Words Have Meanings, Part Ten Thousand
Photo by Rolandhino1, CC BY-SA 4.0
When I was in 8th grade, my best friend was Desiree. We spent nearly every weekend together at my house or hers, though I preferred hers. This was mostly because she had a cool dad. His name was George, which is what he said I could call him. He was a “fun dad” who let Desiree and her younger sister curse. He was a DJ and up on all the current music. He would take us out to eat or to the mall and even bought me stuff sometimes. I recall he bought me an Aerosmith CD. He always asked me for a hug when I came over.
The summer before high school, George was DJing dances at the local Y a few times a month. I went to every one with Desiree, staying while her dad packed up his equipment. He’d take us to Hardees afterward because it was the only place open 24 hours back then. He was fun. When I sulked because boys rarely asked me to dance when the slow songs came on, he assured me I was cute and also too mature for those boys, anyway.
His hugs started to last a little longer. Sometimes he would stand behind me with his arms around me. He would kiss my cheek. Eventually it was a peck on the lips. It felt weird, but he was just my best friend’s cool dad. Then one day, that peck on the lips involved him trying to stick his tongue in my mouth.
There were adults around back then who saw this. The guys who worked for him in his DJ business saw it; at least one was in the room when he tried to kiss me. His wife saw some of it – the shopping trips and gifts if not the physical stuff. No one ever said anything to me. When I became an adult and looked back on it, it was clear as day where it was heading if I hadn’t shied away.
That, my friends, is grooming.
THAT is grooming.
I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. All I knew then was that it made me feel gross and after the attempted tonguing I kept my distance. He noticed and the favored treatment stopped, and my friendship with Desiree waned once we started high school.
Grooming is when someone takes advantage of a child’s immaturity and vulnerability to insinuate themselves into a position of trust and gradually move toward violating them. A hug becomes an accidental touch becomes a not-so-accidental touch, each step of the way testing the boundaries of what the groomer can get away with. What George did was textbook grooming, winning me over by being a fun adult who didn’t treat me like a little kid, acclimating me to his touches.
Grooming is not acknowledging the existence of gay and transgender people to children.
We are not talking about discussing the physical act of sex or the mechanics thereof with kindergarteners and first graders, which I will agree is inappropriate. But to discuss the different types of families that exist and to help children understand in an age-appropriate way that sometimes boys marry other boys is not grooming, anymore than the acknowledgment of traditional male-female couples is.
Bigotry is taught, and so is acceptance and “tolerance” (I hate that word in this context, as if people of other races, religions, or other differences are merely to be “tolerated”.) If we want a society that is not hateful and shunning of people who identify as LGTBQIA -and if you don’t then you have more work to do and I am not talking to you right now – then the best way to accomplish that is to normalize, rather than otherize it. As visible as queer and trans folk may seem to be these days, the reality is that many people don’t often (knowingly) encounter them in everyday life. Wanting kids to know and understand this as a normal thing they may encounter serves to encourage a less hateful society. The fact that you equate this with perversion says more about you than you think.
Maybe an inclusive society is not your goal. Maybe you don’t want your kids to see queer or trans folks as normal people to be treated the same as anyone else. I guess you are free to teach that hate at home, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should have to cater to your unfortunate and misguided opinions, despite the pandering politicians who have led you to think otherwise.
The use of the word “grooming” to describe an attempt to teach kids not to otherize queer and trans people weakens and dilutes what real grooming is and renders it a meaningless term. Similarly, I don’t like the word “rape” used to describe anything but rape. And nothing is cancer except cancer. And nothing is the Holocaust except the Holocaust. Words have meanings.
Find another word that means “teaching my kids about people whom I don’t want them to know exist.”
Bravo.Report
Seconded heartily.Report
+1Report
+2Report
It’s kind of reflective of the state of American political discourse that this is even a matter of discussion. More’s the pity.Report
Excellent essay. Unfortunately for us all, I think that expanding the definition will “work” for a bit (before it stops working).
Assuming gains made in the House/Senate come November, I suspect that there will be large numbers of consultants who assume that the gains were made because of expanding the definitions of the bad thing rather than the pain that came from transitory inflation and finally addressing Global Climate Change like adults.Report
I fear you are correct (and this is the clearest thing I’ve seen you write in a while – well done you).Report
Politics needs to do A/B testing on messaging.Report
Paging Matt Gaetz…
(Good post, Em!)Report
Great post, Em. This needed to be said and I love how you contrast an actual instance of grooming with whatever the RW is railing against.
My biggest problem with calling everything grooming is that it stigmatizes normal interactions. When I was a kid, I had few friends. But I had a few adults who took me under their wing — had me do favors and talked to me like I was a person. They never tried to push any boundaries; they were adults whose kids were grown up and had moved away. They wouldn’t do that these days because they’d be afraid of being accused of something. And I’d have been even lonelier.Report
Exactly. I was a pretty neglected kid and George recognized this. He could have been kind and generous and fatherly to me for no reason other than filling a need I had and that would have been fine. Instead he took advantage of it for his own perverted wants, which was evil.Report
One of the biggest own-goals of the current thing going on is the occasional teacher who instructs students to not talk to their parents about this or that part of the course.
There are a lot of people out there, right or wrong, who see Grooming as something like:
1. Starting with normal, if intimate, conversations and discussions
2. Telling the person “don’t talk to your parents about this”
3. Moving to the bad stuff
1? That’s okay. It’s fine. It’s normal, if intimate.
2? WHOA DOGGIES
So even if #3 isn’t ever achieved except in rare outlier cases where the teachers are caught and punished, and what about the Catholic Church I notice you’re not talking about that, just dealing with numbers 1 and 2 has a lot of red flags start to fly.
And then, of course, you have the well-intentioned politicians who get up and argue that parents shouldn’t be in charge of what students are taught and Katy bar the door.Report
Agree it is a red flag for an adult to urge children to keep secrets from their parents. But “grooming” has a very specific end goal and it’s not “avoid pissing off parents/losing my job for talking about stuff I shouldn’t.” It can be a part of grooming but it is not grooming by itself.Report
Oh, yes! I agree!
I did not intend to imply that just doing #1 and #2 were grooming.
I just wanted to talk about the folks who start freaking out well before the end goal is actually achieved just because their pattern-matching is calibrated to set off klaxons far, far too early in the process without care for false positives.Report
Also while there is a reasonable concern there, a lot of the reason they end up at “grooming” is that they’re fitting the concern into an existing homophobic and transphobic worldview that sees LGBT folk as inherently perverted and predatory.
Not doing that would be better.
Other times, it just turns out to be bullshit.Report
On a tangent — one of the reasons Pride events exist, one of the reasons to push back on purely heteronormative culture is because closeted LGBTQ kids are very vulnerable to abuse.
They are uncertain, and desperate, and wanting — and already hiding things from parents.
Stuff like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which muzzles even mentioning the existence of gay relationships, gay parents, siblings, or even that not all princes want a princess to rescue — they don’t protect kids from predation.
The make them vulnerable to it.Report
There’s a basic asymmetry here, where many members of Team Red sees any effort to ensure that LGBT students feel safe and welcome in school as political activism, and then freak the fish out over those efforts.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lgbtq-students-texas-school-rainbow-stickers-rcna23208
I might have more sympathy for the people who are terrified by the relentless political indoctrination on display in this Texas school district if they couldn’t free themselves of that terror by just not being bigoted imbeciles:
So an effort to make students feel safe regardless of their background or identity is taken down because… why?
Every answer here is bad.Report
The weirdest liberal motte is ‘things have always been this transgendered”. Teachers have always had pride weeks, no one ever speculated that women can have babies, and since time immemorial the NCAA women’s locker rooms have been nothing but penises. You guys don’t look comfortable selling this line. Go back to “we’re changing the world for the better”.Report
The Official Liberal Explainer has checked into the chat:
We have not always had Pride Weeks.
Transgender has a long hx that displays differently in diff cultures. Intersex people have always existed.
Urm.. women and babies??? WTF
Locker rooms and penises???? WTF
The trick in telling someone else what they believe is it should sort of actually match up with what those people believe.Report
Women and babies – DavidTC
Locker rooms and penises – JS
Transgender in other cultures – ok, but pillsy and others are selling it as if there’s been no change in recent years then suddenly Republicans went out looking for a campaign issue
And yeah, I can believe that the Official LIberal Explainer accuses people of blood libel as he walks into the room.Report
Yeah i think blood libel is an accurate analogy to the use of pedo.
Trans people have become more accepted in the past few years and now R’s have a campaign issue about them.
Did a quick scroll threw the comments and didn’t see anything by David or JS that seems related but maybe i missed it.Report
I did?Report
Yeah. You linked to the NBC News article, and your quote played up that angle. “It all started with teachers posting small rainbow stickers — long a symbol of the gay pride movement…” Notice the construction, small rainbow stickers, nothing could be more innocent than a small sticker of a rainbow, and it’s long been a symbol of the movement. Perfectly normal, almost quaint. Then the administration lashes out at them.
You also depict your side as just trying to make kids feel safe, and the overreaction on the right is to freak out and see this as political activism.Report
What does any of that have to do with your contention about trans issues, whatever it is you’re actually contending?
And yes, I definitely depict “my side” and our position here that way because I believe it’s an accurate description of what’s happening.Report
“Locker rooms and penises – JS”
Do you just make things up, or are you incapable of reading, or what?
Do you think rampant lying and deception make your viewpoints and ideology more compelling? I mean if you have to lie and deceive, that’s kind of admitting your ideology can’t stand on it’s own.
For those wondering: My sole reference to “locker rooms and penises” was pointing out how the current attacks on trans people mirror the attacks on gays in the 1990s, wherein one of the primary thrusts of “gay panic” was deep worry that “gays would be inside our locker rooms, staring at our penises”.
This apparently upset Pinky who I can only guess was too young to remember the 90s, slept through them, or finds it deeply inconvenient to his ideology to admit happened.Report
Wasn’t it just yesterday you were saying that transgenders have been common in the NCAA for a while?Report
How on earth did you go from an assertion that transgender people have been in the NCAA before now to “since time immemorial the NCAA women’s locker rooms have been nothing but penises”??
The whole comment was series of WTF even to an old moderate like me, but that one especially hits ‘what on earth have you been smoking?”Report
I was mocking the arguments that have been showing up here lately. There’s been, for example, an observation that the NCAA has allowed born males to compete against women for a while without them dominating, with the claim that that demonstrates that Lia Thomas didn’t have an unfair advantage. There was the article discussed above that made it sound a school administration was clamping down on mere rainbow stickers rather than pride weeks and the whole trans activism in general. Both of these are done to depict Republicans as the aggressors who are looking for a fight, when in fact it’s been the left that’s been pushing this issue for years. Add that to DavidTC’s recent argument that the male/female split was always viewed as anatomical rather than functional, as if the anatomy and function are unconnected, and the pattern becomes clear. They’re making themselves look like the victims of unwarranted aggression.
I think a lot of the arguments made in the past few days are wrong, and I’ve criticized them, but the argument that the right is initiating the fight, that deserves contempt. It’s surprising that they think they can make those arguments and not be mocked. I’m not even sure if I went far enough in mocking them. One of the benefits of a site like this is getting a sense of where others stand on issues, and if some of the commenters here get nothing but reinforcement for arguments like this, they’re going to be stunned at how the rest of the world reacts. When someone says “trans women are women” I don’t think they realize that nearly every person in history would think they’re joking.Report
Let’s all just be clear on what the claim is here.
The claimed aggression by the left is “trans activism”.
What is trans activism, you may ask?
Is it “I’m trans and you should be too! Let’s all change our gender!”
Um, no. No one is even claiming that.
The “activism” of things like Pride events consists of “treat gay and trans people with dignity and as equals”.
THIS is what horrifies conservatives, the prospect of an entire generation of children growing up to treat gay and trans people as just ordinary equal citizens fully deserving of rights.
So of course they view it as aggression.
A world where gays and trans are second class citizens is to them, the legitimate status quo and any challenge to that must be met with force.Report
Are you high? I mean I’m serious, are you actually on mind altering drugs?
What does ‘there have been trans athletes in the NCAA for almost twenty years” have to do with locker rooms and dicks?
Do you just spend your time thinking about trans women and dicks and project that onto the rest of us or what?Report
what are you talking aboutReport
I believe we have reached the “making things up” and “flinging random poo at the walls” stage.
I’m looking forward to the conclusion, as ideology meets questions like “What do you think is actually going on” and “How would that actually fix that” and “Is this 1990? Is gay panic a murder defense again?”, and tends to get smeared across the road when it turns out, darnit, gay and trans still isn’t a choice.Report
It was within my lifetime that a poster saying “all races are equal” was a hotly debated, controversial sentiment about which teachers were encouraged to be neutral.Report
One thing that should be obvious and part of the discussion is that in some cases it is the absolute correct thing for teachers/school counselors to be having private discussions with kids that their parents may not know about at that time. Teachers/school counselors deal with abused children who often disclose to them first. School personal will report to CPS or try to help the kids cope. Sometimes good teaching is hearing about a kids home problems then trying to support the parents with other services or direct help to the parents. It’s typically school personal who spot kids with learning difficulties getting the parents on board.
This entire discussion is superficial since it’s really more homophobia mixed with the rolling moral panic that started with BLM to CRT and now onto LBGTQ. But there is real discussion about the roll of schools and some parents do not like where it goes because sometimes parents do bad things and are pissed at schools for finding out.Report
Oh, absolutely. I’m referring to the own goals of saying “don’t talk about this” to someone who has a decent relationship with their parents, not one where they are being abused.
If it came across like I was trying to draw an equivalency between those two very, very different things, I wasn’t trying to.Report
Fww i didn’t think you were trying to do that. If a teacher said that in the wrong situation that woudl be bad. But teachers are people to which means there are plenty of teachers on the left side of the curve. A few scare stories even when actually true are meaningless in general. This a point i’ve seen , correctly, raised at some of the dumbest things people do with guns.Report
A few scare stories even when actually true are meaningless in general.
Well, we just have to make sure that these scare stories don’t pop up at the same time that there are actual stories of actual abuse that are on the rise.
That’d be a mistake, I think. An avoidable one.
More avoidable than being shot in a country that refuses to pass meaningful gun control laws at the same time as calling for police to be defunded in a world being destroyed by climate change while Russia invades the Ukraine as Will Smith slaps Chris Rock.Report
Great you have just convinced me that because Bob Bagodoughnuts dropped let his 2 year have a loaded weapon and kill himself all gun must be banned. Strong work. Got all the hot buttons in there to so high fives for that.
Strange i’m seeing a lot of raging homophobia the people fuming about grooming. I wonder why. But yes teachers have abused kids which…….what? justifies the Dont’ Say Gay bills or the insinuation that an openly gay teachers is grooming by being open.
Abuse being on the rise of course could mean that teachers are doing a better job of finding abuse and reporting it as they are mandated to. So good for teachers i guess.Report
But yes teachers have abused kids which…….what?
Red Flags going up earlier and causing more false positives.
Abuse being on the rise of course could mean that teachers are doing a better job of finding abuse and reporting it as they are mandated to.
One of the stories I linked to discussed a cover-up.
But the cover-up was uncovered. So… yay.Report
What is this all supposed to mean??? I’m sure teachers, postal workers and admin assistants have abused kids. How does that in any way relate to all this legislation? It doesn’t. Child abuse exists therefore…..???? What is the action you want taken? Does this justify the DSG bills or other such actions around the country. So what?Report
How does that in any way relate to all this legislation?
I can easily imagine wanting to say “It doesn’t” as an answer to this question as if the question was rhetorical but, sadly, I think it ties into the whole “evolution of grooming following steps #1, #2, and #3” thing.
If you want to know why people are freaking out more and more about #1, it’s because of the #2s out there and the #3s out there.
What is the action you want taken?
Oh, I have a handful of things that I might want, but I kind of see what I want as irrelevant given my lack of skin in the game.
I’m more interested with explaining to the people demanding to know where this is coming from where this is coming from.Report
Here is a meta response i guess. Conspiracies often take a real world thing then put the crazy pants spin on it. Does abuse happen in schools? Well of course. No duh. Is any of that related to the Qbert infested non sense about D and teachers being demonic pedophiles are out to destroy the family and mutlate kids for our own kinky needs. No. No. No.
Take one real things dump in 27 dollops of conspiracy theorizing, partisan hyperbole and echo chambers this what you get. It’s about the conspiracy crazy not that abuse happens every place in the world. Which it does.Report
As much as I’d love to explain away the Catholic Church’s “scandals” (what a strange term, don’t you think? It was abuse! Why make it about being a “scandal”?), I am instead explaining why this stuff relates to the legislation.
Having teachers come out and say “don’t talk to your parents about this” to students as a group (NOT ONE ON ONE WITH A STUDENT COMING FORWARD! AS A GROUP!) is an own goal.
And politicians explaining that parents shouldn’t be in charge of what kids learn in school is an own goal.
You’d think “don’t make own goals” would be an obvious piece of advice. Perfectly banal.
I kind of think that the pushback is a bad look as well, but, you know what people are like. “How dare you!” instead of “Yeah, that was a masterful screwup that ruined things.”Report
Yes.
Whistling at a white woman, what a masterful screw up!Report
Yeah if this was a game it might be a better analogy. But whatevs. I dont’ know how to make everybody on my “team” not say anything wrong or do something stupid. Lord knows i’ve tried at the meetings.
Conspiraisists always latch onto something in the real world to attach The Crazy to. Why you are trying to back up the arguments of Qberts and what R’s are doing is not amusing.
I’ve often told you that you for the BSDI. Well here you are.
R’s lets shove LBGTQ back into the closet and prevent gender affirming care for transkids. Teachers and D’s are all demonic pedo’s.
vs.
Some teachers have done some dumb things in the service of gender education.
Yeah thats a rancid pile of BSDI BS that goes nowhere.
Shall i provide another example.
Protocols of the elders of Zion vs. There were actually jews in banking.
Not really an equivalence there. This is what your argument is sounding like.Report
“own goals”.
You do realize that plenty of teenage girls wear suggestive clothing and like to flirt with adult men, right?
And that when the men react by grooming and then molesting the girls, their favorite defense is that she committed an “own goal” and the resulting abuse was inevitable and what did she expect?
Why is “teacher misbehavior” even being introduced into this discussion?Report
“Why is “teacher misbehavior” even being introduced into this discussion?”
To get back to pushing the conclusion that, of course, gay people are gay due to indoctrination by grooming gay adults. Same with trans.
And as such, FOR THE CHILDREN, we must return to the 1990s and begin bashing queers again, as someone needs the votes.
Why did you think it was introduced? “Think of the children” is how it’s always been done.
Trans people, gay people, blacks for centuries, Jews for far, far longer….
it’s a slightly nicer version of blood libel. The gays don’t EAT the babies, just do their usual perverted, unnatural gay sex to keep the gay numbers up.Report
It’s an example of what I mentioned before, where a large percentage of witnesses to a lynching hang back and wring their hands muttering.
“I think this is awful, BUT… I hope the lynching wasn’t provoked by this example of bad behavior, or maybe this other example of bad behavior, or maybe even this, this, and this examples.
Because all those examples of bad behavior make the situation very confused and murky and really, what did they expect would happen?Report
Wait, so you’re defending teachers saying “don’t tell your parents about this” by comparing them to men telling girls they’ve molested “don’t tell your parents about this”?
For what it’s worth, I think that the molestation is different, but I see how “don’t tell your parents about this” is pretty much the same.Report
No, not even close.
Read it again.Report
Well, if I were doing everything I could to *NOT* sound like the anti-anti-Catholic Church scandal people from 20 years ago, I’d refrain from pointing out how sexy some of the altarboys are.
It’s not *THAT* hard to attack abuse, Chip. It’s not *THAT* hard to say that teachers shouldn’t open discussions that get close to topics of sex/sexuality by saying “don’t talk to your parents about this” instead of attacking the people who say teachers shouldn’t do that.
Unless, of course, you’re trying to lose the freaking elections in which case, let me get out of your way.Report
You’re sounding like a tankie, ironically.
Blaming the victim, and excusing the oppressor.
Your posts don’t even attempt to construct an argument, but rather, just accuse the victims of deserving the oppression, for demanding equal rights.
Every post you’ve made is some variation of “she wore a short skirt” , “he whistled at a white woman” , “but there really are a lot of Jewish bankers so of course there’s a backlash”.
You seem to think we haven’t heard this before, like you’re cleverly making some new and brilliant defense of injustice.
Dude, the next time you go searching for a Dr. Seuss book with caricatures of Chinese people, read his other stuff from the era.
He called this nonsense out long ago.Report
Who is the victim, Chip?
