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How do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret? I have no idea, but I hope that someone can explain a reliable strategy because this story makes no sense in its absence.
EDIT: link to the policy in question.
TL;DR: The government of Saskatchewan just enacted a new policy that affects "preferred names" and pronouns for younger students (along with some other changes, which I'll skip over). It requires that teachers obtain parental consent before using new names/pronouns for students under 16 years old. The criticism is focused on two claims: First, being "out" is important. Second, it can be unsafe if a parent learns that their child is transgender.
The first claim has already been argued to death, and there's nothing new in this story.
The second claim is just bizarre in this context. What do they expect would happen in the absence of the new policy? Everybody starts using the child's new names/pronouns in everything from casual conversations to official reports...and the parents don't notice for >2 years?
If I knew that a child had information that could be dangerous if it got into the wrong hands, I wouldn't encourage them to spread it far and wide. In fact, I'd direct them to a professional that would help them to develop a strategy that minimized the damage from its release, or else cope with maintaining the burden of secrecy.
But maybe I'm missing something, so I'll repeat my question: how do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret?
You should listen to stories from educators who deal with these issues in reality.
Yes absolutely kids ask teachers to use different names/pronouns in class and the parents never find out.
Yes absolutely kids ask if they can use the gender-neutral single-stall bathroom next to the teacher's lounge, or change in bathroom stall instead of in front of the other kids, and parents never find out.
You can't 'ensure' that the parents never find out, but you can maximize your odds.
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
I should! Do you have any links handy? Preferably about the exact scenario I outlined (Attempting to keep it public+secret was positive over the long term, regardless of whether or not it succeeded), but I'd take anything short of a human-interest fluff piece. The ones I've seen have been mostly split between "I was scared for nothing, I should've come out to my parents sooner" and "I was not ready for what happened. I should've had a better plan before coming out in public."
Coming back to the policy rather than abstract questions, do you think that 15-year-olds are mature enough to decide to cut ties with their home (even if the plan would culminate at 18ish)? Granted, they might be correct. In that case, the appropriate response is a call to CPS and/or the police to deal with the serious situation.
To go to the ad absurdum, if a 15 year old were being raped and beaten by their parents every night, I think most could correctly identify that this is a bad situation they should leave.
And at the other end, many 15 year olds incorrectly believe that not being allowed to go to a party with drugs and alcohol is a major injustice and that they should run away form home over it.
Like every other human in every other situation in the world, some 15 year olds are smart or are in obvious cases and will make the correct call, and some 15 year olds will be stupid or in ambiguous cases and make the wrong call.
This is an inconvenient fact about the human condition, and is why blanket statements of the type you're trying to inquire about here basically never work, and we have to actually look at the specific situation and apply our best judgement instead.
However, that's not what we're talking about here.
Deciding not to tell your parents that you're trans - or gay, or atheist, or dating outside your race, or any of a million other things that might upset them - is not breaking ties with them. It is in fact the opposite, trying to maintain the family bond in the face of awkward information that you fear might strain or break it.
Should kids keep secrets like that from their parents? Ideally they're in a good situation where they don't have to, but for those who think they're in a bad situation I wouldn't want the government to override their judgement and force them to disclose. Especially since the consequences of keeping the secret are very minor - they remain a stable family unit, nothing changes - while the worst potential consequences of disclosure are very bad (why are so many trans teens prostitutes? Because they were kicked out of their homes and forced to live on the streets!).
Which also gets to your CPS point - if they don't disclose and therefore aren't being abused over it, there's nothing to report to CPS and everything is fine. I don't think 'there is a potential situation under which this loving family would instead abuse their child, we should try to ring that circumstance about so that they will abuse them, so that CPS can take them away' is in any way a sane approach to take to such situations?
And, importantly, the current situation is not just on the recognizance of the student, the school can decide to tell the parents if they want to. Right now the parents don't learn about it only if both the student and the school think they'd be in danger. I trust that combination of judgement a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here.
I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:
This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.
It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:
I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.
* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.
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Six months or three years can also be exceptionally damaging to a kid who is confused or being taking advantage of by others, be they teachers, peers, or otherwise. The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me. To talk casually about "buying" time for children to deceive their parents strikes me as deeply misguided.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role. If I ever had a child whose teacher presumed to know better than me what was best for my child, that would not be a problem to lightly overlook. If this involved core aspects of my child's identity, I would seek that teacher's dismissal. If it involved my child's sex and sexuality, I would be willing to burn through substantial personal resources to impose serious and lasting costs beyond mere dismissal. I cannot imagine a reasonable and loving parent feeling otherwise. There is nothing so special about transsexual activism as to exempt it from these feelings, and that is why transsexual activism continues to be a catastrophically losing issue for Democrats who swing at that particular tar baby.
