At times, it’s difficult…

53 thoughts on At times, it’s difficult…

1. Because God knows, when I was an elementary school student, I looked up to no one more abjectly than our substitute teachers.

   And remember all the questions you would ask them about their gender identity? Good times.

2. And remember all the questions you would ask them about their gender identity? Good times.

   *Snort*

   You know, kids in general tend to be much more straightforward about that kind of thing. They’re all about figuring out where things go. As long as they can fit you into one box or another–“Are you a boy or a girl?”–they’re golden. Not to say that this is the best way to approach the topic, but the kids are probably less anxious about this than the adults.

3. I think it was on Pandagon where I saw someone’s comment to the effect of, “Welcome to the public schools, where you and your child will meet members of the public.”

4. In my experience, it’s usually not the bulk of the students that have problems with this kind of thing — they might react with a few jokes or an “oh, that’s weird” kind of thing, but usually get over it pretty quickly.

   We had a local case not unlike this around here a number of years ago, where the teacher got fired when parents flipped, if I remember right. A whole lot of the kids protested and crap. I can’t remember what wound up happening, though.

   And just because I can’t resist, I’d just like to say that “Schneep” is among the funniest names I’ve ever seen. Looks like it should be a character from a Roald Dahl book or something.

5. I voted in their little poll just to see what the results were. Because I’m something of a glutton for punishment, evidently.

   It’s barely on the “No, I wouldn’t refuse to let my child be instructed by a transsexual teacher” side. People are so goddamn stupid. I’m so mad right now, and I’m not sure why this set me off like it did, but, oof.

   On a lighter noted, did anyone else notice that her skin looks fantastic?? At least in that little picture, I never would’ve guessed 71 by her face.

6. It’s really hard to fathom how people manage to convince themselves that such hateful attitudes are somehow okay. Are they really afraid that meeting a transsexual substitute teacher is going to somehow screw up their child’s gender identity for all time? I wonder. And I know I’m not going to get anywhere wondering, but I wish I understood this better. That sure is an off-the-wall and fucked up thing to go around being afraid of.

   I remember a conversation back in my churchgoing days with a pastor’s wife. She was earnestly explaining the proper attitude toward homosexuality and homosexuals, how we were supposed to love the sinner and hate the sin. She told me all about how if a pair of gay men moved in next door to her. “I would love them,” picture the southern accent, now, she would luuuv theyum… “but I wouldn’t let my boys go over to their house.” Or, really, she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. She would ostracize them. But… lovingly. Apparently.

   Ugh.

7. So let me get this straight. This person just wants to do their job and…..they want to fire her for that?

   Yeah, small government and all.

8. Are they really afraid that meeting a transsexual substitute teacher is going to somehow screw up their child’s gender identity for all time?

   yes, I think this is exactly true.

   I think that your average parent in this country (1) has a strong belief both that there is a “normal” and that their kids will be happier, more secure people if they are “normal” and (2) actually thinks that he/she has some choice in whether the kids come out that way, that it’s not a fairly random process that’s influenced by all kinds of things.

   So while John Q. Parent likes to tell himself that he’s just Fine And Dandy with queers — it’s not our fault, after all — he also thinks we’d have been a lot better off (and thereby his kids will be a lot better off) if we’d just been normal like everybody else. Which he figures might not have been our parents’ fault — but What If?

   Just my reading of people’s attitudes.

9. I think the problem is that these parents are deathly afraid that they are going to have to explain the concept of “transgender” to their 3rd grader. Just like they get all flustered when the pre-schooler asks how the baby got in that woman’s tummy?

   Welcome to the real world — complex, strange, and wonderful. Now grow up and figure it out that people are people, no matter their skin color, gender or sexual orientation, or religion. We all have our own beauty and our own warts. Deal.

10. I love the quote about putting kids in a petrie dish, because that would take a lot of compression and would produce super-dense disc-shaped kids.
    “Schneep” is more Dr. Seuss than Roald Dahl, really, though it would be irresponsible to craft a faux-Seussian rhyme implying that the gentleman in question has sexual relations with wooly barnyard animals.

11. You’re right, “Schneep” is definitely more Seussian.

    I love the quote about putting kids in a petrie dish, because that would take a lot of compression and would produce super-dense disc-shaped kids.

    I’m sorry, I just had to repeat that. Just because I had to.

12. “Welcome to the public schools, where you and your child will meet members of the public.”