I’m pointing to the abused children. You’re pointing to the priests who did nothing wrong but are still getting tarred with the stigma?
You have the Catholic Church abuse and its aftermath RIGHT FREAKING THERE. DON’T DO THAT.Report
Hey look over there!Report
“At the abused children.”
“NO I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT THEM! I’D RATHER TALK ABOUT THE SLANDER OF THE GOOD PRIESTS AND THE WHOLE INSTITUTION!”
You have the Catholic Church abuse and its aftermath RIGHT FREAKING THERE. DON’T DO THAT.Report
I had the same. My Grandparents neighbor would walk to me the bus stop for kindergarten and just talk to me. He was a good man who looked out for us growing up, never did anything untoward, never touched us. I still think about him from time to time.Report
What grooming has in common with the current outbreak of bigotry is that silence of witnesses.
There are only a few active promoters of the hatefullness, but they rely on the willfull blindness and acquiescence of the onlookers.
When the parents of trans teens are charged with abuse and have their children ripped from them, or teachers fired for referencing their same sex spouse it will be done only by a handful of government agents. But how many others will stand by and wring their hands and mutter indecisively, feigning helplessness?
How many ostensibly kind and good-hearted people will eagerly vote for the people instituted this horrific injustice?Report
How many ostensibly kind and good-hearted people will eagerly vote for the people instituted this horrific injustice?
Here’s the April 6th Quinneapac Poll
Biden’s approval/disapproval is at 38/53.
Congress’s approval/disapproval is at 29/61.
The “If the election were today, would you want to see the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win control of the United States House of Representatives?” has Independents choosing Republicans over Democrats 42/36.
The “If the election were today, would you want to see the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win control of the United States Senate?” question is a little better for Dems with Independents going 44/39.
So looks like somewhere around “half of them”.Report
I’ve been saying this for a long time, that around 35-40% of the voting public will eagerly vote for outright fascism.Report
I have one vote, I have an extremely limited number of top priorities (ideally one), this isn’t it.
This sort of policy makes me less likely to vote for it’s founders, but in order for Team Blue to be competitive for my vote they have to lose their attraction to policies that imho are more destructive.Report
Ah got it.
A political party inflicting injustice on an entire class of people is , well, bad.
But not as high a priority as um..wait, what is it that is a higher priority than inflicting injustice on an entire class of citizens?Report
Inflicting damage on larger groups of people.
If Team Red and Team Blue switch sides on trans rights, does that change your vote/Team? Or does some other Team Blue issue become more important so you can vote on that instead?Report
What damage, on what larger group of people outweighs prosecuting parents of trans teenagers?Report
Before we talk about how to measure damage (dollars work pretty well), where has the goal posts been set here?
How many parents of trans teenagers have been prosecuted thus far? Zero? It’s easy to find numbers larger than zero.
If the number of people you’re claiming you’re concerned about is zero, then this about virtue signaling.Report
Don’t bother.
You’ve already set your goalposts.
An official state policy that announces that trans people are evil and must be persecuted is not alarming to you, not enough to vote them out of office.
This is your position, in your own words. You own it.Report
It’s not my state. Ergo I get no vote in what they do no matter what happens.
Unless you mean that because some member of Team Red is evilly virtue signaling that I should be opposed to the entire team?
If that’s what you mean, then we’re back to me asking whether you would switch teams if they switched sides on this issue?
I mean, as opposed to switching issues and finding some other member of Team Red to showcase as being evil so the whole team must be.
I.e. is THIS the issue that determines your vote?Report
You’re not a single issue voter best I can tell, why should he be?Report
That’s my point right there. There’s a lot of drama and pearl clutching over this issue. However the reality is he, just like me, is not willing to vote on it. If the parties switch then he’ll find a different issue to proclaim Team Red evil over and ignore this wart on Team Blue.
I suspect I’m a lot closer to a single issue voter (economic growth) than most, it’s just neither party is willing to adopt that issue as a high priority.
Now for Trump I’ll make an exception and vote against him. Since he refused to accept an election it doesn’t matter what his economic policy is.Report
I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.
It’s something that could happen in the sense that it wouldn’t violate the conservation of angular momentum, but the way the parties are built up out of sub-constituencies, I have a hard time believing the swap could happen.
If it did? I suspect a lot of other changes to the parties would happen too, ones which might well make me trade in my Blue jersey for a Red one.Report
Team Blue was the party of racism until Johnson. Team Blue was the party of xenophobia until Trump.
We like to think the parties are stable and it’s unthinkable that they can steal issues from each other until it happens and they do.
We are one charismatic leader away from any issue being stolen from the other side. Some are harder than others because they’re bound into several issues, but trans doesn’t really go with anything except maybe gay and we’re quickly accepting (and thus ignoring) gays.Report
Um no, “we” aren’t. As has been noted ad nauseum throughout this whole thread Team Red is actively legislating to retrench on homosexuals and transgender person in horrible ways. And that legislating is being done in states within federal court circuits where the states pernicious and bigoted approaches are likely to be upheld.Report
A front pager right here was openly bemoaning that they can’t find an anti-gay and anti-trans church.
Tennessee is trying to ban gay marriage by stripping out marriage laws and hoping that their common law state constitution definition will take precedence, and Florida and Alabama have gone mask off.
Anyone claiming we’re accepting and ignoring gays is either incredibly privileged and isolated, deluded, or bald-faced lying.Report
Obama was elected in 2008 in part on opposing gay marriage. The first state to allow anything like it was Mass in 2004.
We have made massive strides in terms of acceptance and that process is on going.
There are a few corner cases and old guard around but you have to move the goal posts to “full acceptance by everyone” in order to see otherwise.
To repeat, we’re quickly accepting (and thus ignoring) gays.Report
This oversimplifies history to the last straw, ignoring that huge mound of hay on the camel’s back
In both cases, you had years of intra-party struggle and inter-party realignment making the change possible.
LBJ signed the CRA in 1964, but Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat to protest the Democratic Party adopting a pro-civil rights party.
In both cases, you also had a period where the two parties were converging.
Could the Dems start moving in a more transphobic direction?
Sure, and that would be bad.
Could they get to the point where they are the transphobic party?
Maybe, but a lot of other shit would have to happen first, and a lot of it would affect my answer about partisan alignmentReport
It is most certainly over simplifying. However right now we’re in the middle of a sea change in terms of how we treat gays, which seems to be the closest related issue.
The gays get full acceptance or darn close to it. Then they decide every trans woman could have been a gay guy.
How to see Team Red deciding to take trans is harder, but one charismatic leader with a kid who is might do it.
One assumes that a Vice President Thurmond who becomes President have Kennedy gets shot doesn’t steal the civil rights issue. For that matter idk if a President Kennedy could have gotten that bill through Congress.Report
A Democratic Party that ran a Kennedy/Thurmond ticket is likely a Democratic Party that would not have stopped being the Racist Party.
Which is essentially what I’m arguing in microcosm: if Team Red and Team Blue somehow swapped places on trans issues, a lot of other stuff would happen too, in such a way as to make the question very hard to answer in the abstract.Report
I actually don’t think the two issues are very good comps at all. IMO trying to paper over that reality is counterproductive.Report
The entire Republican political establishment has thrown in with the homophobes and bigots, including your state, your city, your Congressman and Senator and state legislator.
You belong to a political party that views democracy as an impediment to its goals, and a majority of your fellow citizens as second class lesser being unworthy of justice or fair treatment.
But none of that is enough to cause you to vote against them.Report
Because a court enjoined it. You don’t get to pretend the governor and AG of a Texas didn’t try.
Heck they’d opened up a case into one of their own CPS employees over
The courts stopped it for now, but that’s like saying attempted murder is no big deal if it’s not successful murder.
Paxton had the gun out, aimed, and had pulled the trigger. You don’t get to argue he wouldn’t really have fired when he’d already done so.Report
Because politicians have never been known to lie or make stupid laws they know will be thrown out?
You sure you want to go with that?Report
Yeah, absolutely I’ll go with taking passed laws and the AG directing CPS to drop everything to go after the parents of trans kids seriously.
I mean I get you don’t give a crap about these kids, or trans people, or gay people and that clearly they’re sacrifices you’re willing to make for whatever it is that gets you up in the morning…
It guess I just can’t bring myself to screw over trans and gay kids for some political juice. Or hand wave away someone trying as ‘no big deal’ because a court has temporarily stopped them — while multiple other states started following their lead.Report
I don’t find the current use of the term “grooming” to be an unfair overextension. The actions involve deliberately confusing a child in order to make him an easier target. The only difference is that the individual teacher may not be grooming a child for his own opportunity. When you hear a teacher say that 20 of her 32 fourth-graders have come out to her as LGBTIA, that’s like 20 out of 32 ICU patients dying under a particular nurse’s care. Anything above 0, maybe 1, is worthy of investigation.Report
Explain for us how this works.
Like, what does a teacher do to induce 20 straight children to suddenly identify as LGBTQ?Report
I don’t know; hence, the need for an investigation.Report
You don’t understand something, but have a vague uneasy sense that Something Awful is happening, so a group of people need to be swept up into an investigation of a horrific crime.Report
I don’t know the specifics of how something awful is happening, but I can see it happening. It’d be a panic if I said that the teacher was a molester. I’m not saying that because there’s no evidence of molestation. There is evidence that these 10 year olds are confused about sex. And as I recall, no one was using the term “groomer” until teachers started refusing to comply with law and saying that parents had no right to know about their kids. Now that we’re seeing the scope of the problem I think the term applies.Report
One problem is that so many of the scare stories turn out to be false or wildly inaccurate. This happened with desantis anecdote yesterday. Just a complete lie used by him to justify his crap.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/06/politics/fact-check-desantis-dont-say-gay-family-narrative/index.html
Kids learn about sex, gender, nauthy bits for years at home before they are ever exposed to a teacher. You have confused kids look at home first then their peers. And one weird class doesn’t mean squat.
As is being pointed out, believing that LBGTQ people are sneakily after the kids is an old old evil trope. It’s on the level of blood libel against jews.
Groomer as a term has been around for decades.Report
The term “groomer” has been around for decades, but as far as I know exclusively used to describe adults who are grooming kids for their own bad actions. I don’t like the misuse of words, but I do think the word reasonably fits in the current use. Maybe a distinction has to be made now between regular groomers and predatory groomers.
But we wouldn’t have so many political people complaining about a term unless they believed they were getting killed in the messaging. I notice that your CNN link includes “dont-say-gay”. You and Chip are comparing your opponents to fascists. That’s a retreat into sloganeering every bit as bad as Em talks about. You have to understand, if you accuse someone of fascism on a “Words Have Meanings” thread, they’re going to laugh at you.Report
The term as it is being used by conservatives now has never ever ever how the term has been used by people involved with the treatment of kids. There is no regular vs predatory groomers distinction that i have ever heard of.
I’ve actually worked with kids for 20+ years at this point. I’ve had training re: sexual abuse. I’ve never heard the term used as it is being used. Groomer/grooming has always been used to describe one person directly manipulating a child to molest them in some way. I guess this is what you mean by predatory grooming. That is the only kind.
The link i sent has an example of how desantis lied. His and the parents story did not match the facts as presented by the parent. It was a lie. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot with these stories. The rest of the article i could care less about.Report
Yeah, also there’s always been the universal understanding that the end goal of grooming is sexually abusing a child.
You know, doing something very evil for personal gain.
There just isn’t an equivalent goal as part of this new made-up kind of “grooming”, and even if you think something’s going wrong, that something going wrong is not an adult sexually exploiting a child, or for that matter even motivated by anything resembling malice.
Or doing anything at all actually harmful to the kid.
EDIT to clarify: the “no malice and no harm” standard here is the lowest possible bar here. Parents can have very legitimate objections to things teachers do that are not malicious and not harmful.Report
Well yeah you and i know there is no equivalent goal. The “goal” the panic riddled are suggesting is weapons grade homo/transphobia but at least they are pretty open about that generally.Report
I respect that you’re distancing yourself from the “don’t say gay” slogan in the article. But you did play the fascist card. And my problem is that I’ve got a bad memory for these things, so by tomorrow I’ll have forgotten which of you other than Chip did that. So I’ll have to laugh at you quietly, to myself, today. As for what you said in your first two paragraphs, it fits with what I’d been saying. But still, heh, heh.Report
Huh wah…??? I posted the link which showed Desantis and parent using a lie to gin up fear as an example of the kind of crap that is being used to justify the current moral panic.
It is interesting you aren’t responding to the fakey claim used by desantis.Report
I’m not blown away by the idea that a politician oversold a story, or that CNN would accuse a Republican of same. If teachers are saying that they’ll quit rather than stop talking about their sexuality, that’s enough for me.Report
Pinky: Here are examples of bad thing.
Me: Some of those examples are excremental and here is a example.
Pinky: Meh, whatever.
Nobody is asking straight teachers to not talk about their spouse.
Teacher loses job over open gay pride and support.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lgbtq-students-texas-school-rainbow-stickers-rcna23208
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lgbtq-students-texas-school-rainbow-stickers-rcna23208Report
He didn’t oversell it. He lied. TO preserve his political power. He lied.Report
I just got a chance to check out the DeSantis story. CNN reports that “DeSantis’ account of what happened in Leon County is not quite what a limited number of records that have been made public show”. The records “show only one conversation in a much more complicated matter between a family and their child’s school”. You, me, and CNN don’t seem to know much about the story, and CNN isn’t calling it a complete lie, but I’m sure your gut instinct is right.Report
“These children are confused about sex.”
You decided this?
You looked at things and decided what their proper attitudes towards sex should be?Report
I think the usual estimate of the LGBTQIA population is 5%. Let’s go with 10% just to be safe. Doing some quick calculations, I found the odds of a class having 20 of 32 kids being LGBTQIA is 1 in 156,739,811,912.Report
As I’ve said before, my wife’s aunt is gay. She’s married and lives with her wife. The two of them have had 3 boys staying with them for weeks at a time, for close to a decade (my son and his two cousins). That’s two gay women, one a retired teacher, one a retired nurse, have complete and unfettered access to 3 boys from toddler-hood on.
All 3 boys are, so far, interested in girls. Why? Because despite all that unfettered exposure to the gay lifestyle of two old out and proud lesbians (& all their out & proud gay friends), the boys are still swimming in heteronormative culture. So something pretty powerful, something about how they are wired biologically, has to over-ride that massive amount of social conditioning.
A day of talking about it in a classroom ain’t going to do it.Report
And so…what?
Assuming a teacher makes the statement that 20 of their students have identified as LGBTQ, who are the proper stakeholders who have a legitimate interest?Report
Hmm, I wonder what the odds of a teacher just making some shit up are.Report
My brother was in a kindergarten class where the teacher was super tolerate to the left handed (that was a thing at one time).
The problem is none of her kids were left handed. She assumed that meant they had been subject to discrimination (25 kids, on average 2.5 of them should be left), so she searched and convinced my brother he was left handed.
So now she had one lefty and was happy she could show she wasn’t discriminating.
Problem is several years later we figured out he’s right handed.Report
It helps if you understand something about how some parents view their offspring. And while you can find parents like this across the political spectrum, it’s heavily titled towards more authoritarian parents for obvious reasons.
That is, there is this belief that children are an extension of the parent. On the milder end, it’s those parents pushing their kids to fulfill their own childhood dreams of being a cheerleader, or quarterback, or violinist. On the further end — and I’ve actually heard a parent say this — it’s a belief in outright ownership of the child. “I made you, and you will be exactly who I say you are” is a real, live, not as uncommon belief as you’d want to think in America. (You can see why this is seen more with more authoritarian parents)
So when it comes to LGBTQ issues, a parent or adult with the more “I make the child into who they are” approach (as opposed to “I try to guide a self-developing independent person as best I can to be the best ‘them’ they can be”) suddenly faced with a gay or trans child — their gut reaction is to ask “Who made you this way?”
(“I didn’t raise no [slur]”, “You won’t be gay/trans under my roof”, and various shades of disownment, being kicked out, beaten, etc spring to mind as common examples of this reaction”)
Not them, obviously. Which meant somewhere along the way, some gay or trans person interfered. And made them gay. And why would a gay or trans person do this? Well, for their “agenda” which clearly involves sex. Because, don’t you know, gay and trans people can’t have kids (even the ones who can), so to keep up a steady supply of gay people they MUST go after straight kids and “convert them”.
It’s the same “you don’t agree with my politics, even though you’re 30, it’s that LIBERAL COLLEGE because you weren’t raised that way” impulse.
Now people who actually view children as independent people and realizing that being LGBTQ isn’t a choice so much as how you’re born, and the only choice is whether you come out of the closet or not —- well, if we see a teacher that has a lot of LGBTQ students confide in them, we think “Oh, teacher X is well known to be supportive of LGBTQ kids, so obviously kids looking for support go to them”.
To someone of a more authoritarian bent, they don’t think “Gay children go to an openly supportive LGBTQ teacher for support” — they jump straight to those sinister thoughts, because deep down — they think “gay” or “trans” is something someone taught those kids.
Either because they believe it’s a choice, or because they believe — despite all evidence — that it’s not something kids that age should “know”. (Which again, the only reason some kids don’t know is because our cultural is so heteronormative that some kids simply don’t have words to put to their feelings and identity. When all you see is Princesses marrying Princes, what exactly are you supposed to do with the fact that you want to be a princess who marries a princess? None of the stories, TV, or examples in front of you show that’s even a thing! But lack of those examples won’t make you straight. Just miserable)Report
I said authoritarian and I meant it. Narcissistic parents show similar traits, because narcissism is inherently authoritarian by default — the authority is “self” above all else — but that is not the only form of authoritarianism at all.
And no, being lesbian is not “socially acquired”. I can only assume you’re talking about lesbian or gay culture, which is an entirely different thing than being lesbian or gay.
We’re all raised in heteronormative culture, which might feel innate since we’re drowned in it from birth, but is no more innate than any other culture.
God, I feel like it’s 1992, with all the stupid hot takes on gay people again. At least in the 90s you could plead some ignorance.Report
Best rebuttal of the whole thread.Report
I agree.
“Molest” means “to interfere with”, to disturb the normal development of something. Like touch a bird’s nest will molest it, and cause the mother to abandon the eggs.
In the normal workings of child development, a child begins as an infant without any sense of bodily autonomy, and slowly grows to form their own boundaries and autonomy until they reach adulthood.
Its very common for adolescents to have a very fluid identity- today they may declare they are a surfer, and dive deep into the surfer culture, but then 6 months later drop it all and become goth, and then a jock after that.
Part of the fluidity is exploring their own sexuality, in orientation and gender identity.
Most often, they go through all these explorations on their own, and need very little input from adults. But sometimes they do ask for counseling or assistance from trusted adults in their lives.
But just as often, adults who aren’t trusted jump in uninvited and “molest” the normal workings of adolescence and coerce or manipulate the adolescent into some activity or another, some identity or another.
If 99% of a certain group of adolescents declare they are nonbinary, gay, or whatever, unless they ask for assistance, its really not something than any other adult needs to opine on, much less act on.Report
Oof.Report
Have a day talking about comic book heroes and you’ll have 20 out of 32 wanting to be super heroes.
Or scientists, or lawyers, or professional athletes, or cops…Report
Which side are you taking? Based on this comment, I assumed we were in agreement about the danger of manipulation but your comment about your wife’s aunt has me confused. I mean, if a teacher talks about being a superhero and encourages kids to wear superhero masks, then when they say they want to be superheroes signs them up for a superhero club and tells them not to tell their parents….Report
If 20 out of 32 are talking about identifying as being gay, then I’m not seeing how the parents aren’t finding out? That number implies that folks found out. But my point is that kids that age are constantly experimenting with identity and trying different ones on for size (usually until well into their teens or young adulthood, honestly). Rational people don’t flip out about it as long as it doesn’t wander into self-harm / dangerous behavior.
And what proof is there that prior to this bill getting publicized that there was a popular wave of teachers talking about LGTBQ people and telling students to keep quiet about? For all I’ve seen, there appears to be a whole lot of anecdata, without much evidence of an actual problem.
I mean, 1 or 2 teachers talking about it, knowing that they have a kid with an unhinged parent, and just not really wanting to put up with their BS is not an issue in need of legislation.Report
It reminds me of the scare stories in the 70s about “gay liberation” where the talk was “well if we revoke laws against homosexuality, then gays will just be everywhere!”
As if, were it not for the law, all men everywhere would suddenly scream “AT LAST!!” and rush out to have gay sex.Report
Yesterday, I was listening to a retelling of the Dungeons & Dragons scare back in the late 70’s, early 80’s. The tune is a bit different, but a lot of the chords are the same.Report
Look back to the pre-CRA stuff about blacks. The playbook hasn’t changed.