I understand that some parents are wrong about what is best for their children, and that some parents are abusive, and so on. But this does not meaningfully distinguish them from teachers, who are also often wrong, abusive, and so on--and teachers have less reason to love children and see to their best interests. As Aristotle notes in the Politics--"how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato's fashion!"
I have seen enough cases of ROGD, as well as the results of decisive parental action against ongoing ROGD, to believe that the evidence of my own eyes is that schools should absolutely never conceal relevant facts from parents. Not for six months; not for six days. Better that a few children face harsh discipline at home, than many be subjected, with the aid of government actors, to the (often, lifelong) suffering brought on by politically popular social contagions.
You seem to just be imagining teachers to be some type of demonic criminal bent on destroying children's lives, and the children (re: teenagers old enough to be considered adults in most human cultures throughout society) to be these entirely non-agentic dolls with no sense of their own life and no knowledge about what is actually best for themselves. This seems entirely alien to me and it's unlikely we will be able to agree on much when our priors about how the world works are this far apart.
In particular:
That is not what we are talking about. Teachers are not assigning children new pronouns against their will.
We are talking about children (again, primarily teens) knowing what is best for themselves, including what is best for their own safety.
It's an open question whether children do know better than their parents in any particular case, but the teacher isn't making any decisions here.
What is the difference between 'concealing information about' and 'not informing on'? Because it's not like we're talking about a law preventing teachers from giving parents information, even when the teacher wants to; we're talking about a law forcing teachers to give parents information, even when they don't want to.
So what is the line about which information teachers should be forced to notify parents about? Is it horrifying for teachers not to notify parents if they find out a student is gay? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen starts dating someone? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen is flirting with someone? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen gets an erection in class?
My feeling is that their is no line, it is not a teacher's duty to be informants on the personal lives of their students. It is a teacher's duty to teach them, and being an informant for the state to their parents makes that harder to do. If a parent cares about their child's life then it is their job to find out about it, and if they've scared their child into thinking it is literally not physically safe to tell them something then that is the parent's fuck-up and they're not entitled to state-sponsored spy operations.
This is the policy in my district, with a narrow exception for FERPA-compelled production of student records.
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I feel that a part of the disconnect you specifically are having is when you call teachers teachers instead of government agents. Maybe you've never thought about them in that manner, or maybe you think that's silly, or possibly even unhinged. But the poster you're responding to calls then government agents in this context for a reason.
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I don’t think they’re automatons, but children are orders of magnitude more short-sighted and naive about the world.
Most kids, at least until puberty, are largely working from the assumption that adults don’t have agendas, and that any adults offering advice or help are doing so only to help them. They don’t think about an adult pushing them to believe in or act in a certain way because it benefits the adult at the expense of the child. In a lot of ways I think this is based in evolutionary psychology— children are born relatively helpless compared to other animals, and couldn’t survive long without accepting the advice and help of adults in the tribe.
The naïveté comes from a simple lack of life experiences. To a ten year old, the idea of someday being 20, let alone 40 is simply incomprehensible. They’ve never thought about it, and really can’t understand being an adult. And because in most cases, the choices kids make are either trivial or temporary, they can’t really understand the idea that a decision they make today will have implications for their lives forever. The biggest decision a kid under 12 makes is likely what kinds of after-school activities they would like to participate in. Except that these choices are temporary (baseball season is just a summer) and easily reversed (you can just quit and not play baseball anymore if you don’t like it). At ten, l liked tennis. I don’t anymore, but it was fun as a kid. But if you somehow reorganized society such that everyone picks a sport or activity or career at that age (I wanted to be a paleontologist, which I don’t do now and don’t even remember having an interest in), most people would be miserable.
The thing about this hiding things and having parents kept out of the loop is that these decisions are pretty permanent, and children do not understand permanency. They cannot really understand that once they “transition” they can never ever go back. They cannot understand the urges to procreate and have children, or that their lives will change drastically between 14-16 and 40. And because of that, kids need parents in the loop to keep them from making decisions they don’t understand without serious guidance.
I still feel like you're equivocating between 'teachers pushing transition onto kids' and 'teachers supporting kids in their own decisions more strongly than a kid's decisions deserve'. Which is a dangerous equivocation because it spans the motte and bailey between 'being careful to help kids make good decisions' and 'all democrats are groomers', so it's the type of thing I wish we were more careful about.
But whatever, let's focus on the latter question, kids making good decisions.
Kids cannot get irreversible medical treatments without their parent being made aware. They cannot get them without their parent's approval and very active participation, so long as they are in their parent's custody. That is never on the table with regards to the types of situations covered by this law.
What's on the table is social transitioning, ie people calling you a different name/pronouns and not beating you up for wearing nonconforming clothes. Maybe at most being allowed to use a gender neutral bathroom and being allowed to change in a bathroom stall or locked classroom instead of the locker room.
