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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’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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