Scary black men after our omen and daughters, to slate their savage lusts upon our gentle flowering womanhood.
That’s why we can’t integrate schools, because the savage blacks will sexually prey on our daughters.
THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
In the 90s it was the gays, after our youth and attacking us manly men in our locker rooms, subjecting us to the vile gay male gaze (some real fun misogyny there — a real “you can’t treat me like I treat women!), and now it’s trans people which has morphed back into attacking gay people.
(The fact that lesbians were less of a focus than gay men comes down to, I believe, two factors — one, a male feeling aggrieved is simply more newsworthy than a woman, and two, lesbians don’t represent quite as much a threat to cishet men as, I suspect, what they hope is an opportunity)Report
Similarly the bill about trans athletes in Utah, which changes the status of exactly one kid.
It’s almost as if the GOP isn’t really the party of small government.Report
They totally are! That’s why all these bills place enforcement in private hands. If the government was going to enforce it, they’d have to expand the government and raise taxes to fund the additional police and prosecutors to handle it. Leave it up to citizens, and you just have to add a few more judges, or shift a few down from the tax evasion courts…Report
Nice touch at the end there.Report
What the hell, it’s not like calling people child molesters has a downside.
Report
Great article Em.
This isn’t at all new. LGBT et all have been accused of preying on children for as long as they’ve existed as advocates. Longer even.Report
It’s such a weird thing. My cousin had a baby about 15 years ago and somehow it came up in front of my father-in-law that when she went back to work, her friend Danny was going to babysit. Danny and my cousin grew up together and had been friends for probably 20 years at that point. Danny is gay, which my FIL knew because he met him at my grandma’s funeral where he was a pall bearer. Anyway, FIL gets all “she better be careful leaving him alone with that baby girl.”
I looked at him with confusion and said, “why?” FIL says “he’s gay!” and I, still confused, say “but the baby is a girl” and he says “Yeah, and Danny is a boy…” as if I was slow.
It made no sense at all and it took me a few minutes to realize what he was actually implying.Report
I’m still not sure what he was implying.Report
He was implying that gay men are by their nature child molesters. Girl or boy , gays dont’ care since they are predatory abusers of children. It’s an old slur. That it is box of rocks level dumb is irrelevant.Report
Ach, you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family, my condolences.Report
Excellent piece. Thank you. Very well said. This kind of writing is what makes the OT special.Report
A teacher is a position of trust. If they’re telling you as a child not to tell your parents something, that should be a massive red flag. If the school is allowing your kid to do something without even telling you, let alone without your consent, tell me how that is definitionally different than grooming? It’s an abuse of trust using a child that does not know better as a bargaining chip against the parents. I don’t care what the thing is. It could be anything. Abortion to transitioning to a bloody field trip.Report
Kid comes out to a teacher.
Teacher asks, “Should I tell your parents?”
Kid says, “No they’d beat the shit out of me if you tell them!”
What should the teacher do?Report
Just to amplify, this is a completely realistic situation. I’ve heard various examples of this.Report
CPS should get involved.Report
Very probably!
But the scenario, which is high salience for a lot of LGBT folks, shouldn’t preclude that kid getting any other sort of support, right?Report
If a child reports abuse to a teacher, which is super common, the teacher will report that to CPS. Without the parents consent very often depending on the situation. That is not grooming. In fact it is often how kids who have been groomed and sexually abused finally get help.
Depending on the age kids will often talk to and confide in teachers or school counselors. Kids do this if they wish and are better off to have an adult they can talk with. In fact in actual counseling there are many situation where the parents DO NOT get to know all of or even a part of what the kids say.
What bargaining chip??? What is that even supposed to mean.Report
Don’t ask. He might explain.Report
That’s something the child told the teacher. You know that is functionally different.Report
Grooming has an end goal of molestation and sexual abuse. That’s the difference between grooming and exposing a child to an ideology you don’t like.Report
But wouldn’t it be AWESOME for some people if they could smear people with the term “grooming” — which we all know means sexual predation — by using it for other things, and just leaving the massive implication it’s for pedophilia?
It’s not exactly subtle, and I lose a lot of respect for anyone trying it.
I’m also not surprised when it falls out of certain lips. In some ways, this has been a real 90-s level trip. We’re back to gender and sexual orientation being “choices”, and of course gay and trans people have to “convince people” to become gay and trans, or else there’d be none! (because obviously you aren’t born that way!).
I mean at least in the 90s most people were fairly ignorant, but 30 years later to keep pushing that BS takes some real dedication, willful ignorance and outright hatred towards LGBTQ people.
And they think slapping “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” on the end somehow hides it — but all it does it make sure the gay and trans kids know they’re especially hated. They’re not the kids to think of. They’re the kids to hammer flat to protect some fragile Boomer’s pristine bigotry.Report
The verb “to groom” is used, non-sexually, to refer to preparation (one’s looks, for example, or a potential replacement). That’s why I don’t see the new use of the term as an overextension.Report
Preparation for what? Preparation to navigate life in general, which, to the dismay of many, includes interacting with non-heterosexual folks, or preparation to have sex with non-heterosexual folks? Big difference. Or maybe you don’t see that. Wouldn’t be all that surprised.Report
Sex with non-hetero folks as a consenting adult is threatening to those clinging to outdated interpretations of the non-issue that was sex as Christ described it.Report
Are you suggesting that the use of the word in the context we are discussing is not intended to imply that these teachers want to molest these kids?
Because that’s disingenuous. That’s exactly what they are saying. They also call them “pedos” which is something of a tell.
EDIT TO ADD:
If they want to be clear that what they mean is “grooming them to be accepting of queer and trans people” then ok, but that’s not what is meant when they say groomer.Report
He’s outright claiming it. Because he, and many other here, believe that exposing kids to ideas and ideologies he doesn’t like is abuse. Just like the Attorney General and Governor of Texas believe that providing transgender children medical and psychological support is abuse.Report
Come on, your whole article was about the word being used in a different way than usual. You can’t switch back now. Either the word’s meaning is being altered to include teachers who don’t want to molest the kids, or the word’s meaning isn’t being altered and the teachers are being accused of wanting to molest kids. You can’t say the word’s meaning is being altered and not altered.
ETA: I see your ETA clarified things but I still think this comment stands.Report
No, I think they are intending the same definition but they’re lumping in activity that should not be included as incidences.
My point was that they are saying it is “grooming” (in the sense of acclimating kids to sexual abuse) to even talk to kids about these things and that is garbage.Report
The word’s meaning IS BEING ALTERED to accuse teachers of wanting to molest kids BECAUSE the accusers believe (As JS very clearly points out above) those people do not accept that kids can simply be gay or trans. The accusers believe – despite a TON of evidence – that being gay or trans is a CHOICE, and that adults MUST groom and recruit children to become gay or trans in order to “preserve” the “lifestyle.” The accusers BELIEVE the teachers are and will commit ABUSE.
Is THAT clear enough for you?Report
Don’t forget, it’s also deliberately used to imply gay and trans people are all sexual predators, to imply that children need to be protected, in an attempt to demonize gay and trans adults.
Or in short, the 90s called and it wants to bash queers again.Report
It’s not just an ideology. Medically transitioning children is something even the Biden Administration is in favor of.Report
“If they’re telling you as a child not to tell your parents something.”
I’ve been teaching in multiple schools for over 20 years. My girlfriend has been teaching in multiple schools for even longer. My mom is a teacher and school administrator with 40+ years experience. My stepfather is a retired college professor.
I’ve never seen, heard, or heard mention of a teacher telling a child to not tell their parents something. That doesn’t mean it never ever ever ever happened. But if it does happen, it happens with such exceeding rarity that basing anything on its occurrence is nonsensical.
In fact, I’d probably report to my admin if I observed a teacher doing that. And I think most of my colleagues would as well.
So, let’s stop with nonsensical ifs that have no basis in reality.Report
See? Look at this. This is a *PERFECT* response to the allegation. “This is bullshit to the point where I don’t believe it happened! But if I saw it, I’d report it!”
None of this “but what about this particular hypothetical?” crap.
(Kazzy, there was one story that reported that this happened and there is footage of the girl talking to the school board about how it happened and it got on Fox & Friends and everything.)Report
Just echoing Jaybird, this is the kind of answer that I think goes a long way, and as always I appreciate your perspective this topic Kazzy.
The most convincing rebuttals to my concerns go something like:
‘There’s 130k public schools in the US. The numbers alone ensure enough weird outliers to produce a regular stream of viral events/news stories particularly if one goes hunting for them. In practice they are incredibly rare, the vast majority of teachers and admins reject whatever weirdness, try (within reason) to prevent it, and if it were to happen around them or involving their students they’d happily work with parents and put a stop to it.’
Bureaucratic defensiveness, hypotheticals about abusive parents that sound like an after school special, or the absolute worst of all, asking if everything isn’t really all about sex and gender anyway, all imply there really is something to the fuss.Report
I’m going to offer one more comment here, to you InMD (because, agree or disagree on the specifics, I always find you to be a fair and reasonable interlocutor) and then I’m going to bow out because I see the comments elsewhere are already deep in the waters of what is going to just feel endlessly frustrating to me…
1.) The hypotheticals about abusive parents DO matter because teachers in most (all?) states are mandated reporters, meaning there are certain things we are legally required to do if we sincerely suspect abuse and which we CANNOT contact parents about. Now, none of the trainings I’ve had ever indicated — directly or indirectly — that we can or should advise the child not to tell their parent we spoke. But we can let the child know that *we* won’t tell their parents. Again, we’re dealing with outliers here so I don’t think they should be a dominant part of the conversation, but it is important to note that there are certain legal requirements teachers have, included among that a level of confidentiality and anonymity. I could see how a mandated report could be construed by a parent as some busy body, ill-intended teacher telling secrets to screw over a family. But, again, that isn’t really what we’re talking about here.
2.) The “Is everything about gender/sex?” thing is a tangent… related but not really the main thrust here. The extent to which that is relevant is that the Florida law (which I know you oppose in letter and largely in spirit) is written such that I — a teacher targeted by the strictest restrictions — would be so worried about the vagueness and enforcement-via-lawsuit mechanism, that I would remove MANY, MANY parts of my curriculum that I would NOT say are ABOUT sex/gender but which could be construed that way. I mentioned a book called “Rainbow Boy” which simply recognizes that some kids like more than one color so the “What’s your favorite color?” question can feel annoying to kids… it is not at all about sex or gender but, hey, it’s called Rainbow Boy and features a boy who sometimes likes pink and on days he likes pink, he wears a pink tutu. He also likes orange on other days and plays with his orange basketball. Do I think that is about sex and gender? No. Could a parent sue because their kid says, “Teacher read a book about rainbow boys wearing pink tutus!” Sure! Why risk it?
But, those are largely digressions. They are PARTS of the conversation but they aren’t the main thrust of it, particularly number 1.
The bigger point I’ll make… to piggyback on my initial point… is we have a saying in education (at least with young kids): “I will believe half of what they tell me about home life if you believe half of what they tell you about school life.” Kids are unreliable reporters. I have a kid who insists he lives in the Bronx with three dogs. He does not. He lives around the corner and has no dogs. But he’s 4. That’s what kids do. One day we served pasta for snack. A kid told his parents and they thought he was making it up so they reached out and we confirmed that, yes indeed, we had a special snack that day!
My students — at 3 and 4 — know I’m in regular contact with their parents! Sometimes they’ll say, “Can you show that picture to my mom and dad?” “Sure!” I respond. Or maybe I’ll say, “We’re going to save that picture for something special so I’m not going to send it to them today.” Could that child misconstrue that and go home and say, “Teacher said we can’t show you what we did at school today.” EGADS!
When in doubt… ask.
When
In
Doubt
Ask.
I implore you to!
If you are met with defensiveness or obfuscation, by all means, press and/or pursue other means. But I can’t stress enough… if your kid comes home and says something about school that doesn’t quite add up and/or doesn’t quite feel right, reach out to the teacher. Any teacher worth their salt will take the time to clarify and explain. The best of us will be proactive… but even there we can’t anticipate everything that might get garbled during the game of telephone that is a child’s school reporting. I *want* parents to ask me about those things. I love sharing about what I do and why and I want parents to have an ACCURATE understanding of their child’s day.
I may be an outlier in terms of how much parent communication I welcome. Some teachers really don’t like it or struggle with it… they got into teaching for the kids and working with adults may feel challenging or uncomfortable or exhausting. But I don’t know any who won’t clear something up with a quick email. And the few I’ve found who won’t even do that, aren’t long for the work. And when I had a supervisory role, that was direct feedback I gave them.
Kids are awesome. I love my work. But they are TERRIBLE reporters. If your kid says something that doesn’t feel right to you, talk to their teacher. We *WANT* you to! And if you try and the teacher indicates they do NOT want to at least try to resolve your concerns, go right up the flagpole. You have my blessing.Report
“There’s 130k public schools in the US. The numbers alone ensure enough weird outliers to produce a regular stream of viral events/news stories particularly if one goes hunting for them.”
And to add to the math…
Over 50M public school students.
Over 3.5M public school teachers.
Consider the dozens if not hundreds of interactions a child has with a teacher in a given day. Like, the odds that something totally insane — or which sounds totally overwhelmingly insane when reported by a child — doesn’t happen approaches zero.
Those situations should be looked into and addressed as needed. But we don’t need laws that remove A WHOLE BUNCH OF GOOD STUFF because maybe just maybe they’ll help us avoid the statistical outliers.Report
But we don’t need laws that remove A WHOLE BUNCH OF GOOD STUFF because maybe just maybe they’ll help us avoid the statistical outliers.
If the self-policing is high-quality, then there won’t be much of a call for these laws (outside of a handful of nutters).
If the self-policing is low-quality, then there will be.Report
In general, this is true.
When it comes to culture war flashpoints, the probability that self policing is actually an issue begins to crater.Report
Once again, this is nonsense.
There is no logical connection between these laws and teacher misbehavior.
There are a million ways to to handle teacher misbehavior that don’t involve bigotry.
Republicans have freely chosen bigotry.Report
That requires the opportunity to self-police.
If I did something that led to a student thinking “Mr. Kazzy told me not to talk to my parents about this” — something I would never ever ever ever say — and next thing I know that student is talking at a school board meeting… we skipped a few steps.
If I read “Rainbow Boy” to my kids and next thing I know I’m served with papers, where was there any opportunity to self-police?
Teachers make thousands of decisions a day, many of which are in the moment and unknown or unknowable to others. Hell, I don’t even know everything I say and do in the classroom. It’s too much to remember. The idea that every word and ever action is carefully calibrated and planned top-down and thus when something goes wrong, there is a clear chain of action and chain of command that can be dissected to suss out the bad actors… that just isn’t how schools work.
Like, let’s say a kid went home and says, “Teacher Kazzy said blah blah blah.”
Parent goes to my head and says, “HOW DARE YOU HAVE A POLICY WHERE TEACHERS SAY BLAH BLAH BLAH!”
My head would probably say, “We don’t have a policy that says that and I don’t think he said that.”
Well… now what?
Maybe I said that thing and my boss didn’t know. Maybe I meant to say something else and accidentally said that thing. Maybe I did say something else and it was misinterpreted by the child or misreported by the child or misunderstood by the parent.
But we can quickly get to a place where the perception is bureaucratic defensiveness or feelings of mistrust emerge?
Schools are a bit of a shitshow. It’s just kind of inevitable. And, honestly, any attempt to correct that would quickly make things far worse and/or more expensive.
People tend to REALLY misunderstand how schools function in practice and, as a result, small issues can quickly snowball.Report
If I read “Rainbow Boy” to my kids and next thing I know I’m served with papers, where was there any opportunity to self-police?
Well, in my example, we’ve got a 4th grader explaining to the school board that a teacher said “don’t talk to your parents about this”.
I can appreciate that there are hypothetical situations where a parent gets upset that a teacher is reading children a book with little boys wearing pink tutus… but my example was of a 4th grader telling the school board “we were told to not talk to our parents about this”.
Here’s a follow-up story that talked to the school district in the aftermath of the video going viral:
No hypotheticals, this is something that actually happened.
Parents asked “can we see the questions you asked our kids?” and the response was “after talking to legal, we’re not going to”.
HOLY GUACAMOLE.
I can totally appreciate that there are going to be situations where there is friction and the classic game of telephone is played and a teacher announcing one thing turns into the student reporting another and the parent hearing something else entirely. I have that happen at work every other day. That’s not my complaint at all.
It’s the “holy cow, this is bad” stuff that gets the ol’ “HOW DARE YOU” treatment that has me conclude “oh, yeah… this is going to result in laws.”Report
1) you get that this is a singular case, right? The definition of an outlier at this point.
2) The organization in question IS NOT the school, it’s an outside org the school was cooperating with, and absent evidence suggesting otherwise, the school probably thought things were above board. At this point, the schools response needs to be looked at, not the outside org.Report
Oh, yeah. I get that it’s a singular case.
But that’s why I put it in a different category than some hypothetical where some theoretical parent overreacts to a misreported misunderstanding of a teacher saying something innocuous but misinterpretable.
At this point, the schools response needs to be looked at, not the outside org.
And looked at will it be! I am going to guess that how it handles/mishandles this situation will have ripples out to other schools in other states despite being a singular outlier of a case.Report
The DEI grift tends to produce fairly text book violations of the civil rights act and similar laws. My view is that teaching critical gender theory inspired childrens books probably does the same and are also very likely ripe for establishment clause challenges, given the kind of metaphysical assertions they include about sex.
Either way I think that is the appropriate realm to fight this out and grounds any dispute in the specific facts. These laws don’t do that.Report
I think the productive way to deal with this is vote out the school board and where appropriate sue the district under existing and well established civil rights law. Force transparency with FOIA where you have to.
With respect to legislation specifically I think there are familiar parallels.
For example, conflating suicides and gang turf wars with hyper rare mass shootings in the suburbs to push a bunch of highly questionable laws or piggy backing on 25-30 police shootings of unarmed black men a year to introduce some barely related ideological junk that the proponents wanted all along. To your point some degree of this is probably inevitable but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that we can and should be smarter than this.Report
To your point some degree of this is probably inevitable but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that we can and should be smarter than this.
Should? Absolutely.
Can? I’m not sure. Maybe. Seems unlikely, though.Report
If the self-policing is high-quality, then there won’t be much of a call for these laws (outside of a handful of nutters).
Optimistic, if not naive. Or maybe cynical. That should cover all the bases.Report
Hey, you’re a lawyer. Do you have an opinion on the whole “Initially, the company agreed to provide the questions, but reportedly later walked that back after consulting with their legal department” thing?
Can you provide more context for that?Report
No, I don’t.
No, I can’t.Report
Do the people who say “man, this looks bad” have a point? Or is refusing to show parents the questions you gave the kids something that prudence would dictate?
From a legal POV, I mean.
I know what it looks like to a layperson.Report
Don’t know.
Can’t tell.
I know how laypeople think, but it would be irresponsible to opine “from a legal point of view,” which is what you’re asking, on the basis of the information available. I’m sure the school board’s lawyers — though school board lawyers are all too often not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and when they are the client often refuses to listen — know a lot more information than either of us do, and presumably have a basis for their advice.Report
presumably have a basis for their advice.
I’m trying to come up with a good basis and failing.
You’re a lawyer. What would be a good basis? Or, at least, one that is not *BAD*?Report
I’m trying to come up with a good basis and failing.
That’s not surprising. That sort of thing is best left to professionals who know both what they’re dealing with and what they’re talking about.Report
Which is why I’m asking you!
Come on, professional! Do the thing best left to you!Report
From my read it’s actually the company that said they won’t release them after consulting with legal, not the district. I can think of reasons unrelated to the nature of the questions you might advise that (IP or competitive sensitivity perhaps) but to CJ’s point it really would be an exercise in speculation. Definitely not enough info on what’s available to assess on the merits and no way to know the true motives.Report
IP or competitive sensitivity might be a decent reason, I guess.
Pity that it presents identically to the alleged statements by the teacher.Report
As you say, I’m a professional. That means I get paid for anything that would take real work, as opposed to explaining the basics or piggybacking on already-established facts. This would take real work, and you can’t afford me.Report
So I’m stuck between the guy who tells me that only he (and people like him) can do this sort of thing and he won’t and the more amateurish people who do it for free for fun?
I think that the “free for fun” guys have a leg up because they actually provide insight beyond “I’m not going to tell you the things that I know.” I mean, even taking into account that they don’t have half the expertise that you have.Report
That’s right. You’re pretty much stuck unless you want to provide the factual information that any competent professional would need to spend dozens of billable hours to find out in order to give responsible advice.
Whether you get any actual “insight” from people who know even less information and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it is questionable.
Reality sucks.Report
Well, I have good news: They released the questions.