Nothing about this is irreversible. Nothing about this is permanent.
But there is a cascade from social transition that makes it much more likely they get puberty blockers and progress on to cross-sex hormones. Social transition is a powerful psychological intervention.
Except for all the stories (ironically popular among the anti-trans side) of gender psychologists of the past trying to assign children different genders and raise them that way and the children rebelling and reasserting their 'natural' gender.
All the evidence I'm aware of is that this is how things actually work. People who ask to socially transition and then medically transition later do both because they are actually trans. People who are not trans are very very resistant to both measures and will not go along with it of their own will forever.
You are making a separate prediction, which is that you can convince someone that they're trans for their entire life, strongly enough that they'll fight for years to get long-term life-altering medical interventions and surgeries, just by calling them a different name and pronouns when they're in middle school/highschool.
That seems shockingly unlikely to me given everything else I know about human psychology, and I wonder whether you really think that human gender is that mutable (which would put you a million miles closer to the trans activist side on how gender works than most people), or if this is just a convenient argument for your bottom line.
I think you might be some distance from what I meant but I can't parse what you've said to know where we departed shared understanding. I don't understand what your saying and am not making any of the claims you are stating as far as I can tell.
I was referencing this research:
https://segm.org/early-social-gender-transition-persistence
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I don't know how you could possibly take that from what I wrote. All I said was that there's no reason to think that teachers, as a class, are in a better position to decide what is good for children than are their parents.
I never suggested as much. Teachers and administrators are deciding to hide information about children from parents, selectively and based on politically popular but empirically dubious notions of sex and gender. When my children were young, I was in communication with teachers about basically every aspect of my child's schooling--if they got a nosebleed, if they were struggling in math, who their friends were, basically anything that dealt either with my child's welfare, the quality of their education, or even just things it seemed like I might want to know.
In the Saskatchewan case from the OP, yes, but trans activists make policies, too.
It is absurd to suggest that open communication between parents and teachers constitutes "spying" just so long as a child wishes to keep something from his or her parents. Many people entertain irrational fears. But even if those fears are rational, I can't imagine a child confiding their sexuality or gender confusion in a teacher, and then not confiding abuse to that teacher, at which point mandatory reporting laws kick in (there are many things teachers must tell the government; why wouldn't there be many things teachers must tell parents?). It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result, even if only in the sense that they expose themselves to manipulation and exploitation. Google "sextortion suicide" if you want to read more about the effects of teens "confiding" in people who aren't their parents.
'Groomers' colloquially refers to offending pedophiles. Bringing up the term is the same type of blood libel as calling your opponents nazis, except with a more dangerous edge since offending pedophiles still exist today.
If I misunderstood you and you were just bringing up groomers in some much broader sense, in that way that a priest 'grooms' a child to be a good catholic or whatever, then to me that's a surprising implementation of the term but I apologize for misrepresenting you. Much of my response would then be based on this misunderstanding of your position and can be ignored.
What age was this? A common disagreement in these conversations about trans stuff is, I think, that one side is thinking about 7 year olds and the other is thinking about 16 year olds.
I'm surprised if you got this level of information for kids in highschool, if so maybe it a rural/urban thing or something because it's not been my experience.
But either way, I still think there's importantly a difference between what teachers choose to volunteer and what they don't. I don't think teachers can do their job effectively if they don't have some discretion there, they need to be figures of at least some trust for kids. I think making all teachers into forced informants with no discretion about what they inform on would make highschool even more of a nightmarish prison sentence than it already is for a lot of kids.
I agree that trans activists can also propose bad policies, absolutely.
That said, this seems to be talking about unofficial policies (which are 'not always written down') and offering very little evidence about what they actually are or entail or that they even exist. They claim that Biden wants to make them law under Title IX, but they don't link to anything from the administration saying that and I haven't been able to find anything even remotely like that with google. Let me know if you have a source on that claim, but overall, none of this feels comparable to an actual law being passed.
Yes, but getting abused and then placed into the foster care system by CPS is much much worse than just... not getting abused and living a normal happy life with your family?
I completely agree with you, I just think that the 'almost' is important here, and want to give kids and teachers some lattitude in deciding whether they're in one of those cases.
Again, I'm not, like, saying parents should never know whether their kid is trans. No one is arguing that, you need a parent's participation to get any form of gender affirming care so obviously the goal is for parents to know whenever that's safe. We're already talking about the rare cases where kids think they are in danger and the school agrees.
