In a Virginia school, a celebration of transgender students in kindergarten - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-a-virginia-school-a-celebration-of-transgender-students-in-a-kindergarten-class/2019/03/03/10fc9f90-3b7e-11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html?noredirect=on In a Virginia school, a celebration of transgender students in a kindergarten class https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/GaEhDeLB0-QxqEqze2-PDCuNndY=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/4DZU4TR3SUI6TMIL6BNCFZ2YMU.jpg Sarah McBride, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, left, and Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, read to kindergarten students at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington. (Debbie Truong/The Washington Post) By Debbie Truong When Jaim Foster began teaching nearly two decades ago in Nebraska, he said he was discouraged from being an openly gay educator. He had championed LGBT causes at his liberal arts college but suddenly found himself switching pronouns when telling students about his boyfriends. “I was told I had to stop being that advocate, and I had to go back into the closet because it wasn’t really safe,” the teacher recalled. “You could be fired.” On Thursday, Foster reflected on how far the country has progressed, he said, as dozens of kindergarten students sat cross-legged in his classroom at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, listening as an advocate for transgender rights paged through a children’s picture book about a transgender girl. “I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way,” the advocate, Sarah McBride, read to the students from the storybook “I Am Jazz.” McBride, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, who drew national attention when she came out as transgender the day after her term as American University’s student body president ended, wanted to relay a message of tolerance on a national day of reading led by the country’s largest teachers union.

This seems like a bad influence. Let kids be kids instead pushing transgender concepts on them.

Here we go.

Sounds more productive that sleeping and playing with building blocks like we did in my Kindergarten class.

Childhood indoctrination. Get'em while they're young.

Good. Maybe if this had existed when I was a kid, I wouldn't have lost my entire childhood and teenage years to suicidal depression. This isn't indictrinating kids, it's telling kids that trans people exist. Hopefully trans kids will realize what they are before puberty hits, because it takes many of us until after puberty is over to realize it.

I get where you're coming from, but it honestly just sounds like it will do more good than bad if its well thought out. PLUS, I'd say it isn't just this that would make kids have bad influences that would confuse them into something they're not.

Weird how I grew up being indoctrinated with the racism, homophobia and transphobia of a rural American community and somehow I'm still trans, queer, and open minded.

you seem like the type of guy who says "let kids be kids" but then when a boy wants to wear a dress you get completely outraged

You know I honestly used to think this kind of way until I realised that it's no different than talking about "Mommy and Daddy" in their Female and Male roles, respectively, this isn't some indoctrination like forcing religion or militaristic shit on your children from an early age and barely allowing them to make the choice later, it's about normalising Transgender people and that it's not different from everything else, it's normal, teaching children about these concepts when they're still young will broaden their minds and make them less ignorant about reality and be more accepting of this way of life. Actually be open-minded and realise this isn't any different than teaching them Maths or Geography, it's about Education, not corrupting their minds or anything stupid like that.

I've been told that there are actually parts of the brain that really are more like 'girl brains' than 'boy brains' in transgender girls, but I just can't shake the feeling that statements like these are inherently sexist. How can a brain be gendered? Doesn't that open the gates for labeling all manner of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as "girly feelings" or "boy behaviors" etc., in turn easily leading to sexist beliefs such as "real men [X]" or "you're not a real girl if you [Y]"? Why can't we just be the way we want to be and forget about the concept of gender? Anyway, does anyone have a good source on information about those supposed brain differences?

children meeting people who are different to themselves is a good thing actually.

I'm honestly not sure enough of what you're saying to respond. Can you clarify?

Female and Male brains DO have differences. IIRC, men have a bit more grey matter whereas women have a bit more white matter, at least in certain regions of the brain. This is NOT the same as saying that gender roles are biological and biotruthers were right all along. The main differences are stuff like spatial rotation vs spatial location, verbal memory, etc. No bullshit like “women EVOLVRD to enjoy high heels”. And the differences that do exist are on average. Anyone saying “you’re not a real man because you’re not good at spatial rotation puzzles” is like someone saying “you’re not a real Scotsman because your nose is a different shape than mine”. An idiot.

Childhood education. Transpeople exist and will continue to exist. These kids will almost definitely be interacting with transpeople, likely early in their education. Some of them may even be trans and not know how to express it. Give them the knowledge and awareness of it, and preempt the spread of bigotry.

But isn't that basically, except more vaguely, what saying "I have a girl brain but a boy body" is? Sure you're not specifying any trait, but if they're not implying that some of their unspecified thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are what make them 'not a boy' (i.e. "because I have this combination of traits, I am not a boy, because ('real') boys don't have this combination of traits"), then what does it mean to have a girl brain?