As it turns out, some of the questions may have violated district policy.
Man, if you read the story about the threat of the lawsuit, the school district really threw the company under the bus.
And after the threat of the lawsuit became credible enough, I guess, legal changed its mind.
I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to come to conclusions about that (though I’m sure that some lawyers would explain that you do).Report
Anyone can come to any “conclusions” they want. Sound legal advice is a different matter.Report
Oh, maybe that was the problem. You thought I was asking you for legal advice and I was just asking you, as a professional, your take on legal saying what it did before it changed its mind.
It’s all good. (I’m pretty sure that a layperson’s take that “they tried to stonewall and then realized that that was a losing strategy and it’d be better to just rip off the band-aid” is accurate enough for a comment section on a discussion blog.)Report
I’ve just gone through all of the questions.
They’re mostly (like, almost *ALL* of them) perfectly innocuous. Dull, almost.
There was a question about “do you consider yourself male, female, transgender, non-binary?” for the 3rd-5th graders that I could see the Tucker Carlson people getting upset about… a handful of questions where people who are very much against the whole “woke” thing might roll their eyes (like the ones asking about which Latinx authors they’ve been assigned) but pretty much every question was either “perfectly appropriate” or “yeah, it ain’t 1980 anymore” but nothing was downright *BAD*.
Heck. Go through them yourself.
But the number one thing that the teacher screwed up? “Don’t tell your parents about this.”
Of freakin’ *COURSE* parents would freak out about that.
And then, when pressed, the school rolled over onto Equity Alliance Minnesota and EAM received the absolutely *HORRIBLE* legal advice to “don’t show anybody the questions”. (Note: This is not professional legal advice. Please do not make wagers based upon this advice.)
And this all could have been avoided if the teacher had not been stupid and if EAM said “We are proud of our questions!” instead of “under the advice of our legal department, we will not show the parents the questions we asked the students”.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.Report
So…
– The questions were fairly banal.
– The school board fought to have the questions released but given resistance from an OUTSIDE COMPANY, it took a while to make that happen.
– We still don’t know exactly what the teacher said; we merely have one child’s report of what the teacher said; further, that child reports what was said to another child: Did she hear it directly? Or hear it from the other child? Was it said outloud to the whole class? Or did she overhear something the teacher said quietly to another student and possibly mishear it?
– We don’t know why the company resisted releasing their questions but, ultimately, they did.
It also feels important to look at the timeline of events:
– Survey was conducted in December of 2020
– The girl addressed the school board the following year (she refers to having been in 4th grade last year; video was posted in July 2021)
– The school board responded less than a week later (video posted 7/21; school board response 7/27)
– Questions were released on about 3 weeks later (8/14)
So, from accusation to release of the questions was approximately 4 weeks, which was slowed down by the legal resistance of an outside company beyond the school board’s control.
This isn’t exactly the smoking gun you think it is. Further, ALL THIS HAPPENED OVER A YEAR AGO! You’re posting like this is happening in real time and you’re giving us live updates. Either you didn’t do your own homework to see how it was resolved or you intentionally tried to paint the school in the worst light possible.
So, this isn’t what you claim it is. The school board did what you thought they ought to do. Perhaps you think they should fire the teacher and maybe they did take disciplinary action against them but that would have likely involved a whole investigation and, if the teachers are unionized, involvement with the union and probably the whole thing is confidential.
And, again, if he DID say that, he SHOULD be disciplined.
Did the parents ever approach the teacher about the survey? The principal? The school board prior to 7 months later? Do those questions matter to you at all?Report
“It’s the “holy cow, this is bad” stuff that gets the ol’ “HOW DARE YOU” treatment that has me conclude “oh, yeah… this is going to result in laws.””
Where is the “HOW DARE YOU?” in this story?
It sounds more like, once the schools were given notice of the complaint and an opportunity to respond, they fought hard on behalf of shedding light on what transpired to give everyone a clearer picture.
And again all of this information was available [check notes] 6 months ago. So we had the whole story throughout this conversation. You just focused on the parts that painted the school it the worst possible light.Report
You must be new around here.:-)
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I don’t do hot legal takes on demand.Report
We still don’t know exactly what the teacher said; we merely have one child’s report of what the teacher said; further, that child reports what was said to another child: Did she hear it directly? Or hear it from the other child? Was it said outloud to the whole class? Or did she overhear something the teacher said quietly to another student and possibly mishear it?
Here’s what it says in the one story:
We also know that Superintendent Jeffery Ridlehoover admitted to the violation of policy.
When it comes to “what happened? What investigations were done? What was found?”, I can’t find anything.
I’ve got this op-ed that mentions stuff like:
Was there an investigation?
I don’t know!
I just know that the Superintended admitted that the policy was not followed. That’s it.
Did the parents ever approach the teacher about the survey? The principal? The school board prior to 7 months later? Do those questions matter to you at all?
They do! And I can’t find answers to them!
Is that a problem at all? Should we just assume that everything is above board because we can’t prove anything beyond he said/she said?Report
We have scant details on a situation and you think it justifies… anything.
Often times during open comment periods at BOE meetings, the Board does not respond. This is often intentional so as to allow as many comments from the public as possible.
In many places, the BOE can’t get involved in matters regarding individual teachers. Those need to be handled at the school level.
Like, you want to jump to step 14 but you haven’t even looked at steps 1-13 in part because you don’t actually understand how any of this works.
We have no idea what happened in that classroom. What we do know is that when parents wanted to know what questions were on the survey, the school board fought to provide them. How is that evidence of Schools Behaving Badly?Report
So what exactly is the issue?
What the teacher said? We don’t know what they said. But I do hope once this was brought to their administrator’s attention, there was at least a talk about never saying that or anything close to that. I agree 100% teachers should never say that to students.
Is it how the school board responded in the meeting? As stated, they likely couldn’t do more.
Is it how they responded after w/r/t to the teacher? Again, BOEs generally can’t get involved in such matters and may not even be able to direct principals or others to.
Is it what happened with the survey? Well, they threatened to sue to release the questions.
Is it that the survey ever existed? Well, as you said, it was pretty banal in the end.
So, what problem are we looking to solve here?Report
My original take on this was simply that grooming consists of something like:
1. Starting with normal, if intimate, conversations and discussions
2. Telling the person “don’t talk to your parents about this”
3. Moving to the bad stuff
And so *ANY* situation where #2 comes up is bad and needs to be responded to the way that you originally responded to the report of a teacher saying such a thing.
That’s it.
Not “the teacher needs to be fired”. Not “the district needs to spend a lot of money”.
It needs to be responded to as if it were something very, very bad.
Indeed, if a teacher were even suspected of saying such a thing, that this be reported.
Maybe it’d call for a meeting in which the teacher had the district’s policies re-explained at length.
We have no idea what happened in that classroom. What we do know is that when parents wanted to know what questions were on the survey, the school board fought to provide them. How is that evidence of Schools Behaving Badly?
It’s not. My criticism isn’t of the schools.
It’s of the knee-jerk response to hearing that something like this happened with stuff like “well, let’s come up with hypotheticals for why a teacher and student might keep a secret from parents”.
This response:
I thought that your response, as a professional, was *PERFECT* and *IDEAL*.
What should the school have done instead? If they talked to the teacher and read her the riot act, maybe that was officially supposed to be confidential according to the union rules or something. Like, to the point where they can’t even say “we investigated this”.
As it is, they merely admitted that they didn’t follow the policy.
What do I want from the *SCHOOL*? Maybe, legally, they can’t give us anything more than what they’ve given.
But, just from looking at the situation with the information that I have, we’ve got a situation where the school did not follow policy, a teacher may have said something that brought that the school wasn’t following its own policy to light, a student DEFINITELY brought that the school wasn’t following its own policy to light, and a buncha stuff followed that.
What do I want to have happened?
People to say “if whatever happened was even in the ballpark of what is alleged, it was bad” rather than “well, there are hypotheticals where it was good, actually… and I’m not going to take the admissions from the Superintendent into account when I play with the hypotheticals”.Report
Heck, even your response of “maybe the teacher didn’t do this REALLY REALLY BAD THING! WE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED AND MAYBE IT WASN’T BAD!” is *MILES* better than “even if it happened, is that so bad?”Report
“…with the information that I have…”
Well, you have very little information.
Also, did the “policy violation” apply to the teacher’s alleged statement? Or the survey itself?
I’m fully on board with the, “Don’t say anything even close to this ever and if we hear that you did, we’re talking.” But we have no reason to think A) this is happening with any frequency and B) that it isn’t being handled exactly as it ought to be if/when it does happen (or anything close to it happens).Report
Also, did the “policy violation” apply to the teacher’s alleged statement? Or the survey itself?
The Superintendent used the passive voice.
The exact policy perhaps was not followed.
That’s the admission.
There is no admission of the teacher, whether one said something, whether one didn’t say something, whether it was addressed, or what.
Maybe the union prevented such statements.
You know, in a country with a bajillion schools, we’re going to have a teacher here or there make a mistake. An honest mistake! A mistake that anybody could make.
Just having “THIS IS A MISTAKE THAT SHOULD NOT BE MADE” as a baseline instead of “hey, don’t you make mistakes at your job sometimes?” is the ask.
As for B, the subculture that immediately runs to “let’s come up with hypotheticals where the teacher and student could keep secrets” is one that makes me worry about whether it isn’t being handled exactly as it ought to be if/when it does happen.
“That’s not proof of anything, though.”
“No. It’s not.”Report
Well, again, I’m fully on record that statements like “Don’t tell your parents this” should not be made.
And I’m not seeing anyone running to hypotheticals about teachers and students “keeping secrets.”
I have seen folks address situation that may be adjacent to teachers and students “keeping secrets” and some of those situations are necessary to address.
For instance, if a student gives me reason to think they’re being abused and I’m required to file a report per my legal status as a mandated reporter, I am *legally barred* from telling the parents I have done that.
Is that a teacher and a student keeping secrets? I mean, sure, if you want to see it that way. But then you’re going to have to deal with all the state laws and the requirements they have for mandated reporting. And if you have an issue with mandated reporting… well, then you’re going to have to figure out another way to catch all of the cases of child abuse that are identified via the system (I believe upwards of 40% of total cases).
And we’ve already shifted from “Should teachers tell students, ‘Don’t tell your parents I taught you this?'”
-to-
Is it ever okay for a teacher to keep private something a child told them?
And we’re acting like those are the same thing.
The first is a hard no.
The second is an “It depends.”
And if you treat the answer to the second question like its an answer to the first question, you’re being disingenous.Report
And I’m not seeing anyone running to hypotheticals about teachers and students “keeping secrets.”
Oh, that happened here.
And if you treat the answer to the second question like its an answer to the first question, you’re being disingenous.
But if we’re discussing the first question and the immediate response is *NOT* “Hard No” but “well, let’s talk about something else entirely…”, that’s going to undercut the first question.
Which ought to have a “Hard No”. Not a “let’s change the subject”.Report
We’re in agreement here. I believe there are already sufficient mechanisms in place. Also agree on the need to investigate things small children say before going into total meltdown panic.
My son says all kinds of stuff and his perceptions of what is and is not notable from his day at school are always interesting and sometimes hilarious. We still talk about a day when we knew the reptile man visited his school. We asked him about it on the drive home and he acted like he didn’t even know what we were talking about. Later the app thing send out a bunch of pictures and the first one is him in front of the entire school petting a giant boa constrictor.Report
Now imagine if you weren’t a sane person and your kid came home and said, “Today I got to pet a strange man’s snake at school! IT WAS SO BIG DADDY!”
:-pReport
OMG. Hilarious. i’ll tell my friend Karen she didn’t know she was gay like 6. She thought she did but apparently she was wrong about that. This will really help her out. Thx.
Gonna go google Sappho and see what all the fuss is about.Report
There’s at least one troll hanging around with the “lesbians are totally trained not born” thing. He read it in a sociology book. He promises.
It really is the 90s again. Only stupider and even more openly bigoted, without the excuse of ignorance anymore.Report
Thank You, Em. Great article.Report
First, Em is right, words do have meaning; and the meaning being deployed here is both disingenuous and vicious.
That said, my sh*tpost comments amount to this:
* Rules 5, 6, 10, 11 and 12. The game is iterated.
* I find it genuinely interesting to hear about the importance of words from the ‘words change meaning’ crew. Y’all an’t anything if not nominalists
* If it helps, think of it as ‘Systemic’.
* Systemic Sexualization.
* But, See Rule #12… make it personal – systemic institutions don’t care.
It truly is a sad commentary on the state of the Republican party and American Politics that Alinsky has emerged the dominant paradigm.Report
I agree with the sentiment. The fact that ‘grooming’ is even in the common parlance the way it has become is a sign of how far this is gone. Next week let’s do the assertion that the SAT is white supremacy. Maybe by the next cycle we will be back to some sort of appreciation of measured speech and some minimal appreciation for clarity of language, even if just as an ideal.
Oh who am I kidding? Of course we won’t.Report
Precisely.Report
The activists who oppose the legislation pulled a brilliant maneuver by effectively renaming and reframing it “Don’t Say Gay”. The fact that isn’t in the legislation is beside the point. It had the desired effect of galvanizing supporters around the rallying cry while annoying the hell out of the opposition because it’s not really accurate. It’s a mischaracterization of the bill.
The democrats have always have been better at naming things. Always.
So, now the bill’s supporters start using the term “groomers” which also is a mischaracterization but achieves *their* political objectives. And without any sense of irony, the activists and their supporters are upset.
Seems turnabout is fair play in this game.Report
Do you believe he bill, as signed, allows teachers in Florida to honestly answer questions form kids about homosexual persons, transgender persons and non-binary persons in a factual and supportive tot he kids way?Report
You left out “kindergarteners to third-graders”. Don’t forget it’s kindergarteners to third-graders. Like, one to four years younger than Bart Simpson.Report
My second grader asks questions regularly. Kids notice differences. Kids notice two women in a family photo on a desk. Kids notice who has what plumbing and who presents what way based on clothes and hair.Report
Incorrect. The bills wording says “kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Which means that it’s worded vaguely enough to allow the lawsuit enforcement mechanism to be used against teachers in all grades.Report
3rd graders will ask. That’s 9-10 year olds. There are girls who start growing breasts and get their periods in 3rd grade It’s not common, but it’s not completely uncommon either (and it is definitely when some start hanging posters of crushes on their walls – a fact that hit me in the face when my daughter was invited to a Jonas Brothers themed birthday party back in 3rd grade). And they are generally in grade schools that include 4th-6th graders who are definitely entering puberty and starting to date or at least talk about crushes or having boyfriends and girlfriends.
Even if there is a rare k-3 only school out there, a lot of those kids will have older siblings in those grades or beyond.Report
I think K through 3 teachers are more than capable of fostering an inclusive, safe environment in the classroom without diving into specifics of sexuality, gender, etc. Any questions from small children unsolicited (and without the curriculum I’ve seen) should not be that frequent nor very hard to handle.
We are all different. Be kind to one another.Report
A great many teachers now believe this bill – which is so vague and poorly worded – means they can no longer do what you are suggesting. That is a huge problem, never mind the political tag lines.Report
To echo Phillip, having an enforcement mechanism of private citizens suing the district is just asking for tons of baseless lawsuits that districts have to spend money & time defending against.
Kinda hard to be kind to one another when the law is written to allow folks to be otherwise.Report
The enforcement mechanism is dumb. It’s a bad law. I fully anticipate a bunch of idiotic lawsuits.
What’s also dumb is believing public school teachers should have any involvement in counseling 1st graders on sex and sexuality, naturally sans parental involvement. They’re there to teach children to read and add, not enact some melodrama.Report
Exactly.
(As and aside, I find that I agree with your comments more than anyone else on OT and you should probably be concerned about this.)Report
That’s a bad sign. You should try to get a good night’s sleep and if symptoms continue call your doctor right away.Report
But are they?
What is the limit of what teachers having been talking to students about? Do you honestly believe that they are talking about sex & sexuality, as opposed to just explaining that some kids have a Mom or a Dad, some kids have a Mom & a Dad, and some kids have two Moms or two Dads?
ETA If teachers were talking about sex & sexuality to students that young, then the proper course of action is to re-work the state standards and train teachers to the new standards. They does not generally require a new law, unless political concerns are trying to over-ride accepted best practices.Report
What, exactly, is a teacher supposed to do if he catches a little boy trying to put his P into a girl’s V? Like, a four year old kid?
[Not a hypothetical. Actual Person was named Leonard Bernstein. His mom chased him with a broom. But that was in the 1950’s.]Report
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?Report
That there are indeed situations where sex and sexuality may come up in a preschool teacher’s purview.
That it may actually be appropriate for a teacher of that age to tell a child that it is not appropriate to touch some parts of their body in public, even if it feels really good.
You seemed to be talking from the perspective that it was never appropriate to discuss sex/sexuality with kids that young. I thought of a reasonable (aka it happened) situation where they might want to discuss sexuality.Report
You can handle that kind of situation without discussing sexuality. From a simple “it’s not appropriate to expose our genitalia to other students in public settings” to discussions about bodily autonomy, etc.
No real need to get into sexuality specifically.Report
Honestly? I have no idea. Like everyone else here I see what I see in the news and blogs and wherever else. There does seem to be a very vocal group of people out there who believe they need to evangelize their theories of sex and gender to children. How widespread are they in meat space, I do not know.
I do know that I think the public school mandate for these kinds of topics for the age group in question is extremely narrow, and certainly none of it should be hidden from parents (and I mean that for all teachers, not just gay teachers). Not so narrow that someone should get sued for it being generally known that they are gay, nor should gay people have to actively hide the mundane details of their lives heterosexual people do not have to hide.
Generally I would be comfortable handling these situations the way you describe in your last paragraph. Teachers who go off the reservation get punished and removed. The one thing that gives me pause is when I see some of the unhinged reactions to these positions, which I find to he pretty moderate and uncontroversial.Report
Set aside the hyperbolic rhetoric and all and from what I’ve seen, the law is poorly written and probably void for vagueness (that’s what it’s called, right?). Or it should be. If the courts don’t strike it down, they are going to have a mess on their hands trying to sort out what constitutes a violation.
But in the end, it’s right wing virtue signaling as legislation. It’s right up there with banning plastic straws because of a video of a turtle with a straw up it’s nose.Report
Vice signaling, but otherwise I agree.Report
I’m sure they consider it virtue signaling.
It’s for the children, yo.Report
I oppose the law too. But I am also disturbed by the implications of some of the things daid by others who also oppose the law.Report
My general rule: If a law is proposed/passed that has a rationale for it’s existence based upon situations so numerous you can count them all without taking off your shoes, or situations where it is necessary to stretch the reality of issue to the point that you risk damaging the time-space continuum, it’s reasonable to assume that the proponents have an ulterior motive for the law.Report
I reiterate what I said on the other post. I think some really bad ideas metastasized on the left during the Trump years. Conservatives are using that to cynically try to undo progress on gay rights/tolerance. Like, I’m not an idiot who is going to sit here and argue DeSantis et al are doing this out of a real concern about children being molested in schools. They aren’t, and that’s obvious to me.
But, not being an idiot, I’m also not thrilled about the prospect of some blue-haired teacher who changed pronouns after the divorce bringing the latest DEI psychobabble into elementary schools. I like to think such things are really just the fever dreams of the far right, and competent administrators put a stop to it whenever it comes up. But then I see comments like those below about how the Little Mermaid really is all about sex and gender. No doubt the children must be instructed on that perspective. And so, again, I pause.Report
I think you misunderstood the point regarding the little mermaid. It’s not that the mermaid is all about sex and gender. It’s that if the discussions grade school teachers are having regarding LGBTQ are inappropriate with regards to sex and gender, then so is the little mermaid.
I get your point about a teacher taking things too far, but absent significant evidence of it happening and administration not taking action to correct it, it’s pretty much a nothingburger.Report
Well I very much hope you’re right. Because I kind of hate this.
Though, in its full context, I don’t think I misunderstood the other comment at all.Report
“Though, in its full context, I don’t think I misunderstood the other comment at all.”
You absolutely did 100% not get it, which is hilarious as it was a response to you whining about not wanting teachers to teach “sex and sexuality” at that age.
I was literally pointing out one common way, a way you’d know and undoubtedly have no issues with, teachers DO teach sex and sexuality in an age appropriate way to children that age, and also commenting that you don’t even notice it when it’s cis and straight.
And further, illustrating how stupid the law in question is. Which you ALSO didn’t get.Report
I think stuff commenters post in OT comments is probably a very bad proxy for what anyone, even OT commenters, thinks is appropriate material to teach to grade schoolers.Report
“I think stuff commenters post in OT comments is probably a very bad proxy for what anyone, even OT commenters, thinks is appropriate material to teach to grade schoolers.”
