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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.
Your entire argument seems to be 'I reject all empirical observations and assert my ideological position as true no matter what', which isn't really an argument that can be engaged with.
I could spend a half hour writing a wall of text about what social constructs are and how the categories are made for man and so forth, but it's hard for me to imagine you are here and don't already know those things. It seems more likely that this is a case of visibly ignoring them in order to do ideological virtue signalling.
So, good luck with that I guess.
Could you, please?
Moreover, could you define 'gender' in a non-self-referential way that isn't just biological sex?
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Every time I ask a prog in the wild what the word "woman" means they either define it as itself and pretend they don't know what circular logic is, or act like it's a ridiculous gotcha question nobody could possibly answer. It's an incoherent nonsense ideology.
Oh come on, surely you understand the game being played here.
There are many different things that we call 'definitions' of words, including intensional vs extensional definitions, ostensive vs. stipulative vs. analytical definitions, etc.
The 'what is a woman' meme is just a trick of equivocating between different types of definitions (usually ostensive and analytical), and then dismissing any explanations that try to take the time to explain this distinction as 'mental gymnastics'.
Most people without training in logic or linguistics are most familiar with ostensive definitions, like 'a bird is a small flying animal with wings and feathers' or 'a woman is an adult human female'. These are the natural 'definitions' that occur to them intuitively, it takes a lot of prompting for them to reach for something beyond that. But turning around and pretending that what they just gave is an analytical definition - ie, that penguins must not be birds and trans women must not be women, therefore - is just a dishonest rhetorical trick.
And, either way - the whole thing is just a semantic argument about the meanings of words, to begin with. Semantic arguments are a good way to waste time arguing about nothing, and can often make your opponents look dumb if you strictly control what your audience is allowed to see. But it doesn't actually mean anything substantive about the empirical reality of the question at hand.
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