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First of all, no, teaching ideas is not a hostile act. If it is then we would need to have a serious conversation about teaching religion, and everything else.
Second, what exactly is it that you imagine is happening in schools? I'm sure schools in California have library books that talk about gender, and maybe as many as some kids have ever read them, but it's not going to be in the curriculum or on a test or anything.
Two wrongs don't make a right, I guess?
Doing a bad thing doesn't become good just because you're also doing a second bad thing. I'm not sure what argument you're really trying to make here.
If this is actually your position, would you object to courses teaching about the importance of white identity, the countless benefits ADOS received from being brought to America as opposed to kept in Africa, the science behind HBD theories and the pivotal role played by the republican party in ending slavery?
Teaching certain ideas is, in my opinion at least, absolutely a hostile act.
There's a big difference between 'I might object to this as stupid' and 'This is not literally worse than child abuse.'
What is the difference, as applied to the examples FirmWeird listed?
... I would object to such a course being taught because it is stupid and counter-productive.
If I thought there was a 75% chance that teaching this class to a single child would, by some mechanism, save them from child abuse or being kicked out of their home, I would grudgingly allow it as the lesser of two evils.
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My district uses FLASH to teach sex ed. Here's a sample lesson plan: https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/dph/documents/health-safety/health-programs-services/sexual-health-education/elementary/es02-family.pdf
Here's a relevant snippet:
This lesson is something that 41% of Americans, including 18% of Democrats, think shouldn't be taught in public schools: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
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I, too, remember the popular political refrain of "it's like ramming your dick down my kid's throat" of 2010.
Of course, the same thing applies to other newly-protected characteristics like, well, sexuality; said dick-ramming happens to be a bit more literal these days.
A government that protects characteristics is, by the reasoning behind protective characteristics, not to then start "affirming" some characteristics over others. The Progress flag and the Christian cross belong in equal measure in government: completely absent.
Oh being cis and straight is absolutely affirmed by schools every minute of every day.
Like a fish in water, it's so common that you don't notice it until it's absent for a moment.
This comment got enough reports that I feel it is important to respond to it with my moderator hat on.
This is certainly an unpopular opinion around here, but we don't moderate on unpopular opinions. I partly wish people would stop reporting things just because they are unpopular opinions. This clogs the mod queue for other uses.
At most I'd just say that you could elaborate on something like this:
Which is a claim that might get accepted uncritically in some circles, but not around here.
I can't speak for others, but I didn't report it for being unpopular - I reported it as being consensus-building and being an extraordinary claim without evidence. It's written both as "we all know this is literally true" and uses over-the-top language which seems... at odds with significant evidence of teachers and administrators affirming the opposite. If the claim had been that "being cis and straight will likely pass without notice" I wouldn't have said anything, but that's very clearly not what was said.
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Like a fish in water, it is the normal, healthy, and natural way of the world.
So long as we agree on the empirical claim.
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Indeed, thinking about it further, I see that symbols of straight pride always accompanying the not-straight ones (flags, banners, crosswalks, etc.), mandatory readings of works that are primarily about how awesome being straight is rather than more objective literary value, teachers specifically going out of their way to promote exclusively straight sexual activity and discussing it in detail, and many other examples too numerous that I'm sure I've forgotten them.
Of course, if "affirmation" means "the mere tolerance/existence of straight sexual student behavior in the halls serves as its own affirmation" (in the same way, and certainly consistent with the belief that "the tolerance of anti-whatever belief systems is affirmation of that viewpoint"), one would simply expect that to be discouraged in equal measure (and in most places, it is) rather than what we see, suggesting that the motivations are different and that those affirming aren't interested in equality.
Yes, almost every story involving romance or relationships will be about straight people being happy about their relationships models, many will talk about how awesome their straight love is, they will probably read Romeo and Juliet, etc.
I don't know how things were like when you were growing up, but from my experience most teenagers romantic feelings are barely taken seriously at best, or outright mocked at worst. Hardly what I'd call affirmation.
The example you gave here has to do with normalization, which is a completely different thing. It also has nothing to do with "gender".
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It absolutely can be a hostile act. To go with your religion example, teaching the idea "Jesus Christ is Lord" to Jewish or Muslim students would be a hostile act. By contrast teaching "there are people who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord" would not be, or at least most parents would agree that their kids are going to run into Christians sooner or later, and learning what they believe might help them navigate these interactions. On the other hand sometimes even teaching about an idea would be considered a hostile act. For example, I'm pretty sure many parents would be against having their children be told about the relationship between genetics, race, and IQ (myself included, funnily enough).
I imagine there are many schools draped in the progress flag, with walls covered in progressive slogans. I imagine that even if it's not officially in the curriculum, many teachers take the time to teach that we all have gender identity, and that it's possible for it to not fit your body, and combine that with lessons on privilege. And I imagine, like we discussed in the other thread, that some schools hide from the parents the fact that their children want to transition.
I think they can. Chemotherapy sans cancer is wrong, but is right when you do have it. The point I'm trying to make is that regulations forcing teachers to inform parents about their children's behavior in school is likely making the best of a bad situation, and there's no way to oppose them on "overreach" grounds.
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Some ideas are sufficiently terrible that teaching them to impressionable children is a hostile act. For a nonpartisan example, let’s imagine that schools were teaching time cube(it does, after all, have about the same evidence as modern gender theory, albeit more poorly written). This would be recognized as a hostile act worth getting upset about even though as far as I know the only person who ever ruined his life over believing in time cube was Dr Gene Ray, the cubic and wisest human himself.
Trans is like that, except true believers have a strong tendency to mutilate themselves instead of just declaring themselves the wisest human and naming their personal website ‘abovegod.com’.
Yes, if a primary school curriculum ever has a unit test on the contents of abovegod.org, you will indeed have a valid point.
Until then, I still think you're crying wolf.
Partially by equivocating between very banal and anodyne discussion of what some people believe about gender being social and sex being biological vs the most extreme weird views of niche online trans content providers, and partially by massively overstating how common and central even that banal anodyne discussion is in schools.
And, again: if schools were teaching timecube, that would certainly be very stupid and something we'd want to fix. But it wouldn't be the same type of aggressive and dangerous action as creating a situation where your expected outcome is for a child to be abused by their parents. Violence is worse than speech even if the speech is bad.
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