As best I can tell, the general view is that grade schoolers learn “Some families have a mommy and a daddy, some have two mommies or two daddies, some just have a mommy OR a daddy, some have a grandmother or grandfather” which implies that some boys like girls, some girls like boys, some boys like boys, etc, etc- – all of which is absolutely true and sort of bedrock socialization since kids that age are aware of the concept of “marriage” and know that adults tend to partner with people and have kids.
So that’s what one side thinks.
The other side apparently thinks we teach 8 year olds to have gay sex with each other, or 400 different pronouns, or have a gay trans grooming hour.
Strangely, the LATTER seem to be writing stupid laws about it and insisting it’s true, and the proof is — why would they write the laws if it wasn’t?Report
Man… if only we had an early childhood or elementary school teacher here…
Sigh…
I have an undergraduate and masters degree in education. My girlfriend is a teacher. My mom is a teacher. My stepfather is a college professor. I’ve been working with children in some capacity since I was 12. If I went through my phone and just looked at friends (not colleagues) I’ve texted with in the past 6 months, at least a dozen other teachers would pop up. I’ve gone to workshops (plural!) on how to handle topics of sex and gender with children. I’ve sat through WEEKS of collective DEI training.
But, yea, let’s base our understanding of what teachers do on a Fox News Story based on a 50 second clip of a 9-year-old sharing what they think happened at school 6 months prior.Report
You are probably right.Report
“But, not being an idiot, I’m also not thrilled about the prospect of some blue-haired teacher who changed pronouns after the divorce bringing the latest DEI psychobabble into elementary schools.”
I want to highlight that.
I mean you combined the “bitter old divorced woman” trope, the transphobic “changing pronouns”, the “teaching kids sex” stuff that was a fun slur about the Clintons in the 90s stuff, handwaving away gender and sexual orientation as “DEI psychobabble”….
And best of all? You literally invented it all.
I’ve seen several people try to get you to actually provide an example of anyone doing this, or any actual school curriculum, any real examples at all.
And what do you do? “blue-haired teacher who changed pronouns after the divorce”
Bravo. That could have fallen from Donald Trump’s lips. Like three layers of bigotry and completely imaginary. You must be proud.Report
Interesting you assumed I meant a woman. I mean, can you point to where I specified that?
I guess that’s your own internalized misogyny. I never would have thought someone with views as progressive as yours would express such hatred. You should educate yourself on just how pernicious these sorts of things can be. Maybe you should google some examples for yourself to study up on.Report
Yeah, nobody’s buying dude.
We all saw exactly what you said and know exactly what you meant.Report
I’m sorry I didn’t see this. You want a single example of DEI psychobabble in schools?
Here it is. A single example.
Time to switch to “nutpicking”.Report
From the Daily Mail?
I know I know I know, but one of the problems here is that a lot of the, “Oh no teachers bad parents are right to not trust them!” are being reported to us by outlets that have a well-deserved reputation for being garbageReport
It was also all over Fox News.
I suppose we could argue that the “real” news outlets did everybody a solid by pretending that this didn’t happen at all…Report
I had not planned to re-engage on this thread (of course Andrew Sullivan’s essay this week links to a bunch of relevant stories and teaching materials, obviously he is easy enough to find for those interested) but this gets at why I am not bothering with ‘battle of the links’ on this subject. Anyone can google reports of whatever DEI or associated stuff run amok and we can accept or reject it based on our reading and priors. We’ve been doing it for over 2 years and really more like 6. It isn’t breaking any new ground at this point.
I’m also definitely not doing it in a situation where I’m being asked to prove the existence of what I thought was an obvious caricature that I clearly said I would like to think only exists in far right fever dreams. I assume we all have our own rules of participation here. I probably got a little trollish yesterday but bottom line is I usually don’t see a point in replying to what seems to be free association, particularly when it goes to such a predictable place.Report
All that is necessary for the triumph of crazy liberals is for sane liberals to say nothing.Report
Right but if you knew this was going to be the response, why not just choose a better source?
Like here’s the thing: DEI nonsense of some sort finding its way into schools?
Pretty plausible.
Being presented with an example of something pretty plausible coming from a barrel-scraping outfit like the Mail?
Pretty weird.Report
Eh, I figured that the fact that The Mail had links to footage of the hearing where the girl said what happened and to Fox News covering the girl talking about what happened was sufficient.
Moving from “there isn’t a single example” to “yes, but, your example is in a bad media source” is good enough for me.
Because my point is not “DEI IS BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS AND THAT’S BAD” but something closer to “democracy is what it is”.Report
And my point is around communication, FWIW.
I think DEI is mostly harmless. I also think that, as long as they’re assembled without weird RIghtward ulterior motives, efforts to keep DEI out of school out are also mostly harmless.Report
Well, there is this weird thing going on where EVERY SINGLE BATTLE MUST BE WON and that means that when a rogue teacher out there does something stupid and indefensible, it becomes something that MUST BE DEFENDED.
I’m of the opinion that something like “a teacher saying ‘don’t tell your parents about this'” is easily condemned. “That teacher should be fired!” or the like.
The contradictions getting heightened ain’t gonna work out in DEI’s favor this time around, I don’t think.Report
people gotta learn when to Rightside norm and when to Correctness norm smdhReport
IMHO, there is a marked difference between “A is a bad thing” and “A is a neutral thing that can be presented to children in bad ways”.
DEI/CRT is not necessarily a bad thing to tackle in school. There are, however, some really bad ways to tackle it in school.
People who do not like DEI/CRT are not going to differentiate between A being bad and A being presented badly. People who support DEI/CRT need to not let the opposition control the narrative and confuse the distinctions. Dismissing things like this, rather than condemning them is giving up control of the narrative to the opposition.Report
Here’s a new account on the twitters that has a lot of outliers on it.
Social media, man.
Report
Oh!
I hadn’t seen this!
Ok, now I see why the Republicans had no choice but to attack gays and trans people;
and prosecute parents for affirming their children;
and fire any teacher who wears a pride bracelet;
and ban books by LGBTQ authors;
and call everyone who works for Disney a pedophile;
and all Democrats pedophiles;
and anyone who identifies ad trans psychologically unhealthy.
It all makes sense now. I mean, what else could the Republicans have done in the face of this aggression, this flagrant abuse of children?
Nope, I can’t think of any other options.
Can anyone here think of any possible alternatives to the bills they passed?
I’m stumped!Report
Whether or not the guy’s policy is a good one (who can judge?), the policy of “TALK ABOUT IT ON SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!” strikes me as being a bad policy.
For one thing, it puts dead-enders in the position of attacking anybody who is uncomfortable with this sort of thing.Report
What’s good for the individual is not good for the movement Jay. This dude gets adulation and social credit from his social media peers. If he draws heat from the right, well that just heightens his own social credit from his own side. Sure it might set back the larger movement but it helps him and that’s what he cares about.
This is, however, universal in all directions, movements and ideologies which is why I have to join the others in (affectionately) saying that your forays to the social media well (and fishin twitter especially) are pretty much bereft in explanatory content and don’t advance the conversation at all.Report
The explanatory content is mostly “it’s speeding up” or “it’s getting faster”.
Advancing the conversation? The conversation is going to advance the way the last hundred did. What is interesting is seeing the “that’s not happening” evolve into “that’s an outlier” evolve into “people who are opposed to this are bad” in real time.
And it’s getting faster.Report
Your logic fails even by your own standards.
You argue that these examples explain the Republican policies;
They don’t.
Your conclusion ( that the Republican bills are a backlash to overreach or bad behavior) is contradicted by Republicans themselves (including right here on this very thread- have read them?)
Further, your starting assumption is indefensible and vile- that even granting bad behavior, a backlash is inevitable and justified.
It isn’t, either one.
As I said, your argument is old, dating back a century, to the antisemitism of the 1920s where bad behavior by European bankers was used to explain the backlash against Jews.
This is how I learned to spot your argument, and understand why it is absurd- like I said, many people like Theodore Geisel have trampled this nonsense before.Report
See? This is exactly what I’m talking about.
As for whether the backlash is “justified” (whatever the hell that means), it would have to depend on whatever the initial act was.
As for “inevitable”, I think that only someone unfamiliar with reality would say that a backlash wouldn’t be inevitable.Report
Isn’t that “reality”, Republican intolerance of gays?
And isnt it “inevitable” only because they refuse to entertain any other option such as welcoming gay people as equals?Report
I’m not 100% sure that spinning this as “welcoming gay people as equals” is in either the democrats’ best interests nor gay peoples’.
But we’ll find out, I guess.Report
I’m just saying that you are trying to drape a moral postulate (moral opposition with gays and trans people) in the robes of a logical argument (inevitable backlash) and it fails.
There’s nothing about Republican behavior that can be explained as anything other than discomfort and moral opposition to homosexuality and transgender.
Which is a choice, they have freely made.Report
I’ve wondered about that. Yes, there is an element of “priests/politicians needing an other/enemy” to this.
But this “other phobia” seems so common worldwide that it’s part of the human condition.
Not everyone and it manifests differently, but it’s an instinct. Presumably left over from our tribes-at-war evolutionary heritage.Report
Politicians are in favor of anything that gets them into office. Thus Obama being opposed to gay marriage up until the point where he was in favor of it.
The reality is society is shifting to welcome gays. Gay tolerance as a percentage is basically a linear line up.
Political opposition to this is quietly being dropped. If you look at the entire nation it’s possible to find exceptions, but they’re exceptions.
Thus the lack of serious efforts in Congress trying to legislatively overturn the Supremes when 99% of them voted to support traditional marriage just a few years earlier.
The issue is so one sided that Team Blue joyfully holds up exceptions in Team Red. The exceptions will continue to get smaller and fewer.Report
The reason we are seeing this rash of bigotry is BECAUSE society is moving towards acceptance.
The bigots know they are losing the next generation and so are desperately clawing to whatever power they can to resist.
But we shouldn’t take comfort from this. Minority rule is a very real phenomenon all throughout history, where a small minority exercises power over the majority.
I anticipate that Republicans will hold one or both branches of government next year, and possibly the Presidency in 2024.
In that event, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them nationalize their bigotry and force it on blue states.Report
This is not a “rash” by earlier standards.
This sort of thing was considered so normal that Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act (only 26 years ago) was overwhelmingly passed. 342-67 and 85-14.
What we’re seeing is some politicians out of step with the rest of the nation, or perhaps virtue signaling to those who are out of step.
That’s much harder nationally because national politicians need to worry about national audiences.
You’re right about the future. In a few decades this sort of thing will be viewed as unthinkable everywhere.
Team Blue really needs to run against past injustices and largely settled issues (or Na.zis) because so many of their core ideas have been shown to be so nasty to the economy in RL.
The votes don’t exist for a 2nd Defense of Marriage act.Report
“They’re there to teach children to read and add, not enact some melodrama.”
Reading The Little Mermaid teaches gender and sexual orientation..
So you object to any reading assignment that mentions boys, girls, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, princes, princesses, dating, etc?
You object to any books that refer to “mommies” and “daddies” and “brothers” and “sisters”?
All gendered, all implicitly teaching that boys and girls get together to make babies.
All those are violations of the law, as written, which means any one can sue over ANY of that. And even if a Court decides to ignore the law in favor of “You know we meant just gay stuff, but we can’t say that because then it’s blatantly unconstitutional, but we’ll do it anyways” the schools can’t recover fees.
Also, you have a very weird idea of what school is for — we use it to teach *culture* and *society* and, well, gay people exist. Students might have gay parents or older siblings, so failure to mention sometimes a kid has two daddies would be as weird as never mentioning the existence of Alabama.Report
I object to all Hans Christian Anderson stories on general principle — that’s teaching religion in school, and teaching that “little children should suffer before they go to heaven.”
Seriously.
I disbelieve in that rhetoric, and it’s not my religion anyway.
(I have much less against the 3 Musketeers, although that’s more blatantly about religion).
One can teach about parents without mentioning “mommy” and “daddy”. I think, at least. “Some parents are mommies, and some parents are daddies.”
I’d be okay with a Kindergarden to third grade ban on discussing dating. In my school, a kid was bullied on the playground by all the girls wanting to kiss him (being a first grader, this was considerably more traumatic than if he’d been older).
It’s not like you can’t teach reading without getting into these social relationships.Report
I am sure this essay got an A in Gender Studies 101: Clams in Disney Cartoons. I have no idea how it is relevant to my comment.Report
“I am sure this essay got an A in Gender Studies 101: Clams in Disney Cartoons. I have no idea how it is relevant to my comment.”
A bit snide for someone who can’t follow simple logic, but let us break it down.
You said, and I quote, “What’s also dumb is believing public school teachers should have any involvement in counseling 1st graders on sex and sexuality, naturally sans parental involvement.”
What do you think teaching kids that Princesses want to marry Princes is? That’s sex and sexuality, my dude. That’s a boy and a girl (gender!) wanting to marry (sexual orientation). Often in these stories they have kids (sexuality again!).
You don’t get to pretends “cis” and “straight” aren’t “gender” and “sexual orientation”, or that we don’t slather young children in stories about boys and girls, men and women, falling in love, having kids. Of families with straight parents with kids.
For some reason you don’t want to see this, but that’s hardly my fault. I didn’t write the stupid law, and unlike some people I’m quite capable of (1) actually realizing how gender and sexual orientation is taught to small children (solely in the cultural sense of “what makes a family”, and unfortunately for whatever the heck you’re upset with, that does include families with gay parents) and (2) later in life, people often marry someone (and again, despite this causing you almost physical discomfort, this DOES include gay people).
And the law, as written, is so stupid as make showing or reading the Little Mermaid a violation as it teachers both gender AND sexual orientation to small children.
Something you’re very, very, VERY upset about despite not being able to point to it, yet when I point out a very obvious example you got all shirty.
It’s not difficult logic. I don’t see why you can’t follow it. If you don’t want teachers teaching “sex and sexuality” then obviously you don’t want them teaching anything involving men, women, boys, girls, dating, families, etc. THEY ALL INVOLVE SEX AND SEXUALITY — that’s literally how it’s taught in an “age appropriate way”.
Or are you admitting you only want cishet sex and sexuality taught?Report
OK I have to say this is the third time I’ve seen this interaction happen in one of these threads in as many days, and at the risk of going all hall-monitor on everybody, it’s a dumb waste of time.
InMD has been quite clear what he thinks of the FL Don’t Say Gay law, and what he thinks is that it’s terrible:
He then stated some other concerns. But he thinks the law is bad. I don’t think he could have been more clear about this.Report
I very much appreciate the back-up.
To be fair I am not particularly worried about it though. This is the price of trying to stick with your principles in a friendly-ish but robust debate.
I actually find it kind of funny. I started legit debating politics online during Obama’s first term at a now long defunct message board associated with a local paper. It’s crazy to think about it but there I was deemed among the left of the left, arguing that gay marriage needed to be the law of the land and the biggest problem with the ACA was that it didn’t go far enough (things I still of course believe). Oh how times change.Report
Maybe being leftward is why you’re aren’t seeing that early grades already teach sexuality and gender identity simply through stories that normalize _one_ acceptable type of those. I mean, people on the right seem to recognize that Disney stories do exactly that, which is why so many of them wanted Frozen banned – it was teaching girls to be lesbians dontcha know!
Or maybe you’re just younger or from a more progressive part of the country, Back when I was a kid in the ‘buckle on the bible belt’ in the 70s it was pretty explicit: girls played with dolls and wanted to be mommies or princesses or ballerinas; boys played with trucks and wanted to be cowboys or soldiers or astronauts. A girl or – heaven forbid! – boy who wanted do or be anything associated with the opposite sex was _unnatural_. That was pretty much out right taught and reinforced by teachers guiding kids who joined the ‘wrong’ group back to where they ‘belonged’.
No one mentioned sex or sexuality of course, but the message of who and what you were supposed to be based on sex was not at all subtle.Report
No, not really. I went to Catholic school in the 80s and 90s. I understand planet Protestant is a bit different in terms of social paranoia but my upbringing was relatively conservative, in a small c sort of way. The upwardly mobile branch became Republicans in the 70s as I understand was the style at the time and the rest were Reagan Democrat types. I’m in a blue state and different flavors of Democrats have always been in charge but I certainly would not call the specific area I grew up in socially progressive at least not at the time.
I’d take it back to your first paragraph about conservatives thinking Frozen teaches kids to be lesbians. That’s paranoid nonsense. I’m all for saying no to paranoid nonsense. What I’m not for is the intellectually lazy, Seinfeld style deconstruction of politics and society thing where we say ‘didn’t you ever notice that everything really is just kind of paranoid nonsense anyway?’ Which then leads to ‘since it’s all just paranoid nonsense anyway we need to make sure it’s our paranoid nonsense that wins!’ Suddenly instead of making fun of the rubes with their ‘intelligent design’ theories we’re entertaining same order garbage and insisting it is taught in schools.Report
The 1/6 insurrection was treason. Those who took part in it are traitors. Those who support them are defending treason. Those who interfere with the investigation of who planned and supported it are aiding traitors.
This isn’t hard, and I don’t know why we hesitate to use the right words.Report
Because then people would actually be accountable. And we don’t want that do we?Report
Dissent will be crushed!
Off with their heads!
Am I doing it right?Report
Just shut up and wear the wristband.Report
Wear the ribbon!Report
Traitors will be prosecuted, I hope. Is that a problem?Report
I really wish I knew why you’re bringing up 1/6 here in relation to the topic, but i do not.Report
I’m contrasting the enthusiastic use of the dishonest term “groomer” with the reluctance to use the accurate term “traitor”.Report
Hmm… I didn’t think the word applied because I thought you needed to betray your country for a different country. Dictionary says trying to overthrow the gov counts.Report
The bill says it prohibits “classroom discussion of sexual orientation in certain grades” right there in the text, lines 21-23.
So yeah, I think “Don’t Say Gay” is pretty damn fair.
And, “If you tell the truth about our bill, we’ll lie about you!” is not a persuasive argument.Report
“You say ‘potato’, I say you’re a child molester.”Report
Honestly, if I heard the word “groomer” 2 weeks ago I would have thought it was in reference to the people who work with horses.Report
Me too, and now it’s everywhere. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.Report
Too True!
Remember when the Commander In Chief was the only one allowed to command our military forces? The supreme guy in charge? (Like, you know, constitutionally speaking?)
Now everyone knows that the 23rd amendment wasn’t invoked on 1/6, and somehow it’s the rabble that did something wrong. Not a palace coup, despite media boasting about Trump no longer being allowed the nuclear codes afterwards.
Trump never put armed guards on political prisoners, confined to house arrest.Report
The DC electors’ votes were counted along with the rest.Report
I recommend a light vinaigrette personally for helpings of word salad responses.Report
The bill is incredibly vague. The Democrats tried to introduce legislation to make it very specific to banning purely discussions of sex and sexuality. And the GOP opposed it. It is a Don’t Say Gay bill, enforced by whoever is the most sensitive parent in the school.Report
“It is a Don’t Say Gay bill, enforced by whoever is the most sensitive parent in the school.”
It’s a poorly written “Don’t Say Gay” bill, because if it actually specified “don’t say gay” it would be immediately tossed.
Instead it’s a “don’t teach gender or sexual orientation” bill written by people who are too effing stupid to realize “straight” and “cis” are sexual orientations and genders.
Which means goodbye basically every book the school uses, every reference to “boy”, “girl”, “husband”. “wife”, “mommy”, “daddy” , “mister”, “miss”, “misses”…..
That’s what happens when you’ve conned the idiots so long they end up running for office and don’t get it’s just red meat to get morons to vote for you.
Watching conservatives twist themselves into knots has been amusing, at least. They’re having to retreat to screaming pedophilia and trying to redefine grooming as if we’re all too stupid to see them trying the oldest smear in the book — throw in claims of child molestation.
Remember the Clinton years? Goodness, which Clinton appointee did they claim wanted to teach kindergarteners to masturbate?Report
And then the guy who shot up the pizza place looking for Clinton’s Pedophilia Ring?Report
That’s the nail on the head right there.Report
Grooming is a poor word choice. Not as poor a decision as teaching kids that removing penises, breasts and taking hormones for the rest of their life is totally healthy and normal.Report
Nail on the head.Report
It needs to be normalized:
https://www.hrc.org/news/new-study-reveals-shocking-rates-of-attempted-suicide-among-trans-adolescen
If Transgender youth get support and treatment – which includes psychological support and counseling long before surgery, those rates plummet:
https://fenwayhealth.org/new-study-shows-transgender-people-who-receive-gender-affirming-surgery-are-significantly-less-likely-to-experience-psychological-distress-or-suicidal-ideation/
If the real goal is the protection of children and youth, then helping decrease the chances of killing themselves seems to be a top priority.Report
Teens in study 1 versus adults in study 2. Unless you’re saying that teens should be receiving sex change surgery?