Also, I'd like to point out that yes, if a kid goes to a single adult for advice and keeps it secret from everyone else, they are often at danger for manipulation and exploitation. But what we're talking about is a case where a kid wants to use different name/pronouns in school, meaning that every teacher and administrator that interacts with them and every kid in any of their classes will know what is going on; there's much less room for manipulation with that many eyes on the situation, and any one of those dozen/hundreds of people has the authority and power to tell the parents at any time if they think something hinky is going on.
That's what the term actually means, though, so you shouldn't be surprised at all. Setting aside the suspicion people might naturally develop when high-profile people belonging to such a tiny minority of the population keep getting outed as offending pedophiles (since for all I know this could be a Chinese Cardiologist problem), many people regard the inundation of children with confusing gender revisionism as per se abusive. The overwhelming weight of evidence available to me currently suggests that, at least for young girls, becoming transgendered is far more often than not a social contagion which, if indulged by peers and educational authorities, can do substantial lasting harm.
In other words, it's not about accusing anyone of being an offending pedophile, it's about accusing people of per se harming children (or "grooming" them to receive such harm) by deliberately exposing them to memetic hazards--functionally, grooming them into becoming front line culture warriors for gender revisionists. No one would be confused if I complained that 4chan was "grooming" my child to become a Nazi, and yet the moment someone says "don't groom my child to advance your gender ideology" suddenly it's "blood libel?" I just can't take that objection seriously. I don't strongly mind tabooing "groomer" when it gets in the way of clear communication, but I do have concerns about the way certain ideologies insist on obfuscating their manifest faults by forcing me onto the euphemism treadmill. If your ideology leads to mucking about in a child's sexual development--whether through hormones or surgeries or psychology or whatever--for no medical reason, but for purely gender-political or dubious "psychological" reasons, then please tell me what word I should use instead to summarize my perception that your ideology gives cover to child abuse (and of an inescapably sexual nature!).
Now, I assume that no one who thinks transsexuality is not in any way worth worrying about on any level is going to find any of that persuasive, of course. But neither do I think it's even remotely crazy to worry, based on the sweeping comorbidity of psychiatric malfunction that attends transgenderism, that this is not a healthy ideology and that kids should not be exposed to it.
First, the idea that this is somehow the information teachers need to be empowered to keep from parents to win student trust seems very suspicious to me. Second, the problems with public education are far too vast for me to respond to adequately here, but I just don't see any plausible way for teacher transparency on potentially serious psychiatric developments to be the straw that breaks the hellscape's back. It seems, rather, transparently political--treating a single tiny issue as so important it demands federal governance in a tug-of-war over who really has children's best interests in hand. Parents saying "it's us" are being shouted down by politicians and teacher's unions and trans activists saying "it's us," and there's just no question in my mind that in all but the edgiest of edge cases, it's definitely actually the parents.
What--like, this?
Is that "remotely like" what you're thinking?
As with public education, I can't exactly solve all the problems with CPS in response here. But children who spend their school days pretending to be a different sex and then go home and pretend they aren't spending their days pretending are not, in my experience, living a life that anyone could reasonably call either normal or happy.
I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea of giving people latitude, but I don't think that's a politically realistic outcome. Because the issue is a culture war issue and the poles have been set at "require disclosure" and "forbid disclosure," even in those places where teachers do technically have "latitude" they are already under tremendous social pressure to behave in ways that are not actually so nuanced. Speaking of which:
Much of the concern, though, is that children are not just being manipulated and exploited by individual abusers, as in the case of offending pedophiles, but that children are being actively enlisted into ideological warfare not of their own choosing, at substantial personal cost. This appears to be how FtM detransitioners (basically, the poster children for ROGD) come to perceive themselves. When every teacher and administrator subscribes to the Successor Ideology, when every kid is inundated with it, when otherwise responsible adults are cowed into silence through emotional blackmail, "everyone knows it's happening" is an incredibly weak response.
For all that: it's entirely possible that there is, actually, nothing at all harmful about gender revisionism. As an armchair transhumanist I think that at some point in our species' future, we're overwhemlingly likely to transcend sex and gender entirely--but by the time we are actually able to do that, we will be unquestionably transhuman--and not, I think, human. If that day ever comes at all, I expect it will be long, long after I'm gone. But in the meantime, I have seen no evidence at all that allowing teachers to conceal presumably important psychological information from their students' parents is meaningfully beneficial, and much evidence that allowing such concealment is in fact actively harmful to children and families, so--how could I conclude anything but that such concealment should be forbidden?
Again I think we just massively disagree about the empirical state of the world here.
Maybe there are a few schools in the Bay area like this, but by and large Republicans still exist and become teachers/administrators and send their kids to school with their values, kids still pick out anyone who is different or awkward in any way and torment them for it, and having one blue-haired art teacher that pushes for awareness and flags sometimes does not make an entire school active culture war zealots.
I'm sure you can find lots of anecdotes for your belief here, and I can find lots of anecdotes for mine, and I don't know how we could actually settle it statistically.
