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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 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?
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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