think it's child abuse, report it. That's your job. It's not your job to decide that it actually is abuse. If you're worried about bullying, then do your job and step in when kids are bullying.

Extreme irony is this particular morsel:

Source: Andy Taylor

"It's time for people of faith to stand up and to just say no to the LGBT's insistence on pushing their agenda to the exclusion of the civil rights of everyone else involved," Taylor said. "We believe in equal rights and dignity for all. We do not agree with creating special rights where those rights are elevated and everyone else's rights are not respected. You can't pick and choose which child you are going to respect, because dignity is owed to all."

© Copyright Original Source

Right. Because you're not claiming special rights for religious beliefs that trump civil rights of other people? Please. You're pushing your own agenda. Stop being a hypocrite. You don't respect everyone else's rights.

This could have been handled intelligently without much of a fuss. But no. To do so would mean passing up a chance to cry about religious infringement, and we can't have that.

At the end of the day, it's just paperwork. It's not a violation of religious belief. You aren't committing some grievous sin by checking the box by 'male' instead of 'female'. You aren't protecting anyone from anything. You aren't 'looking out for the interests of the child'. You're throwing a fit. Grow up already.

[Adam]

I'm not certain how else to frame it. I do not see anything more than vehement disagreement with what I said, containing not one drop of irony. In other words, I do not believe his assertion.

I see no contradiction if Starlight's statement is taken as a lie. My experience so far favors S being truthful.
But S's #17 is so repulsive I could not stand reading it all. So don't judge by me.

[One Bad Pig]

There's no good way to put this, so I'll just jump in with both feet knowing full well I'll land in the muck.

At some point in relatively recent history, people figured out that they can avoid doing anything they don't like just by claiming it's against their religious belief. It doesn't even matter if what they're asked to do is actually related to their religion (usually isn't). It doesn't matter if there are intelligent ways to go about things, either. The point seems to be making a fuss.

There's a lot of things that other people do that I think are flat out wrong. There are things I don't think any person should be doing. There are things people say and do that directly violate my religious beliefs. What you don't see me doing is try to make them act the way I think they should be acting, or prevent them from doing things I don't think they should be doing. You don't see me stomping my feet and shouting "you can't make me" when asked to do those things.

You know who does those things? Christians.

And they're championed for it.

Championed for making a mountain out of a molehill. Championed for not using their brains to find a way to keep the peace without being forced to do things they don't approve of. It's downright idiotic for any parent to decide that their kid is a transgender at the age of 6. It's idiotic for a random adult to decide they know better than the parent. It's also idiotic for a bunch of adults to worry about boys being in the girl's bathroom at the age of 6. For that matter, most daycares don't even have gender-specific bathrooms. They're just bathrooms. It's idiotic for parents to come in and insist that certain paperwork be filed. It's fine to not want to do it. What's not fine is insisting that other parents need to be told or that you need to 'protect' the other kids. It's idiotic to think that calling a girl by a boy's name is child abuse (won't my MIL be surprised to learn that one, given that she's been called by a boy's name her whole life). But fine. If you think it's child abuse, report it. That's your job. It's not your job to decide that it actually is abuse. If you're worried about bullying, then do your job and step in when kids are bullying.

Extreme irony is this particular morsel:

Source: Andy Taylor

"It's time for people of faith to stand up and to just say no to the LGBT's insistence on pushing their agenda to the exclusion of the civil rights of everyone else involved," Taylor said. "We believe in equal rights and dignity for all. We do not agree with creating special rights where those rights are elevated and everyone else's rights are not respected. You can't pick and choose which child you are going to respect, because dignity is owed to all."

© Copyright Original Source

Right. Because you're not claiming special rights for religious beliefs that trump civil rights of other people? Please. You're pushing your own agenda. Stop being a hypocrite. You don't respect everyone else's rights.

This could have been handled intelligently without much of a fuss. But no. To do so would mean passing up a chance to cry about religious infringement, and we can't have that.

