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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.
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.
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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