ETA: Also, don’t they still do psychological testing before sex change surgery? So wouldn’t the non-recipients in the second survey include people who weren’t approved due to mental problems? It hardly seems surprising that they’d be more likely to have mental problems.Report
You would think.
There is a huge amount of “not my child” unwillingness to face reality on these sorts of issues. This in turn puts lots of pressure on politicians to do something.Report
The suicide rate does not statistically change post-op. Try again.Report
Since you offered no support for that statement, I assume you’re talking about Sheldon’s claim?
https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-was-lyle-shelton-right-about-transgender-people-and-a-higher-suicide-risk-after-surgery-55573
If you’re not, you’re probably cherry-picking the same study (whose authors strenuously disagree with that presentation — because that wasn’t the conclusion at all).
But if we’re doing studies — I’ll link some, instead of just randomly making claims like you!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstaceyennis/2021/12/14/gender-affirming-care-linked-to-less-depression-lower-suicide-risk-for-trans-youth/?sh=7567056c5d25
https://fenwayhealth.org/new-study-shows-transgender-people-who-receive-gender-affirming-surgery-are-significantly-less-likely-to-experience-psychological-distress-or-suicidal-ideation/
https://time.com/6128131/gender-affirming-hormone-therapy-study/
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/hormone-therapy-linked-lower-suicide-risk-trans-youths-study-finds-rcna8617
I guess you’re at the pound the table point, huh?Report
“The suicide rate does not statistically change post-op. Try again.”
Gender affirming care drastically lowers suicide risk. I have a nice post full of links to various studies, unlike your flat and unsourced denial of reality.
Sadly stuck in moderation at the momentReport
Is grooming in this sense now a real professional term for this disgusting process of gaining a child’s trust for the purpose of assaulting them? Or is the use of this term for that more colloquial and metaphorical?
Rape is rape. Cancer is cancer. Those are not metaphors and not colloquial.
As far as I knew until a few years ago, grooming was combing your hair, or possibly preparing a protege in your profession for success. It had an entirely positive connotation. The negative meaning we are discussing here was a new metaphorical extension of a “word that means something.”
If I am wrong about that, if this was always a terms as fixed and literal as rock meaning rock just in a context I was not aware of, then fair enough. I learned something today. But if it is a new metaphorical extension of the meaning of a word that meant some(one)thing, then that is a process of rapid chant that is underway. Such processes aren’t complete when one part of society decides t t are. They mostly just aren’t ever complete once the pace of meanings and forms in language becoming unfixed picks up.Report
Yes, grooming has multiple definitions such as personal grooming, grooming a horse, grooming an apprentice to take over a business, etc.
It is also a word used for years and years by child psychologists and law enforcement and social workers and other professionals who deal with abuse victims to describe the ways in which abusers prep their victims for abuse, like George did to me and like lots of other predators do. It is that latter meaning that is intended by the people weaponizing it right now to describe what they think teachers are doing. It’s not new at all. It’s just being thrown about willy nilly now.Report
I suspect that it’s gotten more attention recently as social media has provided a new medium through which groomers can prime minors for sexual abuse, and one which often leaves a permanent record which can then be leaked, causing more or less severe reputational damage to the groomer.
Seems to happen a lot to YouTube stars, for depressingly explicable reasons.Report
Because of the MeToo movement. Stopping grooming has become a cause of the third wavers among the online left. The online right using a term they cultivated for something else is hilarious.Report
I dunno I think stopping people from sexually preying on minors is Good, Actually, and maybe appropriating a term that is useful for explaining important dynamics that allow people to sexually prey on minors over an unrelated Culture War issue is not terribly amusing.
Maybe j r’s right and this sort of thing is inevitable but we all have choices.Report
Hand to god, I’m starting to wonder if that opiate abuse problem hasn’t caused serious cognitive damage. It’s like some people live in an utterly imaginary world.
‘Had, har, I think it’s funny that liberals hate pedophiles and now conservatives are just calling liberals pedophiles randomly! We’re winning the meme war!”.
Wtf even.Report
Thanks for accusing me of brain damage.Report
Weirdly, I didn’t mention your name at all.
So why do you think I’m talking about you?
I mean were you arguing that you think it’s funny that liberals hate pedophiles and so conservatives started randomly calling them that?
If so, why is that funny?Report
Because Pillsy was responding to me who you then responded to. How else was I supposed to take that?Report
Was your name attached? Do you consider it funny or ironic that liberals are against pedophilia, and that conservatives have started randomly calling them pedophiles?
If not, then clearly it wasn’t about you so it’s weird you feel so called out by it.Report
Proverbs 28:1?Report
Based on the way conservatives use the terms, I honestly believe that for them, the difference betweenthe strict definition of grooming- “prepare children for sex” and and the Fox propaganda usage-“prepare children to be accepting of multiple genders and orientations” is essentially nil.
Even right here on this blog, we see how “I have a daddy and mommy” is OK, but “I have two daddies” is considered sexual and inherently inappropriate.Report
Medically transitioning children without parental consent is bad.Report
But cutting off their foreskin;
Giving short children growth hormones ;
Giving hyperactive children psychoactive drugs;
And a whole suite of medical procedures designed to alter children’s bodies and minds;
These things are OK, why?Report
oh god why can’t people read more carefully why do I have to do this
Those things are rarely, if ever, done without parental consent.
I don’t think Russell is right.
I think your counterargument is very bad.Report
Bad? For whom?
I assure you that Chip is demonstrating his devotion to the cause.
You’re undercutting him.
Why in the world would you try to undercut people on your own side?
PERHAPS YOU ARE A REPUBLICANReport
Because I value my cause enough that I want to see demonstrations of devotion to it done properly.
Thanks for asking!Report
Don’t make it a habit or else you’ll find yourself over here.Report
Don’t worry I have counter-habits that I expect to keep me safely ensconced hereReport
The bills being passed make it a crime for parents to provide puberty blocking hormones to their children.
ETA: All the arguments being trotted out; Bad behavior by teachers; Strangers transitioning children against the parent wishes;
Are monuments of misdirection and absurdity.
The bills are not aimed at bad behavior, but good. Not aimed at child abuse, but child care.Report
Yeah. That was one of the the better counterargument I was referring to.Report
Also there are better counter-arguments here, because the neither the “medical” aspect nor the “parental consent” aspect are the beginning or end of the GOP’s campaign against trans youth and parents who support themReport
I am against all of the top three. As an average height man with his foreskin and who lost a decade of his life to an anxiety disorder (my first article on this site) caused by Ritalin.Report
I’m glad you’re here to dictate medicine to other people’s kids based on your personal experience.
Everyone, we’re done with science! Russel’s anecdotes will suffice now.
if you’re an average height man with a foreskin and anxiety, better pretend real hard.Report
Cool.
But nobody in America is doing that. Puberty blockers or HRT require parental consent, minors consent, and a formal diagnosis and letter from a qualified expert adhering to WPATH guidelines, and a second letter from a therapist who has been seeming the minor for some time.
And nobody is agitating to change that.
But multiple states have moved to forbid doing despite with the consent and sign off of all those people, and some have tried to make it felony child abuse.
So I don’t know what your random statement to a thing that doesn’t exist and no one is lobbying for (ie, feel free to name a bill or any prominent politician trying to allow minors to medically transition without parental consent — heck, I’ll take a state level one) has to do with the price of tea in China.
When someone fights so hard against an entirely imaginary foe, one is forced to conclude that either their sanity is suffering, they’’ve been conned — or they’re fighting someone else and lying about it.Report
Puberty blockers are child abuse. Because they’re not currently approved by the FDA to block puberty in trans youth. Yet they’re being prescribed for that. That’s probably illegal.Report
Why does the transgendered status of the person matter? Since the whole point is to stop a process while the kid sorts it out?Report
“Puberty blockers are child abuse. Because they’re not currently approved by the FDA to block puberty in trans youth.”
So all off-label medication is child abuse? Wait, it’s not even really off-label. They’re prescribed to halt puberty, which is exactly what they’re use for.
“Yet they’re being prescribed for that. That’s probably illegal.”
Off-label medication is “probably illegal”? Oh DO TELL. Which law is being broken? I’m all ears, as is every doctor and lawyer in America as off-label use is common. You’ve probably had off-label prescriptions. Those abusive, abusive., doctors.
Like whew my nephew was treated with colchicine for pericarditis that was child abuse? His doctors were abusing him? By giving him an off-label treatment that, you know, fixed it?
So you’ve claimed, in a fun argument, that off-label medications are probably illegal, that prescribing them to anyone is abuse, and to children is child-abuse, because off-label prescriptions are abusive.
Like..do you even listen to yourself? You’re defining common, best-practice medical approaches — ones entirely unrelated to trans people — as “child-abuse” in order to justify yourself.
When you’re to the point where you’re calling vast swathes of medicine “CHILD ABUSE” in order to try to justify your position, I’m thinking maybe your position isn’t so…justified.Report
Yes, It is. But that’s not this.
This is Texas saying parents who are providing their kids with medically and psychologically supervised support to address their gender dysphoria are, as a matter of Texas state policy and law, committing child abuse.
Apples and ice cubes dude.Report
I actually agree with that for the medical transitioning part. It’s irreversible damage. I think adults should decide that for themselves as adults. Children cannot make an informed choice. Yeah, you can’t buy alcohol, cigarettes, vote, or serve your country, but you can decide on medically cutting off parts of your body that cannot be replaced if you eventually decide to detransition.Report
No, as a kid you can’t. We keep writing this out here, but the process is a LONG one that involves doctors, psychologists, parents and the child. treatment decisions are made as a team, not unilaterally by the kid.Report
” but you can decide on medically cutting off parts of your body that cannot be replaced if you eventually decide to detransition.
Russel, you’ve been told this like five times — nobody does any gender confirmation surgeries on kids. They’re not done until you’re 18. NO SURGERIES ARE DONE. Nothing is cut off of kids, because surgeons won’t do those surgeries on kids.
World-wide guidelines are against it, for reasons ranging from “ethics” to “it leads to bad outcomes when done before the body is fully mature” (so ethical, pragmatic, and capitalistic arguments even for god’s sake).
They won’t even give kids blockers without a formal diagnosis and letters from two separate independent experts, plus parental and child consent. (Adults ALSO need two letters for any surgery, and yes this includes places like Thailand)
At this point, I can’t continue believing you’re just missing this point. You’re deliberately repeating things you know to be false.
Why are you constantly bearing false witness on this? if your position depends on lies, why do you hold it?
I don’t know why you’re obsessed with cutting off kids genitals, or WHY YOU KEEP LYING ABOUT IT.Report
Also just a note that yes people do use rape and cancer as colloquialisms.
“Liberals are a cancer,” for example.Report
I know, but we’re saying let’s not do that. (I’m more okay with it than you perhaps, but I can be persuaded.)
The question is whether the until-last-week-or-so-existing use of “grooming” in the sexual predation context was a “word that [strictly] meant something [which is very specifically fixed]” like cancer does when referring to actual cancer, or more like the metaphorical extension of the meaning of “cancer”
as in “cancer on society.”Report
I really don’t think it’s meant metaphorically, but I also think a lot of it is being driven specifically by activists who, ah, don’t have a strong record of acting in good faith, like Christopher Rufo, or Christina Pushaw (DeSantis’ press secretary). And all the defenses I’ve seen argue that it’s about the “sexualization of young children”. It also functions well as a Q dogwhistle when taken literally, which could theoretically be a coincidence but I don’t believe it for a second.
What I’ve seen in it out in the wild, coming from the major activists and officials defending the Don’t Say Gay Bill, doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for metaphor in the mix.
FWIW, while I doubt that Rufo or Trump Jr. or whoever give a fish whether it’s true, I suspect for a lot of rank-and-file SoCon supporters it probably makes sense as a generalization of the original concept, but it’s a bad generalization that allows for far too many really bad ideas to be smuggled into the discussion.Report
Or they’re projecting. GOP has been going on about pedos and gays are groomers, and those evil libs want to sexual young children, but within their own ranks (and fairly well placed in those ranks) you have people like this:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/district-man-sentenced-151-months-prison-receipt-child-pornography
Former Trump aide, RNC operative, and “pro-life” activist. (But not trans or gay, so no one on the right is going to talk about this).Report
Grooming had been an official and well recognized term for a common form of child predation for decades. And by recognized I mean ‘commonly used in media, legal documents, police reports, newspapers, and in common parlance among citizens when discussing those unsavory things”.
It is by no means a ‘new thing’ or ‘just this week’ term.
Moreover, it had been commonly used by conservatives to smear gay and trans adults for decades as well. I was aware of it being deployed political in the 80s and 90s. Claiming gays and trans people are child abusers is a very common insult from bigots and as I said — in no way new.
How frequently accusations of pedophilia, child grooming, and occasionally blood libel surface depends mostly on how loud certain segments of the population are feeling,
It was common in the 80s and 90s, fell a bit after DOMA and anti-gay bills stopped driving voters to the polls, and has seen a resurgence with QAnon to some serious new heights.Report
“The negative meaning we are discussing here was a new metaphorical extension of a “word that means something.””
No it’s not. That term has been used by psychologists and law enforcement to describe a particular prep pattern child abusers use to gain the trust of and silence of their victims, going back to at least the 1970s.
I’m glad you’ve lived a happy enough life to have never encountered the word used in this context, although I am at an honest loss as to how. It’s incredibly common parlance for an incredibly common practice among child abusers, and has been for decades.Report
I’ve encountered it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a neologistic usage as I describe it.
Here is an entry for “grooming” currently posted on an online Psychology Dictionary Professional Reference:
“ GROOMING
By N., Sam M.S. – 97
the term for the basic function of caring for yourself by cleaning and maintaining your hair, body and appearance standards. Animals groom by picking insects of themselves.”
https://psychologydictionary.org/grooming/
So… I dunno. But I will take your word for it.Report
It’s an incredibly common usage and has been for decades, because it’s an apt description of the process — As in the phrase “groomed for the job.
Grooming in the context of child predation is literally the second definition in Oxfords.
The English language contains actual contronyms, so using the word grooming — which has a meaning of ‘prepare or train for a particular purpose’ and has for a century and using it to describe….preparing or training a child for a particularly awful purpose is literally right in line with s common (in common parlance at least least a century) usage of the word.
I really can’t see the problem or the complaint. English has the word cleave, for gods sake, but there’s something upsetting about using’ “groom’ to describe “grooming”?
I mean sure, absent context you can’t tell whether ‘grooming a child means ‘combing their hair’ or ‘setting them up for abuse’ but that’s the entire English language.
And given the wide gulf In context between straightening a kids clothes and pedophilia I don’t think it’s causing any confusion.
And if it is, take it up with whomever started using grooming to mean ‘preparing for a particular job or task’ a century ago.Report
One of the not uncommon meanings of “groom”, since at least the 19th century, has been to “prepare or train someone for a particular purpose or activity.” The special case of this use specifically for “preparing or training” someone for sexual molestation or abuse goes back at least to the 80s in therapy/counseling and survivor discourse. I first encountered it online in the late 90s/early 00s in survivor discourse, where it was already common. It doesn’t seem to have come into common use outside of those communities until a few years ago.Report
This is a good post. I have nothing negative to say bout it. That said, I do wonder if the horse isn’t already out of the barn. Critique drift is endemic.
There is an idea called emotional labor, which started as a sociological term to describe work that involved managing your and other people’s emotional states, jobs like waiting tables or working the counter at the DMV. Then emotional labor became things like, “I feel sad that I’m the only one who remembers office birthdays and orders the cake.” Gaslighting was meant to describe a deliberate act of trying to make someone question their sanity and then it became, “you said I was wrong me on the internet.” There are many more examples.
Yes, words have meanings, but words also have metaphorical meanings. So, it’s quite easy for immigration to become an invasion, or securing voting rights to become election tampering. Why wouldn’t reactionaries use a term like grooming as a way to score points on an outgroup that they don’t like? They would almost be negligent not to do it. That’s just how we do politics these days.
I hope this will change, but I’m not exactly hopeful.Report
When they show you who they are, believe them:
Alabama Passed 3 (Three!) Anti-Gay Bills Today
https://jezebel.com/alabama-is-set-to-pass-3-three-anti-gay-bills-today-1848763049?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Today the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a so-called “bathroom bill” that would ban transgender students in grades K through 12 from using the bathroom and locker room corresponding with their gender identity, a felony ban on doctors providing gender-affirming healthcare to transgender minors, and a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit teachers from discussing sexuality in kindergarten through fifth grade. The bills will all go to Governor Kay Ivey (R) for her signature.
The bathroom bill, HB 322, has already passed the House, and the Senate is considered it today. Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman said on Twitter that right after the bathroom bill was introduced on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. Shay Shelnutt moved to add a “Don’t Say Gay” amendment to the bill. (Shelnutt is the lead sponsor of the healthcare ban.) Lyman reported that the amendment passed 24 to 6 and the larger bathroom bill passed 26 to 5, sailing right on through. It will now go back to the House for final approval.
The Senate has already passed the health care ban, SB 184, so the House took it up today. It would make providing gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormones a class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That bill could also potentially out trans kids to their parents by forcing schools to report gender non-conformity to parents. The Alabama House passed it by a vote of 66 to 28.
This is the Republican Party.Report
Forty years after the effort to remake the judiciary, republican led states in conservative federal circuits are poised to flood the Supreme Court with legislation that openly engages in bigotry, all in the hopes that SCOTUS uses the opportunity to eviscerate federalism so conservative rich white people can stay in power. The Confederacy may yet win.Report
Headline is wrong. Two of those bills are anti-trans and the third is the don’t instruct k-3 on gay.Report
Agreed this is great. I wonder why it is we’re getting so much… rhetorical inflation, maybe, right now. It’s possible to disagree with someone without mislabelling thaem as “gaslighting,” “grooming,” being part of a “cult,” or whatever. In fact, it makes it easier to disagree with them persuasively.Report
Persuasion isn’t the objective. Obtaining and keeping power is the objective.Report
Yeah, this is a good point. I assume we’ll be on to the next boogeyman in about six months. Hope they don’t get anybody senselessly killed in the meantime.Report
I’ve never been a fan of the term “gaslighting”. I think what it refers to is usually just people lying with chutzpah or being completely mistaken. I think it’s more indicative of the listener’s reaction. Kind of, “you can’t expect me to believe that, right?”.
You didn’t mention “Karen”. I think it’s related. “Being a Karen” is to etiquette what “gaslighting” is to facts.Report
Right, Karen inflation is everywhere. My guess is it was originally what “Miss Ann” used to be- a term used mainly by Black people for arrogant or condescending white women- but it got co-opted and used for all sorts of other situations and behaviors.Report
I was just reflecting on this comment for a while. It got me thinking about other terms that were used recently as if they were precise, like “mask” (as if there was one kind and quality), “lockdown” (including everything from restaurant recommendations to actual bans), and “social distancing” (somehow diseases could be transmitted farther in the UK than the US). And then I thought about how the forerunner to the education controversies wasn’t CRT, it was school closures. And that got me thinking –
Remember COVID? Those were weird times, huh? Everyone ordering from Grubhub and sitting around tracking death stats. They seem so long ago, I think I’d actually have trouble trying to describe them to someone. They feel like something from the Great Depression.
Anyway, this isn’t a political observation; it’s just weird. And I wonder how much of our political conversation is being thrown off because we’ve completely forgotten about our recent past.Report
Handmaids, your bonnets await:
Woman arrested in Starr County on murder for ‘illegal abortion’
https://myrgv.com/local-news/2022/04/08/woman-arrested-in-starr-county-for-illegal-abortion/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
A woman was arrested Thursday and charged with murder for having a self-induced “illegal abortion.”
According to the Starr County Sheriff’s Office, Lizelle Herrera, 26, was arrested and served with an indictment “on the charge of Murder after Herrera did then and there intentionally and knowingly cause the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”
Herrera is currently in custody at the Starr County Detention Center. She faces a surety bond of $500,000.
The case remains under investigation.
Last year, Texas state legislators passed Senate Bill 8, which prevents women from having an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Though it is being challenged in court, the law is currently in place.Report
What, the law isn’t a magic wand that people simply obey?Report
It’s funny to see when Democrats put the word “illegal” in quotes. Anyway, I’m sure the idea of posting this is to make it sound like Woman got arrested for having an abortion, rather than being her own abortionist.Report
Yes, Republicans want to charge women who induce abortions with murder.
Murder.
All the savvy pundits who assured us for years that this was paranoia and hyperbole, come get your prize.Report
It’s less that they want to do this and more that their logic (and thus law) lead there. Democracy lets determined people try out bad/unworkable ideas. This is a good example.