At the end of the day, it's just paperwork. It's not a violation of religious belief. You aren't committing some grievous sin by checking the box by 'male' instead of 'female'. You aren't protecting anyone from anything. You aren't 'looking out for the interests of the child'. You're throwing a fit. Grow up already.

If you know the child is biologically female, then checking the box "male" is a lie. Which is a sin. Get some standards, already.

[Adam]

I see no contradiction if Starlight's statement is taken as a lie. My experience so far favors S being truthful.
But S's #17 is so repulsive I could not stand reading it all. So don't judge by me.

In #45 Starlight confessed that just that part of his Post #17 was ironic. Thus as I said in my #45, Lao Tsu in his #31 is correct that there is no contradiction, at least if understood that Starlight "lied" if this bit is misunderstood (as CP did) to the whole post. On this bigger issue, Star did intend all the rest of his post to be taken seriously, consequently unpalatable for me to read and I havn't. That larger part was serious so that it makes Starlight's quoted bit a lie as regards it (but he wasn't talking about IT).

[Cow Poke]

In other news, Mrs CP and I are considering baking a turkey for Thanksgiving.

[Papa Zoom]

I've worked in education for 27 years and last year was the first year we had a student who identified with gender dysphoria. We also had a training in our school where we learned that gender is fluid and one can be a boy one day and a girl the next. Gender runs on a continuum too from the GI Joe type all the way to the Barbie type (and then every type inbetween. Genitalia doesn't matter but feelings do.

So a 1st grade boy, now second grader, has begun living as if he were a she. He wears dresses, boots, and any things else he fancies. He has very long hair and if you didn't know him before "becoming" female, you'd easily see him as a she.

He uses the adult bathroom at the moment but by law he's allowed to use the girl's bathroom. Theoretically, he could claim to be a girl one day and a boy the next. Or even a girl in the morning and a boy in the afternoon. How he/she identifies matters. This according to the speaker.

This boy is a great kid. We're supposed to call him a she. I try to use his name which can be both for male and female (like Sam short for Samantha) or Dani instead of Danny. It's awkward.

genderunicorn1.0.jpg

Here is a chart they used in our "training."

[Papa Zoom]

Here's another I found on the web: Genderbread-Person-3.3.0.jpg

Note the cute choice of characters. Who doesn't like a unicorn or gingerbread boy (or genderbread non-binary identity)

Learn more here! http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/...ng-continuums/

I think you can download a coloring sheet too!

[Starlight]

Theoretically, he could claim to be a girl one day and a boy the next. Or even a girl in the morning and a boy in the afternoon.

I think describing it like this is extremely misleading and unhelpful. I've not heard of any cases of transgender people regularly changing back and forth between genders. It's not a case of "what type of coffee shall I have this afternoon?" being equivalent to deciding "which gender shall I be this afternoon?" Instead, it's a major life decision that lasts years or decades. In that sense it's more comparable to something like marriage. Yes, it's literally true that you can be unmarried in the morning and married in the afternoon. But the way you talk about it, you seem to be treating a major life decision on their part that they probably agonize over, as if it's a flippant and reversible decision on par with deciding what color t-shirt to wear on any given day. That just comes across as dishonest on your part.

[Cow Poke]

I think describing it like this is extremely misleading and unhelpful. I've not heard of any cases of transgender people regularly changing back and forth between genders...

...yet.

[Papa Zoom]

I think describing it like this is extremely misleading and unhelpful. I've not heard of any cases of transgender people regularly changing back and forth between genders. It's not a case of "what type of coffee shall I have this afternoon?" being equivalent to deciding "which gender shall I be this afternoon?" Instead, it's a major life decision that lasts years or decades. In that sense it's more comparable to something like marriage. Yes, it's literally true that you can be unmarried in the morning and married in the afternoon. But the way you talk about it, you seem to be treating a major life decision on their part that they probably agonize over, as if it's a flippant and reversible decision on par with deciding what color t-shirt to wear on any given day. That just comes across as dishonest on your part.

www.genderdiversity.org/resources/terminology/
Jump to Gender Fluidity - Genderqueer people embrace a fluidity of gender expression that is not limiting. They may not identify as male or female, but as both, neither, or as a blend. Similarly, genderqueer is a more inclusive term with respect to sexual orientation.

gender fluid
Gender Fluid is a gender identity best described as a dynamic mix of boy and girl. A person who is Gender Fluid may always feel like a mix of the two traditional genders, but may feel more boy some days, and more girl other days.
Being Gender Fluid has nothing to do with which set of genitalia one has, nor their sexual orientation.