    That’s pretty darned funny, too.

13. This sounds a lot like the book Tran-Sister Radio by Chris Bohjalian. It’s too bad people are upset about this.

14. That was a really good book…

15. Laurie’s said it best: these folks are afraid to have to be in a position where THEY might actually have to TALK to their OWN children. You’d be shocked… well, maybe not… at the number of times parents of my students have asked me to talk to their kids about something they should be talking about.

    Hey, I got my own kids to worry about.

16. This whole thing shows the sad fact that too many children learn how to hate very early in their lives. Then when the children grow up to be angry and confused adolescents and act out, they point somewhere else, like blaming those damn trans people for interfering with their happy little lives.

    Makes me sick everytime I read about parents teaching their children to hate and sicker when I see these children act on the hate they’ve learned.

    We’ve got far to go to fight such ignorance.

17. I think the problem is that these parents are deathly afraid that they are going to have to explain the concept of “transgender” to their 3rd grader.

    Bingo. Because of course it’s somehow all about sex and then they’d have to, like, explain sex to their kids. Or something.

    I’m intrigued by the use of a Petri dish as a parenting tool.

18. I think the problem is that these parents are deathly afraid that they are going to have to explain the concept of “transgender” to their 3rd grader.

    Please correct me if I’m wrong, but after SRS isn’t the correct term “transsexual”? Not to be unnecessarily nitpicky! It was really helpful for me when I didn’t think I had any trans friends (turns out I did) to understand the distinction between trans(vestite | gender | sexual).

19. I think that it would be helpful to always keep in mind that the Left is pure science and the Right is applied engineering. It was the Left that introduced “dispositions theory” to education so that they could boot teachers, or prospective teachers, from the profession if they didn’t pass a subjective test on their dispositions. Not surprisingly the dispositions that were favored were all supportive of the Left’s favorite bugaboos. Dispositions are rationalized as being necessary because teachers are thought to transmit value to their students beyond what is in the lesson plan. Further, those booted because of their dispositions are told to find solace in the fact that the dispositions exam doesn’t judege their value as people, just that their values shouldn’t find expression within a schooling environment.

    Why should we be surprised that some on the Right are applying this “science” as engineering? These parents aren’t relying on an argument of lessor moral worth being assigned to transexuals, just that this transexual may be inadvertently transmitting values to the students and these values are inappropriate in a classroom environment.

    We’re likely to see the same prinicples play out in Washington State where police executed a warrant on a teacher’s home for the purpose of looking for drug paraphenalia, didn’t find any but seized his computer, and then found child pornography. I’ll leave it to the lawyers amongst us to argue about what happens to the child porn evidence (I’m not sure how seizing a computer is warranted) but if the whole thing gets thrown out of court, then we have a teacher who is known to be attracted to children, but there have been no accusations of inappropriate conduct against him. What should the district do about that situation?

20. I think that it would be helpful to always keep in mind that the Left is pure science and the Right is applied engineering.

    Other than a desire to demonise “The Left” because you’re on “The Right’, I don’t get it.

    The current conservative edu-fad is insisting that boys are falling further behind, so we need to abandon traditional teaching methods for something that doesn’t involve so much of that girly language stuff. This, from the same crowd that insisted on the Three Rs and Strict Discipline until recently…

21. Other than a desire to demonise “The Left” because you’re on “The Right’, I don’t get it.

    Let me try it this way: Any sufficiently potent quasi-intellectual sophistry concocted on the Left is eventually appropriated by the Right.

    Here’s an example:

    Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, aligned himself with President Bush on Friday when he said that the theory of intelligent design as well as evolution should be taught in public schools.

    …Such an approach “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone,” Mr. Frist said in Nashville, according to The Associated Press. “I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

    Frist is taking the philosophy originated by the Left, and even their tone of being sensitive to relativism and using it to drive home the idea that teaching I.D. is just a fair thing to do.

    The Right would never have the originality to come up with this type of thing, but once the path has been cleared for them, like good engineers, they’ll master the technique as they adapt it to fit their agenda.

    The Left devised “dispositions theory” and in a sense, it is the teacher’s disposition and the teacher’s values that are the issue here and I think as the more sophisticated Right thinkers get on board, you’ll see less emphasis on the “transexuals are an affront to God” message and more sophistry on the dispostion of the teacher.

    “…whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Galatians, 6:7.