But I do think the fact that you're proposing what feels like a grand unified movement where everyone is on the same page with a specific interpretation of the culture war and zealously pushing for it by manipulating kids in ways that end up being harmful to them, and I'm saying that the world is just pretty normal place where different people believe different things and everyone follows their personal incentives and are mostly lazy and noncommital about doing praxis in their own lives, argues in favor of my interpretation just in terms of priors.
I think an organization like a church is capable of being as ideologically motivated and consistent as what you describe here.
I think maybe a school is capable of doing that for a few years, if the top-level administrators are super duper committed to it and are willing to put their career on the line by firing people over it and are in a super duper progressive city where they won't be immediately fired when conservative parents find out and raise a fuss.
I really don't think something as large and complex as a school district could do that, not for long anyway. And certainly not that most schools would do that, when only a few tiny areas of the country are super duper progressive bastions.
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This remains an empirical disagreement for us, I just don't think is as true as you do, am not very convinced by the source you provided on it, and still believe that if we all just stop meddling we can maintain the ideal situation where teachers have latitude and generally use it well.
If I am wrong about that empirical claim, then I am wrong about some of my arguments here.
But, keep in mind that even in the world where schools are blanket 'prohibited' from telling parents, that doesn't mean that no parents ever find out, it means that the only parents who don't find out are the ones where teh students don't feel safe telling them, and the school cannot persuade the student to tell their parents (which they're still welcome to do and would certainly prefer for liability reasons), and no other students or parents of other students ho heard about it or etc. ever tell them.
So even if the world where telling parents is prohibited, I still expect parents would know 95+% of the time, and the cases where they don't know would still be very highly correlated with the cases where they shouldn't know.
This is a general point to several parts of your response: 'Teachers aren't forced to tell parents' is not at all the same as 'parent's don't know'. Parents can still learn from dozens of other sources, hopefully just their child trusting and telling them, also (in the situation I'm arguing for) just a teacher choosing to tell them without being forced, and many others.
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I agree, but it's probably better than being taken away by CPS.
Obviously the ideal situation is that parents find out and do not become abusive. I think that is currently what already happens 95% of the time, or maybe 99%.
We're just talking about what to do in the tiny fraction of cases (which is already from a tiny fraction of students) where the students fear it would not go this well and the school agrees.
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Yes, unless I am missing something, that story - like all the stories I could find making this claim - does not actually link to the text of the Title IX guidance that is being interpreted to say this, or any Biden officials saying they intend for it to be used this way, or anything other than people on their side claiming or speculating that this is happening.
What I really want to see is just the plain text of the part of Title IX that says this, or statements from the administration saying they are doing this. Those would all be part of the public record and I haven;t been able to find any evidence of them, but let me know if you do.
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Yes, informing parents of things that will help them raise their child is a part of teacher's jobs, but they are not currently and have not in the past been obligated to tell parents everything and have been allowed to use their discretion for most things. I again state that in the case we're talking about here, it's your side suspiciously focused on this one tiny issue and trying to change things for ideological reasons.
And I agree that in the reverse case, if my side tries to pass laws prohibiting teachers from telling this to parents, then I'm also suspicious of that.
For instance, if a student of strictly devout LDS parents is questioning the existence of God, I think they should be able to talk to a trusted teacher about this without the teacher having to tell the parents and potentially get the student excommunicated.
For instance, if a student has traditional parents (lets say muslim or indian or something) who would not let them date outside their race or religion and they are doing so but feel conflicted about it and want to get advice from a trusted teacher on what to do, the teacher should not be forced to immediately tell the parents so they can end the relationship and maybe pull the child out of school and restrict their ability to leave the house unsupervised so it can't happen again.
For instance, if a student is worried that a friend is being pressured into sex by their boyfriend, I think they should be able to ask a teacher for advice on what to tell them without the teacher immediately calling the other student's parents so they can end that relationship or call the cops.
Etc. etc. etc. All of these cases and a million more are the same as the one we're talking about here.
There are just some times when it's actually not a good idea for parents to be immediately informed of something going on in a student life.
And there are many many more times than that where it would be good for the parents to know, but the student doesn't want the parent to know, and so if there is a blanket law require the teacher to disclose then the student will never come forward for advice at all, and it will remain a secret until something explodes, to everyone's detriment.
And there are many many more cases than that where teachers need to build rapport with students and make the students feel like they are on the same side and can cooperate with each other in order to be an effective educator and mentor, and if kids know that they are basically paid informants who will tell all their secrets to their parents immediately, they will instead view them as hostile antagonists who must be eluded and resisted at all turns. Even for the kids with zero real secrets, I think this is likely to happen and worsen their educational experience.