There actually are differences between male and female brains, and research has shown that the brains of transpeople tend to reflect the brains of their preferred gender as opposed to their sex. Gender and gender roles are different. Gender roles are entirely social constructs and are the views society has on what the genders should be like and how they should behave. Gender does seem to have some characteristic that is unchangeable and possibly related to biology in some way or else develops incredibly early in life. Children are known to become aware of their gender as early as the range of 5-7 years old.

Whether there's anything biological at all in transgenderism doesn't really matter, because nearly all of the behaviors that transgender people are adopting are completely arbitrary cultural behaviors that we've associated with some particular gender that have nothing to do with biology anyway. You don't need some biological justification for wearing some particular kind of clothes or cosmetics or talking a certain way.

Exactly right. I think I just didn’t explain quite enough, I’m on my phone right now. Ah, that’s what you mean. I probably should have realized that from the thread topic. In the context of being transgender, “having a girl brain and a boy body” basically just means you don’t really feel comfortable as a male and would rather be female. It doesn’t really have much of anything to do with behavior, it’s just about body image. Of course, people who transition (even if only socially) do change their habits, clothes, etc, but they do those things the same reason cis people do them: to fit in and be identified as the gender they identify as. For example, there’s nothing at all biological keeping a woman from putting cloth over her chest that has a pattern on the front matching the English words “Big Man”. It’s purely for social reasons that she instead wears a blouse or neutral t shirt instead of the “Big Man” shirt. Trans or cis.

Making children more aware about the different kinds of people in the world is a commendable goal. However, I would say that spending too much time focusing on outlying conditions is something that schools should avoid doing. Time spent learning about people with different sexual orientations/genders could probably be better used to learn about more common conditions such as diabetes or depression. Not that no time should be spent on these issues at all, of course. I remember in middleschool we had an assembly where we learned about deaf people and were introduced to a few words in sign language. I think a format like that is the perfect place for kids to learn about things like transgenderism.

I agree. It always seemed like double think to me that someone can feel like they're "not the gender they were assigned" but that at the same time, the rules we made up for the difference between men and women are arbitrary. If women can wear pants and men can wear dresses, then why does a trans person have to be a "woman in a mans body" if they want to do things that are culturally identified with women? What about them makes them "feel" like a woman? Why do they have to be a woman, and not just a man who likes things which are considered womanly by society?

it's just so funny to me that the standard used to be "why are you coming out so late, you would've known at a younger age, there would've been signs, there's no way you're trans" and now that kids are encouraged to explore their personality and be more open about themselves w/r/t this kinda thing, it's all "forcing these delusional ideas on children, you can't let teach them this is okay" from the same groups damned if you do, damned if ya don't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But what does it mean to be a female or male? If it's not behavior, then is it, like you said, body image? Are tomboys not "really female" if they're sexually androgynous? Do you have to have boobs and a skinny waste to "feel" like a woman? It just seems like the idea that your gender is not what you were told it was is putting men and women in narrowly defined categories.

I recognize that there's a lot of things about this that I don't understand, particularly the part about it not having to do with anything. The way I've heard it, it isn't always about the body, though? Isn't there a distinction between sex dysphoria - feeling wrong about your biological sex - and feeling that you are a certain gender? I may be wrong, and I would like to understand, but if there is such a distinction then I just can't see what the feeling of being a gender? Please do correct me if I'm wrong about this distinction between sex dysphoria and gender dysphoria, since if it all comes down to body image (i.e. something physical) then my concerns are erased. I just can't imagine how it can be when there's way more genders than biological sexes, and I don't think all of them have to do with body image? Well, society already has a huge wealth of stereotypes for both boys and girls. If you're referring to finding out what sorts of traits are 'male' and which are 'female', then it feels contradictory to me for that to be 'impossible or wildly unethical' but at the same possible for transgender people to know what gender they are despite their bodies trying to hide it. Obviously this is coming from an extremely cis-gendered perspective, but to me literally the only indication of my gender is my sex - I would have no clue what to point to if my sex did not determine my gender. This is where my concern comes from; I feel that if it is not based on the body, it must be based on something in the mind, and even if that is left unspecified it seems to allow stereotyping and labeling people as various genders instead of just embracing that humans are diverse and that their expressions are unrelated to their genitals.

I genuinely want you to elaborate on this. How are these children being indoctrinated? What are they being indoctrinated to do? What is it you think the end goal here is?

I dont agree with the original post, but this is just hilariously misconstruing/taking an extreme interpretation of his statement

you'll be genuinely disappointed then, @Cureless only knows how to lurk til a trigger word like "transgender" or "refugee" has him offended enough to blurt out some sewage he won't explain anything because he can't, you get to a position like his by being a very emotional bigot, not by being made to elaborate on your positions and forming a logical basis for them

I figured. Still wanted to call him out on it

Gotta be a transphobe all the time don't you?

He's been transphobic for literally years. He doesn't come into threads like this for anything remotely resembling discussion because you can't discuss shit with him no matter what evidence you show him proving him wrong. He just comes into these threads to shit them up.