22. I don’t think Tango is saying this just to snipe at the lefties, Mythago (as fun as that is). It’s an honest observation; I’ve noticed this too. You guys come up with some (very creative) justification for why whatever the pet project of the week is legitimate, and maybe you win and maybe you lose, but regardless, the technique has become legitimized. We then pick up the technique and use it for our own wicked purposes. Cf. “intellectual diversity” in the academy – and don’t students need exposure to all kinds of different points of view? Enter David Horowitz.

    When I was a lefty, I was uncomfortable with this habit/tactic of innovating novel tools to advance immediate ends, but I was reassured that since we held the media high ground, we could ensure that the righties would never had the chance to counter-deploy these weapons against us.

    Oops.

23. In that you’re saying that “the Right” are master co-opters, you’re exactly correct. The “pure science”/”engineer” analogy implies that “the Left” are fuzzy-headed theoreticians and the “the Right” are practical-minded appliers. I can’t get on board with that, but I fully agree that “the Right” has done an excellent job at co-opting “the Left”s terms of debate and muddying them beyond usability.

24. Actually, Robert, it’s not a one-way street. cf. “states’ rights” and “WWJD?”–things that were once the battle-cry of the right, but which have been picked up by liberals as support for their own agendae. As long as we’re picking on people, I can’t express how amused I am to watch conservatives sputter over these.

25. Ah, but we didn’t invent those things, Mythago – just picked them up from existing strains of thought. You guys are creative.

    KnifeGhost, you could just as easily characterize the dichotomization as “brilliant theoreticians, comfortable with abstract thought” and “plodding engineers, unable to look up from their muddy worksite long enough to draw a conclusion from data”. It’s entirely your choice how you choose to perceive this distinction; kinda revelatory that you choose the one that makes you look bad.

26. Ah, but we didn’t invent those things, Mythago

    ‘Liberals’ didn’t invent the ideas of intellectual freedom or respect for different points of view, either, unless you assume that anyone who believes in those things is by definition a liberal.

27. ‘Liberals’ didn’t invent the ideas of intellectual freedom or respect for different points of view, either, unless you assume that anyone who believes in those things is by definition a liberal.

    Well, in the small-“l” sense of the word, yeah, they obviously are.

    But TangoMan isn’t talking about liberals, whether of the classical or the squishy type. He’s talking about the left.

    The example TangoMan is using is “dispositions theory”. It was indeed invented by lefties. It is indeed going to be turned around and used against them.

    Not sure why this is problematic or controversial.

28. Here is another case that’s currently in the news. This is a perfect opportunity to use the cudgel of “dispositions theory” against the teacher. If the Left can boot people out of the teaching profession because they write “diversity is perversity” in a paper at university, then certainly the same principle can be used against a teacher who teaches his class that some people find Bush and Hitler to be comparable.

    I don’t think anyone is quesioning the competence of this geography teacher, just as no one is questioning the competence of the transsexual teacher. What’s going on is a questioning of whether these people’s dispositions are appropriate for the profession of teaching. The Left has been very vocal and pro-active in declaring what dispositions are essential to teachers, and if you question issues like diversity, gay rights, corporal punishment, etc then you’re denied licensure and/or a university degree, despite the fact that no one has accused the teacher of any actual misconduct and/or violation of conditions laid out in a teaching contract. It’s not the conduct that is on trial, but the person’s philosophy and demeanor.

    If there is anything that qualifies as “quasi-intellectual sophistry” it’s dispositions theory, and this assinine theory is going to be a very effective tool for the Right as their engineers perfect what the Left has devised.

29. What I just cannot understand about this is why so many seem to feel that gay/lesbian/transgender/straight/celibate (whatever) people are on some type of recruitment drive to get people to change their sexual orientation.
    I’m no spring chicken and I have known many people from all sexual persuasions and not once has anyone tried to recruit me to another “team”.
    Oh yeah, I’ve been hit on by another team but never recruited when I stated what team I was on.
    When there are so many genuine issues to be concerned about I just don’t get this one. What exactly are folks afraid of?

30. What exactly are folks afraid of?

    As an outside observer of these battles, I’d say that people are afraid of exactly the same things that the Leftist advocates of disposition theory are afraid of – it’s a grand battle of ideas, and these skirmishes are only small battles in a larger war. These battles are fought to gain or remove tactical advantage – the Left wanted to remove certain people from being able to influence, via their ideas and or demeanor, the young children who are most open to having their views shaped by adults. The Right is fighting back by using the same tactics.