If your world view says the woman is always a victim who was tricked or forced into an abortion, then this is a corner case that can’t happen. Problem is the law has to interact with the real world.Report
And it’s unclear if she’s charged with having her own abortion or rather helping someone else with theirs.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/09/texas-woman-26-charged-murder-self-induced-abortionReport
This is a very common story of how atrocities come about.
When polite European gentlemen sat around having cool civil discussions of skull shapes and cleansing the human race, did any of them say “Hey, lets slaughter millions of Jews and Gypsies and stuff their bodies into ovens!”
Or when Radio Rwanda was broadcasting endless hours describing the Hutus as cockroaches and vermin, how many of the listeners thought, “Yeah, this is going to end up with us hacking little children to death with machetes!”
And even now when Jesse Kelly or Jack Prosobiec or Josh Mandel or any of the Republicans posing with their guns and talking about pedophiles, are any of their followers saying, “Yeah, I can’t wait to slaughter a family of Democrats and bash in the skulls of their little babies!”
When Putin was exhorting his people to reclaim Ukraine and describing them all as Natzees, did any Russian commenters describe the events in Bucha?
Of course not. No one ever starts out like that. But that’s where the road ends, unless someone can find an exit ramp.
If abortion really is murder, which Republican is going to stand up and defend this woman?
If another woman is arrested and sentenced to the gas chamber, which Republican will stand up and say “No, this is too far!”?
If a parent is charged with child abuse and sentenced to prison for helping their teen transition, which Republican will stand up and say “No, this has gone too far!?
I have not heard any Republican, ever, say those words. Right now, they are speeding down the road to a very dark place and no one is looking for exit ramps.Report
Unless they were really dumb, the law will have a carve out against charging women with their own abortions. That’s one heck of a “off ramp” right there.Report
I’m more than willing to bet they were really, really dumb.Report
Good luck finding someone to take that bet.Report
What evidence is there that any Republican wants such a carve out, or will pay a price if it doesn’t exist?
In case it wasn’t obvious, the last paragraph in my previous post was directed at you, and Pinky, and Koz and any other Republicans on this board.
When they sentence a woman to prison for obtaining an abortion, will you stop voting Republican?
Maybe when they stick a needle in a woman’s arm?
Where is your personal offramp where you say, “OK no more.”?Report
During one of his debates, George Bush was subjected to a “gotcha” question on this subject. You believe in the death penalty and you believe abortion is murder, are you going to be executing millions of American women.
He had a deer in headlights moment and didn’t handle it well, and ever since then GOP politicians have made it clear that no, they’re not going to be executing women for their own abortions.
And Chip, this constantly predicting death camps unless Team Blue is elected is getting tiring.
We’re still waiting for Trump to put them up for the illegal immigrants. You were wrong about that and you’re wrong about this.Report
So your off ramp is “slaughtering millions”.
All the others leading up to it are cool.Report
You keep pointing to zero people, or situations where we don’t have much information beyond a hysterical headline, and proclaiming it’s the same as millions of people. Oh, and you’ve kind of admitted you wouldn’t switch teams if Blue and Red switched sides on this issue.
My off ramp is reality starting to match what you routinely claim. When “Na.zi” means something other than nut picking or “not a democrat”.
Alternatively Team Blue could stop gushing over policies that in the RL result in absurd levels of economic destruction.Report
What we have is a woman sitting in jail at this moment facing murder charges.
And a parent facing an investigation of child abuse for providing supportive treatment for their trans child.
Both of these things are facts, just objective reality.
If they don’t bother you, ok, just say, “These things don’t bother me.”
But to wave them away as “hysterical headlines” is just ridiculous.Report
But for what? Did she have an abortion, perform an abortion, or something else? Without those details, we have no clue what’s going on.
What to do about trans children is somewhat gray.
According to prospective studies, the majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria cease to desire to be the other sex by puberty, with most growing up to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, with or without therapeutic intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria_in_children#Prospective_outcomes
I wasn’t kidding about prospective conflicts between the gay and trans communities. Most trans children, if left untreated, become normal homosexuals.Report
Back to the subject, is there any line for Democrats on sexual matters? When people call Rachel Levine and Lia Thomas “women”, I have to assume they’ll mouth any falsehood they’re told to. Even the most radical pro-choicer can say that there’s a possibility that a fetus is a human being. But if you can’t say that those men are men, how can you ever be taken seriously?Report
This is what’s so remarkable about modern conservatives. They all, every one of them, enjoy and take full advantage of the liberal cafeteria of life choices and revel in picking and choosing their own version of the good, heaping their plate with a wide mix of this belief and that practice, this entrée of preference and that side dish of custom.
Yet they recoil at the choices of others, and insist that their menu selections are somehow the only acceptable ones and that it would be some sort of affront to be compelled to accept the choices of others.
It would cost you nothing to embrace gays and trans people as they are. Literally, it creates no hardship for you, requires nothing of you, it doesn’t even demand that you understand.
I don’t understand the tenets of Mormonism, I really don’t. It seems perplexing to me, and I just don’t get the appeal.
But I also don’t grasp the appeal of homosexuality- Men just seem unpleasant and unattractive and why women put up with us I’ll never know.
But there really isn’t any need. We can just embrace Mormons and gays and trans people as they are, on their own terms without needing to understand.Report
I don’t know if this is important or not, but I did notice that you didn’t answer the question. So if your intention was to write a comment that people wouldn’t notice didn’t answer the question, you missed the mark. However, by now, the thread is dead, and no one’s interested in your and I yelling at each other, so it doesn’t much matter.Report
Sure there’s a line for liberals on sexual matters: harm and consent. Consent is the easy one- if everyone involved consents then all is well. Harm is a tch more complicated because measurement of harm can become difficult to measure at more granular levels. Liberals have come to the (pretty rational in my mind) conclusion that when a person says “I identify as a woman/man now” it does harm to say “You’re deranged we’ll call you whatever we feel like” and no harm to say “Cool, we’ll use your preferred pronouns now then”. It helps that it neither picks our pocket nor bloodies our nose to do so.Report
It may do harm to a 13-year-old who’s struggling through puberty to reinforce a temporary discomfort. It definitely can harm that kid to be put on hormone blockers and encouraged toward surgery that will cause infertility. A child can’t consent in sexual matters. So while you may believe that liberals wouldn’t cross those two lines, they’ve got a head of steam behind them and aren’t thinking clearly.
In general, though, the left isn’t saying they’ll use the preferred pronouns; they’re requiring that other people do. Not just that. They’re requiring that girls ignore wang in a locker room. They’re sending men to women’s prisons. They’re just simply more committed to their cause than to the truth.Report
Whether it does more harm to kids to be supportive of their exploration of their gender identity or not is an open question and is actively being debated within the left. Drugs and surgery for kids who’re too young to consent is a real and seriously complicated question and I’m not confident that overshooting isn’t occurring. It’s a tough call. The other examples you cite are edge cases and, again, are tough calls.
What isn’t an open question though is the reality that the rights’ preferred policy of pouring scorn and cruelty on such people is unambiguously the wrong and more harmful policy. And for all their braying about how libruls with the gummint were going to come for peoples kids to turn them trans it turns out that it was the right that ended up pairing with gumming to come after peoples’ kids. Every accusation is a confession I suppose.Report
To your first point: I don’t trust liberals to find the right balance. There’s nothing in your resume to demonstrate you can, and there’s nothing in the law that gives you the power. You don’t sound awfully confident in the left doing it right either.
You then set up a false dichotomy, implying that the two choices are the left solving the problem or the right being cruel. I’m sure you can nutpick some conservatives who are cruel about gender issues, but again that doesn’t give your the moral authority to make the call.
As for which party has used the government, I tried to address this above but maybe used too much mockery. Let’s state it clearly: the public school system has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. They’re government entities. Some of the changes in sex and gender rules have been voted on, but many have not. The left has been the instigator, particularly within the school systems. The right didn’t start this fight.Report
I’m too centrist and cynical to think that the far left has any competence to do anything beyond competing with each other over who can race further to the left on twitter. Obviously, mistakes get made- mistakes always get made and de-transitioners do exist. The trans question is very very difficult, especially when you’re dealing with kids. That said the left has not succeeded (nor particularly tried) at writing the far left or even just left-wing position on the trans question into actual law or policy.
Nutpick the right being cruel? Pinky old boy, the right literally wrote into law and policy in Texas that parents who’re not toeing the right-wing line on trans issues should be investigated for child abuse and potentially have their kids taken away! Is the entire state of Texas a nut? Find me a left-wing state that has passed a law that flat out says “if you don’t transition your kid the moment they express trans sentiment we’ll investigate you for child abuse.” You can find occasional cases of individuals facing something like that (usually in divorce/custody cases which, of course, clouds the issue hopelessly) but the left and its political arm isn’t writing such intrusions into law nor are they even advocating for such action- the right is.
And sure, the teachers and bureaucrats have gone in pretty hard on DEI stuff. I am not left enough to view such movements with equanimity since I think in no small number of cases, they’re policies that, at best, do no serious harm but waste money and at worst are actively harmful. But in these cases, you’re mostly talking about ground up developments coming from the culture into the institutions and promulgating through pretty anodyne bureaucratic principles. It’s not something the lefts political arm is handing down from on high. And certainly, the right started the fight. The Moral Majority opened up shop in ’79 when I was born (though hopefully not in response to my being born).Report
I think Pinky does have a point about more people making a case for some kind of third way. To me the entire issue of the TX law and to a lesser degree the FL law arise from a dynamic of bureaucracy vs legislature and legislature vs bureaucracy. Contra Pinky I think the majority of Democratic voters, most of whom reside outside of twitter and other academic or activist subcultures, aren’t thrilled with the way this is playing out. At leaat I can say I’m not.Report
Sure. I’m not exactly thrilled about the flood of DEI stuff into education myself. The fact that it’s being imported by employees embracing what is culturally fashionable for their social group and what is helpful for their careers in the bureaucracy also complicates the matter. But the fact remains- the left didn’t impose this by some kind of legislative fiat- it’s a ground up process. When it comes to the trans question only one side is passing laws and coming for your kids- and it isn’t the left.Report
At a basic level I agree. But my caveat in agreeing is that I don’t think it’s reasonable to also portray local action against local bureaucracies to force a correction on the execesses as evil or mass hysteria. The GOP is, as they say, pouncing. Fight that, but not in a way that takes the side of educational bureaucracies over parents.Report
Well that one is a no brainer. If the left or (perish the thought) the Democratic Party is dumb enough to side with the educational bureaucracies over parents they’ll lose and lose brutally hard. We’ve seen this play before.
But this is, once again, a substantive policy debate between liberals, centrists and leftists. The right is not really in it, they’re opportunistically attacking but policy wise they aren’t offering anything but incoherent misery.Report
So a parent demands that the school teach Creationism.
Why shouldn’t we side with the educational establishment?Report
Happily, Creationism is a tiny, unpopular, fringe policy among parents so there is no parents vs the educational establishment in your scenario. That’s parent vs the rest of the parents and the educational establishment.Report
I think it’s not quite that simple in context of Bostock which remember, was 6-3 and written by Gorsuch.
Above I said I do not think this issue aligns well with the gay rights movement, at least to the extent we’re talking about self-ID/affirmation as a standard of determination, real tension with well established womens’ rights, and the medical interventions involved, particularly with children. I think it’s a real problem for example to provide materials to very young, impressionable children that universalize the trans experience particularly where it is portrayed as a low stakes magical thing. That’s insanely irresponsible for a path that eventually may involve a life time of serious medical interventions with poorly understood long term effects and incredibly serious consequences for getting it wrong.
Nevertheless that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of areas of life where those things aren’t at issue. Adults who have transitioned can most of the time be accommodated under a basic rubric of not discriminating by sex and to the extent we can do that without running headlong into other concerns it strikes me as a no brainer. So I’m all in on driving out the crazy DEI people but I also don’t think this is going away and trying to pretend it is will result in its own disasters.Report
Lets imagine that you, at the age of 8 or so, were “provided materials to very young, impressionable children that universalize the trans experience particularly where it is portrayed as a low stakes magical thing. ”
What would have happened?
Would you have become gay, or decided that you were really a different gender than what you were born with?
In order to answer that, lets review what happens when young, impressionable gay people are provided with materials that universalize the hetero experience, where it is portrayed as a low stakes magical thing.
Do they somehow turn straight?
Is that really how things work?Report
Note I said universalize the trans experience, not gay. The inability to talk about this without conflating a bunch of issues of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, as you just did, is itself indicative of a total lack of seriousness on the subject.
But yes, I think conflating biological sex with gender identity is likely to create more problems than it solves with young children. I don’t think school teachers or admins are competent to do it, and the problems they create are likely to be made worse when determination is made by self-identification which must in all cases be affirmed.
Most children will ultimately shrug it off, realize that the institutions that serve them are often full of dumb people with dumb ideas, and go about their cynical lives. However for others it is a creation of a system bound to result in false positives with particularly awful and irreversible results especially if no one is ever allowed to question it.Report
Let’s explore that last sentence.
Let’s imagine your worst case scenario, a ” false positive” of a cis child somehow thinking they are trans, as a result of a teacher universalizing the trans experience.
First, what exactly is “universalizing” mean in this context?
How does it differ from merely “accepting” trans people?Report
The distinction is materials that generally instruct on tolerance of difference, whatever it may be, and those that deliberately conflate gender identity with biological sex. For the vast, vast, vast majority of children these are not and will never be in any sort of conflict and there is no reason to tell them it is something they should anticipate. Doing so is deeply misleading to children, and itself reinforces a bunch of terrible stereotypes where girls who like stereotypical boy activities may not really be girls or that boys who like stereotypical girl activities might not really be boys. Young children do not have the faculties to understand the distinction and it’s dishonest to suggest they do. It’s morally wrong and manipulative to attempt it, and certainly so without their parents involvement.
Where it goes from misleading, to outright lying to children, is the omission of details around the way painful and intrusive medical treatment is the natural conclusion of these ideas. It is hard for me to ever think of a situation where delving into that is age appropriate which is why I assume you rarely hear of it. However, it is that natural conclusion itself that renders such materials inappropriate, and well beyond the mandate of public schools.Report
So just to be clear:
1. Schools shouldn’t tell kids trans people exist, because most students aren’t trans. To what other minorities do you wish to extend this to?
2. Children can’t understand gender and this will confuse them, because they’ll think tomboys are trans, and anyone thinking children can understand gender is lying. Especially those trans kids who knew from a young age.
3. The worst lie is telling children about trans kids existing, but not telling them how awful being trans is — all the medicine and stuff — which isn’t appropriate so you shouldn’t tell them, but the fact that they don’t know it is a lie. So telling them is inappropriate, but not telling them is a lie, so the existence of trans kids makes schools into dens of lies no matter what they do.
Lost in this, of course, is again — schools don’t really mention trans kids unless there’s a trans kid in the class, and even then the gist is still “sometimes people born a boy are really a girl on the inside, or vice versa, and so if they say they’re a boy that’s how we treat them” and life goes on.
And nobody is suggesting otherwise, but in your head there’s apparently diagrams, YouTube videos of surgery, and poor tomboys being convince they’re actual transfem catboys.
As someone married to an educator, whose whole family works in education, your weird fantasies of what things are like in schools are….well they’d be funny, if it wasn’t in the midst of basically trying to bash some of the most vulnerable kids in America in the name of “protecting kids”.
Real “burn the village to save it” vibe.Report
Last year, my son went to a summer camp (he was 9). At camp was a girl named Charlie, who said she was a boy, and asked to be treated as one. Not sure how much of a deal the camp counselors made of it, but my son told us all the other kids basically shrugged and rolled with it.
Charlie was a boy, end of discussion.
We teach them the Golden Rule. If they want a day where everyone acknowledges that they are Batman or Wonder Woman, then it’s not a lift to acknowledge that someone wants to be the opposite gender for a while.Report
It’s easily forgotten that traditionally tomboyish girls and sensitive boys are “exploring their gender” by refusing to conform to the stereotypical gender roles.
People don’t use the term “gender fluid” but that’s what it is, and always has been.Report
And that is exactly how trans people are taught in schools up until you get to actual sex education — and even in sex ed later in school, it’s literally just “trans people exist, hormones are pretty powerful,. but medically not the funnest ride”
And generally only if you have an actual trans kid in that grade, and it’s done in the “Sometimes people are born boys but are actually girls and vice versa, so go ahead and just treat them like you would any girl/boy”.
And despite that being actually how it’s done in reality, right here we have frothing screaming to the point where you’d think teachers are strapping people to the desks and injecting them with hormones.
The unconnected to reality hysteria is…tiresome. Doubly so when the person screaming the loudest literally knows the LEAST — about trans people, about how schools and education work, how stuff actually is in reality.
It really is Satanic Panic married to 90s- gay bashing, and the target is literally the single most vulnerable child demographic.Report
Let’s all here, just reflect on our own childhood, and let’s imagine the “worst case scenario”, where one of our elementary school teachers had frivolously told us that gender fluidity was no big thing and we could be any gender we chose.
How would you, gentle reader, have responded?
Would have changed gender? Worn a dress and eagerly applied makeup?
I sound sarcastic because this shows the underlying absurdity, that gender identity is something frivolous, that a child will switch from boy to girl at the mere suggestion of a teacher.
Another absurdity is the idea that exploring gender will “inevitably” lead to gender reassignment surgery.
But we know, with absolute scientific certainty that this is false, by studying the tragic cases where teachers and parents DID try to change a child’s gender, with horrific results.
We can also compare that to the millions of children who explored their gender identity in freedom, and ended up well adjusted and happy.Report
Firstly, they’re not your kids so it’s not your call. Secondly, the most psychologically stable kid’s won’t be damaged by it, but the most confused ones could be. It’s estimated that 60-80% of minors who suffer from gender confusion grow out of it.Report
Wait, what are those other 20 to 40٪‽
People “remained confused” about their gender?
Like, whose call is it to determine if they are “confused”?Report
Taking your numbers at face value (something I’m sure I’d regret if I looked it up, as I bet it’s running some fun games on definitions of “gender confusion” and conflating, say, tomboys in with trans men)….
I have said this a million times, but let me repeat it: A trans minor can’t even get a Sudafed without three experts signing off on it.
Parent’s consent, minor’s consent, formal diagnosis with letter of recommendation from psychiatrist or psychologist, formal letter from gender therapist with a minimum number of hours with the minor in question, and finally a sign off from an endocrinologist.
ALL OF THAT to do anything more permanent than a hair style and an outfit choice.
You need all of that for blockers. And then later you need them all again — up to date — for HRT.
And even as an adult, every surgeon in world requires it for ANY surgical intervention (the two independent letters, not parent’s consent).
So what are you worried about? You think your 60 to 80% are all speed-running that? Heck, 90% of them wouldn’t get parental consent no matter HOW trans they were, much less fool two independent experts who are all erring on the side of caution.
Even the most liberal proposals tend to be towards “better education” and “better access to experts” so that people who are trans can actually GET a diagnosis.
And god forbid, if the gender confused 60% that grow out of it asked to be called Tina instead of Tom for a week, so what?
“Firstly, they’re not your kids so it’s not your call. ”
They weren’t Ken Paxton’s kids, but he darn well made that call. And Alabama followed. And Florida is trying real hard.Report
Can a therapist tell a kid he’s wrong, or does he have to support the kid’s understanding?Report
Absolutely they can say the kid is wrong. That’s the whole POINT. The fact that you think that’s not obvious or in question is mind-blowing.
Now yes, one can try expert shopping — but the diagnostic criteria for a kid from the psychologist is pretty rigorous, and while an older kid (16 to 18) might be able to game it, it’s unlikely — and why would they want to? And they’d also have to game the therapist, over multiple sessions. (And to end up with a cis kid getting treated as trans, you’d need parents basically expert shopping a cis kid, the cis kid going along with it, and then when you finally get to HRT around 16 or so, the cis kid NOT developing dysphoria from reversible HRT. If you’re worried about that, you should worry a lot more about lightning)
To be bluntly honest: In the real world, the problem isn’t “therapists and psychiatrists rubber stamping letters” for gender issues. It’s the opposite.
In the real world, the problem is very much “therapists and psychiatrists who are decades out of date being asked to do diagnosis”, which has the end result of preventing actual trans kids from gaining access rather than letting actually cis kids through because they’re using diagnostic criteria or models that are still assuming “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” are the same thing.
Gender issues is a fairly small field of study, and your average therapist and psychologist doesn’t keep up to date on it.
Talk to a few trans adults — not kids, adults — and you’ll hear some fun stories. My favorite is a trans women I know — her therapist told her she couldn’t be trans, because she liked women.