That's my model of how schools work, anyway (lets specify highschool for sake of argument, though I think it applies largely to middle school too).
Leaving aside the question of trans anything, just talking about how students relate to teachers and what is important about that relationship: do you think that is wrong? In what ways?
Or do you think that's broadly right, and the trans thing is just dangerous enough that we should pass a blanket disclosure requirement anyway?
It would certainly break it for trans students, who would end up being even more closeted and receiving even less adult supervision over what they're going through, if they are not safe to talk to teachers about it.
Which feels like it should matter to you, right - the options here are not really just between students talking to teachers and then teachers telling the parents vs students talking to teachers and teachers not telling the parents.
In many many cases where students don't want parents to find out yet, it would be students talking to teachers and teachers not telling their parents vs students not talking to teachers because that's not safe and continuing to deal with the issue on their own with zero supervision.
And yes, I do think that it makes the camel groan and buckle a bit more for all students. Every time there's a political fight or news story about teachers informing to parents about something against the student's wishes, it reinforces the overall suspicion that tachers are not on their side and cannot be trusted, no matter what the issue is talking about.
For example, certainly the fact that teachers are obligated to report suspicions of abuse and assault means that there are many cases where students do not come to teachers for advice or help when they don't want to be separated from their family or don't want their uncle to go to jail or etc. We make them mandatory reporters anyway because we expect that on balance that still helps more kids than it hurts. But it would be wrong to imagine there are no downsides to that policy, policy debates should not appear one-sided.
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Going to break this into separate responses to hopefully aid legibility.
'Mistaken'.
You think my side is harming children, I think your side is harming children. You can call me a groomer and I can call you a crazy fundy or an evil terf or whatever, and the discussion can be about whose motives are secretly more sinister and how much innuendo we can pile into our descriptions of each other. We can do that all day if you want.
But we won't help any children that way.
I absolutely think you are well intentioned and want to help kids and are empirically mistaken about how to do that.
I think if you acknowledged the same thing about the teachers in these situations, that would do a lot more to help children than calling them groomers does.
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No, he isn’t. He’s arguing that teachers are no less likely to be wrong/abusive than parents. And they aren’t.
Read the rest of the comment though. Teachers aren't doing anything or making any decisions here, the children decide what they want and some teachers humor them to some degree if they are particularly indulgent or supportive.
The only question is whether the state should force teachers to inform on their kids to parents.
Sure, but early teens are idiots. The question is whether the teacher should decide whether to believe them or have to involve the parents, and the argument for the former rests on teachers being less likely to be wrong/abusive than parents.
I can buy that teachers in inner city schools catering to lowest common denominators are in that situation, but it just does not pass the smell test that this is the case for the average teacher vs average parent. And you’ll notice trans kids is not a phenomenon among the LCD’s, it’s an upper middle class contagion.
This seems like an odd equivocation.
There's no discussion of whether the parents or teachers are more likely to be abusive. If a teacher is abusive in the classroom they get fired, and besides the only teacher we're talking about here are the supportive ones who want to be good allies. The only abuse that is at question here is from the parents.
Similarly, we're not talking about who is more likely to be wrong here. The only concern is about abusive parents, not incorrect parents. We're trying to prevent abuse.
yes, in teh average case the student has already told their parents everything long before coming to the school with it.
In the average case, the parents are the ones making the request, because their child asked them to and convinced them it was the right thing to do.
We're not talking about the average case, we're talking about the case where a child is begging their school not to tell their parents because they think they'll be abused, and the school finds this plausible enough to go along with them.
Do you think that in those rare cases, it's still more likely that the student is wrong and the best thing for the student is for their parent to know?
'Among the demographic where parents are most likely to abuse their kids for coming out as trans, very few kids come out as trans' is maybe not the ringing endorsement of your position that you think it is.
No, you aren't. Even granting your premise that transgenderism is real, 99.9999999% of adolescent cases are just psychosomatic angst best treated with a stern "honey, you're wrong about this. Go look at yourself naked in the bathroom mirror to check your gender" and the goal is to prevent that approach.
Yes. Kids are stupid, transgenderism is made up, and the definition of 'abuse' in this case is just "calling mentally ill teens on their bullshit instead of letting them seriously harm themselves".
Few among demographics that have real problems come out as trans, yes.
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I’m sure that’s what the educators say and believe but it doesn’t follow that is good for the kids. The whole debate is who is in the best position to make an intelligent decision: the kid, the educator, or the parent.
The kid is young, dumb and subject to peer pressure with limited long term thinking.
The educator has little skin in the game.
The parent has a ton of skin in the game and likely can be a bit more long term thinking.
The question is not whether parents should ever be informed that a child is experiencing gender dysphoria; ideally, the child should tell them immediately.
The question is what happens in the rare cases where the child feels that it would not be safe to do this.
