A Georgia school board voted along party lines Thursday to fire a teacher after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.
A Georgia school board voted along party lines Thursday to fire a teacher after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.
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In fifth grade I knew my gender for sure. Did you not? Maybe you could’ve used the book so you understood yourself.
The concept of gender is a social construct. Humans are a complex matrix of innate and learned behaviour. Our prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully matured until age 25, meaning you continue to change and develop your sense of identity until then. I don’t believe for a second you had a strong, stable and unchanging realisation of self and ego at age 10. Part of human maturation is exploring these changes, testing psychological boundaries, and filtering and accepting external influence. We should definitely not be placing kids into any kind of boxes, either explicitly or implicitly.
Kids spend their entire lives learning our social constructs and self selecting into them. It’s going to happen. Some people have no interest in exploring, some do, and both are ok.
I knew at the age of 13 that I never wanted children and have held fast to that decision. I would say it’s not unreasonable for someone at a young age to know early on what gender they identify with even if they don’t know the specific term for it.
I’ve known since birth.
You haven’t, you at best knew at age 2, typically 2.5. If you were a parent you could see the process. Why is it that the anti-LGBT crowd knows the least about childhood development? Is it because you think a book written for and by goat herders in the bronze age contains any value?
It’s because people who are anti-free thought tend to be lacking critical thinking capabilities. That’s why they need to be told who to hate and why they are able to move on to the next set of “others” to hate just as quickly as their media bubble steers them. They don’t have to waste time in forethought or hindsight.
Part of it may be because that crowd has limited curiosity, mental flexibility, empathy, and humility.
Whereas the rest of us are fascinated watching our kids develop into whoever they become and learn new things and modify our beliefs and understanding based on reflecting on what we observe.
I suspect that the right leaning crowd wants to force everything around them to fit what they already believe, rather than updating their beliefs based on what they experience. And so the daughter who says “actually, I feel like a boy and also my name is John” is rejected and/or forced to conform with the outdated, incorrect beliefs of the parents.
What is your earliest memory…?
Patting themselves on the back for knowing their gender.
Although I’m sure it was tough to reach right as they were coming out of the birth canal…
My eldest is going into 4th grade and it took me about 30 seconds to explain that her aunt was born male. It really isn’t that baffling of a concept.
Adults who have trouble understanding basic concepts (or those who need to be told how to feel about them) often assume everyone also has trouble understanding them.
So I can see how someone - someone who doesn’t understand other people’s capabilities - would have a hard time understanding that most grade school-aged people do not also have a hard time understanding those concepts.
In short, some people are too dumb to realize other people aren’t dumb, too.
I will go with that, basic projection.
Have you met a 10 year old recently?
I have and they usually have a phone in their hand and have been ruined by the Internet. I would know because I was one.
Might be best to opt out of parenting.
Fifth graders have genders. What’s your problem?
By that age kids know if they are a boy or girl or other. And much younger, actually.
The book^1 is about being accepted for who you are and what you like Instead of being rejected and hated.
How can anyone defend rejecting and hating a 5th grader for any reason much less merely because of how they dress or what they like to do??
1 I’ve read the book, have you?