That’s right, her therapist (who billed herself as LGBTQ friendly and a gender therapist) was almost 40 years out of date, and still parroting heavily discredited 80s era research that started with the assumption that there are two types trans women: Gay men so gay they wanted to be women, and fetishists.
I am not exaggerating.
Bluntly put: The gatekeeping for kids to get on blockers, much less HRT, is high. And there is no rubber-stamp therapist/psychologist network to push it along (why WOULD there be?) and for that to even work — to catch a cis kid up — you’d need to have parents who wanted their kid to be trans, the kid to cooperate with this, and then two independent experts willing to rubber stamp this for…..
Why, actually? I mean sure, you get some Munchausen’s by proxy parent all sorts of crazy can come up, but — if not this, they’d pick something else.
As it is, in the real world? Literally the only example I can think of is that botched circumcision’s case form the 80s, which is pretty firm proof gender identity isn’t malleable or going to change under pressure.
Contrast that to, oh, find any random room full of trans kids and if 1 in 10 has supportive parents I’d be shocked. Blockers and HRT aren’t an option for 90% of them because of it.Report
Is everyone on this blog unaware of the history of intersex children whose doctors arbitrarily forced the wrong gender on them, instead of letting them realize their own gender for themselves?
There are plenty of cases where a child’s genitals are ambiguous and doctors “assign” a gender to them, but often get it wrong, and as the child goes through adolescence and discovers their own gender identity, the results are often tragic.
Children don’t need adults to assign them a gender and “tell a kid he’s wrong”- they can figure it out on their own.Report
This seems to be another case where your lack of limiting principle can allow your position to logically include the worst of what your opponents accuse your side of.Report
Is there a limiting principle that stops Republicans from calling people child molesters when they are obviously not? The Ninth Commandment, perhaps?
Apparently not.Report
“For god’s sake, nobody is sacrificing kids to Satan” and “For god’s sake, there’s not a pedophile ring under a pizza parlor” have, sadly, a poor track record of convincing people who really, really, REALLY want it to be true.
Or are terrified, due to some prior, that it has to be.
Blood libel, for instance, has persisted for millennia for a reason, despite how freaking insane it is.Report
“However for others it is a creation of a system bound to result in false positives with particularly awful and irreversible results especially if no one is ever allowed to question it.”
I have a question — what role do you think teachers have in children going on blockers or HRT?
Because you talk about “irreversible results” and dumb institutions right after talking about teachers, so I’m not sure if you’ve shifted to a DIFFERNT group or are still talking about teachers. I’m also forced to assume by “irreversible results” you’re talking about HRT.
If I’m wrong please explain what you meant but the flow of your statements go straight from “teachers” to “dumb institutions” to “irreversible results” — if I read that correctly — you realize that for a minor to get HRT in America has literally nothing to do with teachers?
It requires parental consent, minor consent, a formal diagnosis (psychologist or psychiatrist), a therapist who has seen the child for at least a certain minimum amount of time to also concur, and then a doctor’s agreement as well.
Teacher’s aren’t consulted. Teacher’s don’t make a diagnosis. Nobody in the school system — no teacher, not counsellor, not superintendent — has any role in the actual, formal process that is required for a minor to take blockers OR go on HRT.
“and the problems they create are likely to be made worse.”
Question: As multiple papers, and the consensus of both American and world-wide psychologists and psychiatrists is that the best possible treatment for trans individuals is diagnosis and gender affirming care (which can be as small as proper names and pronouns), why do you think the recommended treatment of gender affirming care is wrong and “how does it make things worse” and how did you come to this determination when all the people who study this for a living and have met with lots and lots of trans people of all ages disagree and why are they wrong?
“determination is made by self-identification which must in all cases be affirmed”
Who else can determine a person’s identity but themselves?
it sounds like you think trans people are just mentally ill, that gender identity ALWAYS matches biological sex, and you’re upset we’re all pretending that’s not the case.Report
“Drugs and surgery for kids who’re too young to consent is a real and seriously complicated question and I’m not confident that overshooting isn’t occurring”
I shall note the current WPATH guidelines — which is the guidelines doctors in America follow:
1. At the onset of puberty a trans child may be put on blockers IF and ONLY IF the child, the parents, a doctor consent AND the child has a formal diagnosis from one expert (psychologist) and has undergone some therapy with another. BOTH must sign off on it. So to get on blockers — which are harmless and have no long-term effects — you need the sign off of 5 people (counting the parents as “1”), one of whom is the child in question.
2. At around the age of 15 or 16, they can transition to HRT. This again requires parents, child, and doctor to sign off — and requires an up-to-date diagnosis AGAIN from a psychologist AND sign-off from the minor’s therapist.
Again, three separate experts, the child, and the parent — at an age where we let people drive and get married.
I’m not sure where the “overshooting” might be occurring here, other than some understandable worry about access to said experts.
If it wasn’t for the fact that going through the wrong puberty for a trans kid does significant damage, I suspect the default would be “wait until you’re 18 and then do informed consent”.
Unfortunately, reality is that suicide rates for trans kids spike during puberty and their teenage years, and the best solution is….gender affirming care.
So wanting it to be accessible — or at least the experts, doctors, and education accessible so a trans kid has a fighting chance to run the gauntlet BEFORE considering suicide is hard for me to consider “overshooting”.
So yeah, the bigoted screaming about trans kids is about a process that requires parents, kid and three independent experts to sign off on. And in which the first, even slightly irreversible process, doesn’t begin until the minor is old enough to get married with their parent’s consent in most states.
(HRT’s irreversibility is the three Bs: Boobs, baritone, and beard — those three things are the only thing HRT does that generally doesn’t revert simply by stopping HRT. Surgeries, and again I can’t stress this enough, aren’t done until 18 at the earliest and generally later. Surgeons don’t like to operate that young, and the process for the more significant surgeries often takes at least a year or more prep work before anyone goes under a knife.)Report
Sure, as usual the right takes the edge cases, distorts them and cranks the amp up to eleven but there are genuine failure cases (we’re humans, of course there are). De-transitioners exist and have complaints. Mistakes and abuses can happen and have. I still remain hopeful that the developments in affirming care for trans people remains far more right than wrong but it’d be wild hubris to claim it’s flawless.Report
There’s literally not even an edge case. They just lie about them.
In this very thread I believe there’s two at least two posters who just take it as fact that people are mutilating children’s genitals.
They’ve been corrected, but they persist. It’s a mix of Satanic Panic and, as best I can tell, just a bedrock belief that gay and trans people are all literally evil sex perverts.
So what’s the point in discussing it with them? You’re not going to change minds — in their eyes, you’re justifying sex perversion and child mutilation.
As for flawless: Nothing in life is flawless. NOTHING Everything can be improved. Heck, today’s process — in place since 2014 — is a massive improvement over the previous process (which, bluntly, most trans people — child or adult — had no chance at real treatment). And I suspect the process in a decade will be better than that.
But what’s the point in arguing the actual process when, you know, it’s bigots screaming lies? Why pretend there’s a good faith discussion over the process when that’s not actually happening?
Have that good faith discussion with people discussing it in good faith. You might get somewhere.
it’s like discussing feminism with Rush Limbaugh (well, when he was alive). You think that’s going to result in any iterative improvement in feminism? You think you’d be having a real discussion of pros and cons and edge cases and complex isssues?Report
We’re not disagreeing on anything there- I said it’s not perfect and nothing is.
What’s the point? I like to argue for one, also even if you don’t convince them you my convince the onlookers. Also it helps to hone the edge of ones’ own position against the intractable obdurate propaganda of the right- helps keep your arguments sharp.Report
For me, the point is that the burden is on Republicans to demonstrate their concern over abuse isn’t just a pretext for bigotry.
Because if this massive thread has convinced me of anything, it’s that it is.Report
Would stuff like this count?
(I could easily see someone argue that seven percent is below the watermark that would personally bother them, for example.)Report
Please explain why sexual abuse in public school has ANYTHING to do with both gender affirming care AND teaching children tolerance and compassion for Transgendered and homosexual persons?Report
If you deep down believe that trans people are just sex perverts, and that it’s all about sex and getting your rocks off, a lot of the logic at least hangs together coherently. Because trans people are sexual perverts, teaching about sexual perverts to small children is, well, sexually abusing them because you’re teaching them about sex perverts and how it’s okay to be a sex pervert.
I’ve found it’s literally the easiest way to identify bigots — if their logic and argument rests on the assumption that any trans person is, basically, doing it because of a “fetish”, you’re dealing with a bigot or someone 50 years out of date.
To be fair, this all traces back to 70s and 80s ideas — which were fairly mainstream — about trans people. Blanchard is the big name to spring to mind, but the general psychological understand in the mid-80s was as follows — and if this seems to be very focused on trans women, it’s because it WAS to the point where trans men were basically just chalked up as hysterical and confused women. (Nothing new there).
1. Sexual orientation and gender are the same thing.
2. Therefore, there were two types of trans women
2a. “True” trans women who were basically men who were SO INCREDIBLY GAY that they wrapped around and wanted to be women. (I cannot remember the acronym and full term for this)
2b. Fetishists.
There you go. That was state of the art 1985, and the proposed rubric of several major experts. I am NOT exaggerating. (It gets worse — but methodological flaws like “deciding any person who claimed to be trans but wasn’t into men was just lying” are a bit afield)
This has led to some…unfortunate representations in media and thus the general public understanding. Blanchard is still pushing AGP (that most trans women are basically just fetishistic crossdressers) even now, even though his own diagnostic criteria means about 85% of cis women are fetishistic crossdressers, although I think he has at least decided that trans lesbians can theoretically exist.
But this isn’t 1995, where Blanchard is only a decade out of date. It’s not even 2005, where WPATH started rejiggering it’s standards under the “Okay, so maybe we shouldn’t be adhering to crap 70s and 80s research in a world where we’ve stopped classifying gay people as a mentally ill”).Report
As I said above, it has to do with the blurring of the evolution of “grooming” (steps #1, #2, and #3) and teachers saying “we’ll do #2”.
And, of course, the parents out there who hear #2 and immediately assume that there’s going to be a #3… even though there’s not necessarily a reason to believe that there will be a #3.
And if you want an example of that, we’ve linked to the one teacher who has bragged on social media about the changing closet where the kids can get to school, change into their “real” outfit, go to classes, then change back before they go home… without their parents knowing about it.
If you don’t see that blurring as part of ANYTHING, then I guess I have no examples of ANYTHING.Report
You do understand, that the teachers who do #2 most often, are heterosexual cis men, right?
I would be only half facetious if I demanded that ONLY gay and trans people be allowed in a classroom.Report
Sure.
But if I wanted to explain why examples of there being a culture of normalizing teachers and students not telling parents things being an example of something (ANYTHING) that would make parents freak out?
There you go.
“But that’s not the *BAD* keeping secrets! It’s the *GOOD* keeping secrets!”
“Yeah, that’s outside of the scope of my observation.”Report
No, t doesn’t explain it, but does exactly the opposite.
The Republicans are lynching gay and trans people and you’re pointing to statistics about about cishet men abusing children.Report
in the “Words Have Meanings” thread – the Republicans are lynching gay and trans peopleReport
Showing teachers bragging on social media about doing things for students and keeping it hidden from parents (see, for example, the example I gave that had you respond “Oh! I hadn’t seen this!”) is not exactly the opposite of keeping secrets from parents.
It’s more or less the same thing as keeping secrets from parents.
And normalizing keeping secrets from parents is something that parents are freaking out about.
And pointing out that the overwhelming number of examples are heterosexual does the opposite of addressing these concerns.Report
Even if someone were doing all the things you say, it fails to explain the Republican behavior as anything but bigotry.
The Republicans could respond with a rational policy tailored to problem teachers but they don’t.
They react with bigotry, by a free and willful choice.
You haven’t bothered to dispute that but instead just bang on about misbehaving teachers as if that means anything.Report
I suppose that that’s true. Perhaps the examples of the people saying things that I’m sharing are examples of people lying about what they’re doing.
Perhaps they’re deliberately trying to undercut the goal!
The Republicans could respond with a rational policy tailored to problem teachers but they don’t.
I don’t have kids but I understand that parents are really irrational about their own, for some reason.
But it’s, like, they’re *PREDICTABLY* irrational about them.Report
So after all this discussion, you’re just agreeing that yeah, parents are irrationally bigoted towards gay and trans people.Report
Another thing I said back at the beginning:
I’d say that there are a bunch of people who have stuff set to go off for gay stuff before a similar hetero klaxon would go off.
Like stuff that they’d consider perfectly fine, if intimate, would suddenly become not perfectly fine (same level of intimacy) if “gay” or “trans” were part of the dynamic. Stuff that would go off at a 5 over here would go off at a 4 over there, to use a crude numerical system.
And, get this, I think that going with an overt “we’re going to educate the children differently!” is likely to backfire and it’s even more likely to backfire if the idea that keeping secrets from the parents is normalized.
“Ought!”
“Yeah, well. Is.”Report
You keep pretending that bigotry is inevitable like some iron law of nature, but clearly empirical evidence falsifies your assertion.
Attitudes towards gay and trans folk have shifted remarkably of the past two decades to where the Republican position is so unpopular it needs to be hidden under layers of lies.
This thread is the perfect example of that, where it took hundreds of comments before the pretense (children are being molested) was abandoned and the real motivation (we just don’t like trans people ok) was admitted.
So even you argument of “Is/Ought” fails not just on moral grounds but pragmatic ones.
Trans acceptance is rapidly becoming the Is.Report
Well, then full speed ahead. This is nothing more than a little hiccup on the way to a much better future with much less bigotry against gay people and transsexuals and bills like Florida’s are a last gasp of bigotry and we’ll see it evaporate away like racism did following Loving v. Virginia.
I do think that normalizing stuff like “keep secrets from parents” is going to bite you in the butt, though.Report
Speaking of predictably irrational: I predict that this means….the onus lies on trans people and liberals to have proactively countered predictable irrationality, and since they didn’t, it’s really their fault.
Bigots gonna bigot, right? So why have you failed to make the bigots happy? They’re angry, quite predictably, that trans and gay people exist — which is the fault of trans and gay people and especially Democrats for Not Doing Enough.Report
“I’m all for narcing on kids who [checks notes] “Changes clothes upon coming to school but still conforms to dress code” to their parents, in order for them to be beaten by said parents for being “gay/trans/sissy/no child of mine””
Is a weird flex.Report
I’ll repeat myself again:
Report
Oh, are we talking about morals and ethics of social media now?
I get confused with how often you shift the topic rather than defend your stance.
Sorry, I forgot who I was dealing with.
well, you won’t get me disagreeing with you — teachers really should anonymize any student information when dealing with social media, which means some things they simply can’t talk about due to small class sizes making statements like “I have a student this year” too easy to divine.
So can we go back to talking about the actual topic, which is bashing trans kids to gin up voters for the mid-terms?
I know it distracts from talking about which liberal made Ken Paxton hate trans kids, but darnit, it does seem to be the actual topic.Report
It’s not the morals and ethics of social media, exactly, as much as it is the morals and ethics of bragging, publicly, about setting up a changing closet that the children will use that the parents don’t know about AND INDEED THE PARENTS NOT KNOWING ABOUT IT IS PART OF THE POINT. IT IS DELIBERATELY ADVERTISED AS KEEPING A SECRET FROM THE PARENTS.
And if you want to have parents *NOT* freak out?
Don’t start wandering down the path from “perfectly fine, if intimate conversations” through “keeping secrets from the parents” EVEN IF YOU NEVER EVER HIT DOING BAD STUFF.
We’ve already had multiple people pull the old “THAT’S NOT HAPPENING GIVE A SINGLE EXAMPLE” and, well, here. There’s a single example.
“But that’s good, though.”
Yeah. That’s how this evolves, isn’t it?Report
And after we’re done shifting the topic of discussion from X to Y to Z, the next move is to talk about how we talk about X, or is it Y? or Z? rather than X or Y or Z itself.
Maybe the next move after that ought to be talking about whose comment threads end up this way and why.Report
It’s always about the tone.
Look, if you didn’t point out open racism, the racists wouldn’t be so racist. What made them hate black people, Hispanics, Jews, whatever was that you accused them of it.
They just had to go out and get that swastika tattoo once you opened your mouth.
I’m sorry, are you a little upset about people bashing trans kids? Someone repeatedly lying about trans kids despite being corrected five times in this very thread?
Your tone is what’s driving them away. If you weren’t so unhappy with their bigotry, they’ve have mended their ways.
It’s YOUR FAULT.
You need to understand this.
That “Don’t Say Gay” Law? It’s triggered by liberals and gay people. They did SOMETHING or else DeSantis would never have done it. There are no anti-gay bigots in Florida until Disney made them bigots by having pride week.
So we’re all missing the point by not talking about how awful Pride Week is.
Don’t we all long for the days gay people just got rolled in back alleys, quietly, and didn’t offend the delicate conservative sensibility of America?
blah. I’m so sick of people who would step over a dying child to lecture someone on their tone, and how if they’d just been more polite he’d have had time to administer first aid. Way to kill a child, liberal.Report
None of my priors have been particularly shaken by the conversation either, I confess. But this particular freak out by the right has struck me as especially retro. Just aimed at an even more granular minority.Report
It’s so retro — so 1990s through DOMA — that even the GOP keeps slipping and making it anti-gay as well.
With a dash of satanic panic.
I can’t decide if the GOP thinks there’s an opportunity here, or whether the Trump years just means they’ve had to go back to the Greatest Hits to keep the votes going.
I mean at least in Texas, Ken Paxton had a tight primary (heading to a run-off) and Abbot, while he will win versus Beto easily enough, knows GOP statewide margins have slipped so far that he actually has to put in effort to juice the base just to make sure.Report
What I’ve found, since really looking into this issue, is that gay acceptance is paper-thin, and that there’s a lot more anti-trans bigots than I would have imagined — even on the “left” in America.
I suspect nothing I’ve discovered is really a surprise to anyone who is trans.Report
That surprised you?Report
Some of the people it’s coming from? Yes.
It’s clear, for instance, that some ostensibly liberal people simply don’t view trans people as being actually trans. They don’t actually accept the notion that your gender identity might not match your physical body — or rather, they think it’s all in your head.
A mental illness that apparently the soft-minded psychologists and psychiatrists of the world are simply indulging out of some politically correct fear instead of “properly treating” whatever that means. (Trans people — less than 1% of the population, with high suicide rates and often living in poverty — but somehow making all the world’s mental health experts lie for them)
I mean offhand simple logic tells you that if there’s a treatment that works BETTER than changing the body to fit the mind, everyone would do THAT.
But these same folks also seem to believe it’s just a perverted sex thing and we all know how sex perverts will spend money and do awful things to their bodies to get off — and the talking points are so on the money for 90s anti-gay talking points that I suspect their support for gay people is…not much better.
“We let you marry, Jesus, so can you just slink away now?”
At you know where you stand with DeSantis and Trump.Report
They self-identify as women, which is not an easy or comfortable thing for them to do. Why should that be disregarded?Report
Gess what? They are really really dumb. Texas just threw a woman in jail on charges of murder, bail set a $500k, for inducing her own abortion.Report
And then dropped the charges after it was confirmed she miscarried. Which in no way makes the initial charging any less cruel, but it does illustrate what is likely to come of these things if these laws stay on the books.Report
Remember when we had a discussion about Kevin Williamson’s comments about hanging women who get abortions?
And how all the savvy pundits and reasonable conservatives laughed at us and swore we were being paranoid?
Good times.Report
I think we all have to ask ourselves, as liberals — if conservatives are trying to hang women who get abortions, what did WE do to make them get so upset?
Clearly, if he’s wanting to hang women that get abortions — the other side must have done SOMETHING to provoke him.
We need to understand that both sides are the same, but especially that liberals and Democrats are to blame.Report
A beautifully succinct parody of several commenters.Report
Currently, anyone can be charged with murdering a child in the womb outside of the mother of that child. Happens in burglaries gone wrong all the time. Pregnant woman gets hurt, loses the child. Murder changes get filed against the burglar.Report
Inside the mother of the child, it’s too dark.Report
The most amazing part of this story, at least for me, is the lockstep conservative adoption of the term groomer for anyone who opposes bills and laws like Florida’s. Say what you will about the batsh*ttery going on with their messaging, they do stay on point.Report
It’s sloganeering, which is endemic to political discourse. Remember “He crossed state lines!” “insurrection,” “This is not normal,” “maverick,” “the 1%,” etc.?
Really, considering how rare it is for people to have original thoughts, it’s surprising that the language doesn’t line up more often.Report
They all use the same consultants. It’s like how Trump’s Supreme Court list looked so attractive. There’s a think tank or 3 who does this stuff.Report