Child protective services does exist; some parents are bad parents, and the state is aware of this and has policies that acknowledge it.
Acknowledging that some parents are bad and need to be treated differently from other parents is in no way at odds with saying parents should generally be trusted to make good decisions for their children. It's just that every rule has exceptions.
The question here is what to do about exceptions. So far it has been up to the student and teacher's best judgement about what to do in each case, based on their local precise knowledge of the situation.
The proposal here is for the state to override that local judgement and regulate that all parents be treated the same no matter what, ignoring the possibility of legitimately dangerous exceptions.
This is big government overreach into people's private lives, in a way that's legitimately dangerous as well as onerous. And it's being done for clear culture war reasons, there's a reason we have 50 high-profile bills about trans kids in school and few to none about school funding or other things with much bigger impact.
And how do we decide if the parents are bad in any given case? On this issue, the progressive answer seems to be "if the child says so". That is pretty close to just letting the child make the decisions in the first place. You cant really claim to agree that "parents should make the decisions in most cases", if you support overriding this default at the childs asking.
In the vast majority of cases, everyone involved agrees what to do. Saying "well in those cases we let the parents decide" does not count as parents deciding most of the time.
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Perhaps the teacher is simply rescuing the innocent child from an evil GSM-bashing family. (Perhaps the teacher is simply rescuing five innocent children from five evil GSM-bashing families.)
And perhaps the shoplifter is simply a Jean Valjean, stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. (And that he's stealing cigarettes could perhaps be explained by his family having tastes like Fat Tony's.)
And perhaps the pet in the no-pets-allowed zone is simply a seeing-eye guide dog for a poor blind man. (Perhaps that the guide dog is actually two "American Bully XLs" is just because his problems are really tough and need special treatment.)
And perhaps the maniac tearing down the highway at thrice the speed limit is simply hurrying a medical emergency to the hospital and can't afford the ambulance fees. (Perhaps the several other cars who seem to be racing him just don't want to miss a moment by their loved one's bedside.)
And perhaps the email in the spam filter really did come from a Nigerian prince who needs your help moving his money. And perhaps the candidate really does mean to keep his campaign promises. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
Of course, all of these are theoretically possible (maybe not the cigarettes one, though.
Or the campaign promises.) but living on edge cases is not a safe or sustainable way to live. (For every one with a Legitimate Excuse, there are x who are taking advantage of the grace afforded, where x is proportional to the ease of faking and the magnitude of the benefit divided by the costs and probability of getting caught - something like that.) So one has to think each case through, if one really does want to be careful.Because breaks from plain-sense like these are typically justified on utilitarian grounds. I mean, the deontological way would seem to be against them: stealing is wrong, breaking rules because one pleases is wrong, driving unsafely is wrong - but even the utilitarian argument often fails. Tolerating theft probably pushes more families towards poverty than it saves Valjeans. Tolerating reckless driving probably causes more medical emergencies than it saves.
In my experience, the argument at this point tends towards demands for perfection, I suppose: "in order to save both the center and the edge cases, we must make this massive change, and nothing less will do." No traffic safety without universal healthcare, I suppose. No punishment of theft before ending poverty. No trust in parents before total acceptance of everything LGBTQ+, perhaps. Often this feels to me like an attempt to hold a problem hostage until something much bigger and more ambitious can be granted instead. Usually it doesn't happen; often the bigger goal is utopic and can't happen.
But erring on the side of saving the edge cases, heedless of false positives, can ultimately be bad for those edge cases, too, come the next turn of the cultural wheel. Soft-on-crime light-handedness get followed by tough-on-crime crackdowns, and, well, pardonnez-nous, Monsieur Valjean. And perhaps here's where we're headed in this case.
I agree with you that no major change is needed. People can use their common sense to navigate their individual situations and do better than any massive externally imposed rule could hope to do.
Again, that is already how it works. What we are discussing here is a proposed law to force teachers to report.
The thing you're against in the abstract is also the thing I'm against in the specific. Because it turns out that in this specific case, the side you seem to be on is the one doing the thing you seem to be against.
Your speaking of "big government overreach" in the context of public schools seems to me like "get your government hands off my Medicare." Unless this is a situation where, in Canada, the meaning of "public school" is reversed from America, as in Britain (I think.) - it seems to me like that Rubicon has been crossed already. I'm reminded of objections (though not applicable north of the border) to state curriculum mandates on the grounds of teachers' First Amendment rights. Truly so, if their ability to speak as private citizens to private citizens was what was being curtailed - but as agents of the state to their captive audience? Not so much.
And particularly in Canada, one might suppose that a takeaway from the latest hullabaloo involving the legacy of residential schools would be that having schools usurp parental authority, no matter how backwards those parents are considered, should be something they might want to be more shy about. But maybe that's not the lesson they want to learn.