What's not helpful is your ignorance on the topic.

[Starlight]

...yet.

In the distant scifi future, it might be possible to change the gender of our bodies at the push of a button, or with a thought, and deciding what gender to be on any given day might be a decision on par with what clothes to wear.

But in the present day I've not heard of anyone doing anything more than changing genders and then years later deciding that it wasn't working out and changing back. Again the analogy of marriage, and the possibility of eventual divorce, seems an apt comparison.

When people respond by saying, essentially, "OMG, you can now be unmarried one day, and married the next! What is the world coming to!? People can now change relationship status! I just can't cope with change! I don't know how to deal with people I interact with undergoing that sort of change! Emergency!!!" My response is: "Get over yourself. You'll survive it."

There's a lot of issues and concerns I have around the whole gender-change process. And I would be the first to suggest people don't jump into it too soon, or until they're really really sure, or until they've extensively talked to doctors and counselors about it. And especially if it's a child. But assuming they've done all that, people around them panicking because "ChAnGe?!? I just can't cope with cHaNgE!!! What is the world coming to?!" deserve a roll of the eyes and a giant face-palm.

And anyone who thinks it's the evil liberals behind it all, because they're out of get gender norms and/or Christianity as part of their gay agenda or somesuch, should be reminded that the countries where sex reassignment surgery is performed most often are Thailand and Iran, neither known as bastions of liberalism.

[Papa Zoom]

And because you haven't "heard" of it, it doesn't exist. Couldn't be you just are ignorant of that aspect of gender confusion.

[Starlight]

www.genderdiversity.org/resources/terminology/
Jump to Gender Fluidity - Genderqueer people embrace a fluidity of gender expression that is not limiting. They may not identify as male or female, but as both, neither, or as a blend. Similarly, genderqueer is a more inclusive term with respect to sexual orientation.

gender fluid
Gender Fluid is a gender identity best described as a dynamic mix of boy and girl. A person who is Gender Fluid may always feel like a mix of the two traditional genders, but may feel more boy some days, and more girl other days.
Being Gender Fluid has nothing to do with which set of genitalia one has, nor their sexual orientation.

I've got no problem with acknowledging that some people feel they can't really identify with either gender. Lots of cultures in history have had categories for people like this. eg among native american tribes they were called 'two-spirited' in the sense of having both a male and female spirit within the one body:

The history of two-spirits among Indigenous American culture dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years and has been documented in more than 130 North American tribes (Roscoe, 1991). Throughout history, a person who was recognized as two-spirit was someone who identified with both male and female gender roles, and so two-spirit is essentially a third gender recognized in Indigenous cultures. The perspective among Indigenous Americans was that having this third gender was a strength their society benefited from. In the Zuni culture a person's gender was not assigned at birth, but was grown into at 3 or 4 years of age.

A similar phenomena has a long history in South Asia and many other societies.

However, given that our culture doesn't tend to have a category for that, as a simple matter of convenience and practicality in terms of schooling, I don't see it as being too onerous on these people to ask them to pick a gender and stick with it for at least a year at a time. I would seriously question whether a school administration that said "the child can identify as whatever gender they are feeling most like at a given time of day, and the teacher needs to take extensive action to accommodate that" is taking a practical approach. There's a difference between tolerance and understanding when it costs you nothing, and going massively out of your way to accommodate extreme needs of one student if it comes at the expense of the many. But if nothing is really required of the teacher or the other students, then I don't see the problem.

It's kind of like religion in the workplace. If you're religious, no problem. If your religion starts wildly interfering with all your coworkers and your ability to do your work, then there's a problem.