To address students by their pronouns
A school board meeting in Loudoun County Virginia got so rowdy that the cops had to break it up.
Many of the speakers were there to express support or opposition for a draft school policy that would require teachers to address transgender students by their names and pronouns, as well as grant transgender students access to facilities and activities that match their gender identity. Loudoun is pursuing the policy in accordance with a recently passed state law requiring school systems to revise their treatment of transgender students.
Well, the trouble with that is, by “revising” their treatment of transgender students that way they will be mistreating other students, especially the female ones. If boys who claim to be trans girls can use the girls’ toilets and changing rooms, that’s an intrusion on the girls’ rights.
Late in the evening, after the school board finished its work, chair Sheridan gave a short speech, saying she could not let the “disruption that occurred in our board room tonight go unaddressed.”
…
Sheridan noted that June is LGBTQ Pride Month. She promised that the Loudoun school board will continue to protect the rights of LGBTQ students. She said efforts to convert the county to “a political battleground” — rather than a place of learning — will ultimately fail.
There again – what about the L? what about the rights of L students? They may not want to be forced to pretend that boys who identify as lesbians really are lesbians.
Just talking about LGBTQ as if they all had the same needs and rights and wants isn’t going to work any more.
Loudon County is just a few counties over. It used to be solid red, but like Virginia as a whole it’s been moving toward the blue side of purple. I worry that things like this could nudge the pendulum back in the other direction.
Maybe that is the direction it should go. I have been a lifelong left-liberal, but I nonetheless maintain that it would be difficult for the political Right to be wrong on everything.
Considering that the political right in the US these days is mostly concerned with making it more difficult for Black people to vote, or to have their votes counted, no.
Yes, this. A recent Five Thirty Eight article about polarization talked in part about just how awful the Republican Party is; how conservative parties in industrialized democracies usually respect the norms and mechanisms of democracy, but the Republicans are closer to the authoritarian right-wing parties of Hungary and Turkey. Having a party like this changes the dynamics of politics and raises the stakes for an election.
(Ignore the headline, it’s only partly about the two-party system, and then only at the end.)
Not to mention children in cages, the global gag rule, tax breaks for billionaires, anti-gay and anti-woman legislation, right wing judges, global warming denial, refusal to sign on to VAWA, and anti-abortion…
Gee, yeah, I can’t see any reason not to vote for them. (Meghan Murphy did a post in which she sort of said the same thing as Omar. It’s a bit narrow in view, and dangerous for the world at large.)
I am not usually a one-issue voter, though I do make some exceptions when the stakes are high enough, and I can’t be one issue on this, either. I wish we could get it all in a single package, and the Dems are only moderately liberal, but in contrast with the buffoonery and fascist tendencies of the right…and the fact that their “gender critical” position is that only women are women, transwomen don’t belong in women’s spaces sounds good, but the rest of their policies on women are drawn straight out of a playbook that would relegate women back to the home – kitchen and bedroom mostly – and leave them at the mercy of brutal, angry men.
In addition to everything iknklast says, for the most part the right-wing “gender-critical” position is based on a reactionary view of gender roles: many, if not most, of them want to go back to the days when the woman stayed home, served her husband, and pushed out babies.
Meghan Murphy has taken a serious turn to the right over the past year or so, sadly.
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That is a statement by OB which I support. To do so is not an endorsement of Trump, Trumpism, the Ku Klux Klan, the NRA or any of the other usual suspects. (Let’s face it, even fascists are in favour of motherhood, as are we all.)
XY people sporting male genitalia but wearing female clothes, carrying pro-LGBTQ + the rest of the alphabet banners or whatever should have no right to enter womens’ toilets and changerooms, and will provide clear cover for all manner of rapists and molesters etc if allowed. As someone once also said: Here I Stand.
WAM #5:
What with their complete inability to accept that women can be independent actors apart from being able to buy guns and spew about Jewish Space Lasers starting fires, I simply cannot stomach the idea of voting for the type of Republican that is running for office these days. I can only say that I’ll continue to support the very flawed Democratic Party, and those who work from within it to change the way that this issue is presented currently. For all the issues such as their desire to break the social safety net, refusal to see racism, refusal to address the police abuses, and their blindness when it comes to seeing how their authoritorian approach to “freedom” is cancel cutlure in its own rite makes it impossible for me to vote Republican.
Isn’t that the opposite of gender critical?
Address transgender students by their names and pronouns? What, at the same time? Do teachers not already address students by their names? Is it not completely bizarre to address a person by “their” pronoun? Does nobody in journalism think about the meaning of the words they are stringing together?
I’m learning more about this now.
In 2020, Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed two Virginia House and Senate bills to make a law that directs the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to develop “model policies concerning the treatment of transgender students in public elementary and secondary schools.”
VDOE posted their model policies, and now school boards are adopting policies consistent with the model policies.
VDOE’s list of terminology starts with cisgender, so I’ve learned enough for today.