I disagree about 'crossing the Rubicon', if I'm understanding what you mean. Just because the government has overreached some, does not mean the seal is broken and they may as well overreach more. Every additional violation still causes additional damage and should be avoided.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and so forth.
As far as 'they are acting as government agents, not expressing their freedom of speech', I totally agree with that. We're not talking about what teachers should have the right to do as citizens, we're talking about how they should be instructed to behave as government agents.
In this case, I am arguing that our instructions to them as government agents should be to use their discretion to do what they think is best for the safety and wellbeing of the child.
This is a fairly normal thing to tell government agents to do, it's not like they're automatons where every word spoken and every movement taken is precisely and deterministically proscribed by strict policy. They're not Chinese Rooms. Working for the government ussually entails having a goal, and working at your discretion within broad guidelines to achieve it.
In this case, I think more children would be harmed if we took away the school's ability to exercise their own discretion as to what is best for the individual students in their care, and instead laid out a centralized blanket policy of universal disclosure. Yes, a government agent is involved either way; I'm talking about which set of rules for that government agent would lead to better outcomes.
And, yes, I do think that you can fairly describe leaving it to their discretion as 'less government overreach' than mandated disclosure. In the same way that 'CPS must take all children away from their parents if there is a report of suspected abuse' would be more government overreach than ' CPS must investigate all reports of suspected abuse and have the discretion to take the child away if they think they are in danger'.
I might be misunderstanding something, but it seems to me like this does not, in fact, mandate disclosure. It mandates disclosure iff social transition is to happen. There is an out here of "the kid withdraws the request for social transition upon realising this is going to involve disclosure to parents" (note the requirement for the school to "work with" the kid to plan the disclosure, so the kid will know this). Thus, this is not equivalent to "CPS must take the kids", because "do nothing" is still in fact an option. The only option closed off is "a government organisation socially transitions the kid without the parent's knowledge or consent".
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Just disagree. Yes there are bad parents. There are of course bad teachers as well. The question is who gets to decide who is a bad teacher or a bad parent. I don’t think it should be within the teacher’s discretion to make that decision because well teachers can be both bad and they lack skin in the game (despite wanting to do good they may have ideological motivations that cause them to do bad).
That is, allowing teachers to keep secrets is also “dangerous.”
Also it is bad form to complain that there aren’t high profile bills about funding schools but are about the trans issue. Funding schools is a relative normal issue for the last hundred years. Trans issuers are new. Of course there will be high profile bills there when there won’t be for discussing a 1% increase in funding etc.
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Doesn't that sound suspiciously like grooming?
No?
This feels like you are verging into 'Hitler was a vegetarian so all vegetarians hate Jews' territory here.
It seems closer to "scientologists secretly setting up a 'secondary support network' for children of 'suppressive persons' is deeply suspicious" territory.
Not to me.
If you have an argument, you'll have to make it. I don't share enough of your cultural signifiers for innuendo alone to carry the message.
I don't think it's about cultural signifiers, the analogy is pretty 1:1. Both scientologists, and gender affirming teachers are secretly making an end run around the parents. This behavior is wrong, both inherently, and because it puts children at risk.
It only sounds suspicious because you chose a group that you expect everyone here to be suspicious of, scientologists. This is what I was talking about with the 'Hitler was a vegetarian' thing. You are carrying the suspicion based on the person you chose to include in the example, not the actual structure of the situation which the analogy is to.
For instance, if I said 'a student whose parents are LDS is questioning the existence of god, and the LDS church would require the parents to kick them out of the house and stop all contact with them if they came out as atheist, and when the student talks to a teacher about this for support the teacher decides to not immediately tell the parents but instead help the student find other resources they could make use of if they do end up kicked out of the house', then the atheist portion of our audience here would probably think that is not a hugely suspicious and monstrous thing for the teacher to do.
Again, you are choosing objectionable examples for you analogies to make it seem bad, I can use sympathetic analogies to make it seem good. Both of these tactics are misleading and prey on cognitive biases around affect.
Quite the opposite. I don't find their actions suspicious because they're committed by scientologists, I find scientologists suspicious because of their actions.
It might work if you stayed within the parameters of the original hypothetical. Not immediately telling the parents might be defensible in certain situations, but we were talking about "6 months or a year or three years".
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Add me as a person who is creeped out by the words "secondary support network". How many of us, at age 30, are still in touch with teachers from high school? The idea that they could, or should, replace parents is farcical.
Absolutely, teachers should provide support where appropriate, but never as a replacement to parents, only in addition to.
This is where allegations of grooming come from. Why are these teachers so interested in my child's sexuality? Why are they using my child to fight their culture wars? And who will bear the cost for the consequences?
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