31. It’s entirely your choice how you choose to perceive this distinction; kinda revelatory that you choose the one that makes you look bad.

    It is, but it’s only revelatory of my awareness that “the Right” has done it’s damnedest to weasel those connotations into the public mind.

    The conservative vast majority of the small town I went to high-school in bought it. I reject the “theory/practice” divide between “the Left” and “the Right” entirely.

32. I just don’t think that one’s sexual persuasion is the entire sum of a person.
    I don’t choose friends or role models or those whom I admire based only on their sexual identity or any other single aspect.
    I have brown (ok, also somewhat gray, 🙂 ) hair and brown eyes but I don’t insist that everyone else in the world should have the same.

33. If the Left can boot people out of the teaching profession because they write “diversity is perversity” in a paper at university

    Do you have some kind of cite for this?

34. Edward Swan, Washington State University. They backed down once he got publicity, though.

35. Pop on over to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) who have been doing stand-up work in battling against the application of dispositions theory.

    Over the last year, he was given four substandard evaluations, known as Professional Dispositions Evaluations or PDEs, though he was an A student. Swan was criticized in the PDEs for not having an open mind, for expressing “anti-gay/lesbian sentiments” and ideas about “a woman’s place,” according to FIRE and Swan.

    Swan told his professors that he didn’t believe in the idea of white privilege or male privilege, or that there is a bias any longer in favor of majority groups. One professor called him a white supremacist in one evaluation, though Swan saw that after the fact.

    “I didn’t know I was a white supremacist until I read my file,” said Swan, who points out that he has four bi-racial children from a former marriage to a Hispanic woman.

    Swan was made to attend a diversity training course and ordered to sign an agreement to abide by the dispositions to respect community norms and appreciate diversity. Swan didn’t sign it, and the university withdrew it after receiving complaints from FIRE, which argued that it was an unconstitutional intrusion on Swan’s freedom.

    “That is incredibly dangerous,” said French, who added that Swan was not being judged on his behavior but on his opinions. “They focused on the various expressions, whether it was writing phrases in notebooks, the T-shirt he wore … even wearing a camouflage hunting cap led one person to conclude he was threatening.”

    Or see here for another case:

    In November 2004, McConnell submitted as part of an assignment a paper expressing his personal views on classroom management, including various ideas for attaining a classroom environment that is “based upon strong discipline and hard work” and that allows “corporal punishment.” The paper received an “A-,” with his professor noting that his ideas were “interesting” and that she had shared the paper with the department chair, Cathy Leogrande. McConnell ultimately received an “A” as his final grade in the course.

    Yet in January 2005, with no prior warning, Leogrande dismissed McConnell from Le Moyne. In the dismissal letter, Leogrande stated that she had reviewed McConnell’s grades for courses he took during the summer and fall semesters and had “discussed” his work with his professors. Leogrande wrote, “I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals. Based on this data, I do not believe that you should continue in the Le Moyne [Master of Science for Teachers] Program.” At the time he was dismissed, McConnell had achieved a grade-point average of 3.78 for the fall semester and had received an “excellent” evaluation for his work in an actual classroom.

    Here is some commentary on dispositions theory from The New Criterion.

36. Success breed imitation. Of course the right is going to copy those tactics that the left has used successfully. Its called an “Arms Race” – its a fundamental part of many adaptive processes.

    The Right is certainly not immune. The slaves who cant wait to surrender their freedom and privacy to Master Bush are going to feel the lash when the manor changes hands. And yes, I will hold them responsible when gun owners are classified as “enemy combatants” and shipped to GITMO by a Liberal gov’t in the name of fighting domestic right-wing terrorism.

37. Um, hold up just a second. This woman’s job is not being threatened because she said anything to her students. Do you really see no difference between a teacher who happens to be something and a teacher who advocates certain views in the classroom? So far as I can tell, Ms. McBeth has zero interest in discussing transsexuality with her students. I’m very troubled by the idea that a decision undertaken for reasons that are not generally political should be equated with political argument.

38. Do you really see no difference between a teacher who happens to be something and a teacher who advocates certain views in the classroom

    The two cases I cited of dispostions being used against teachers were because of thoughts not actions. In fact one teacher got a good review for classroom performance.

    So, where are we now?

39. Here we are: In those cases, LeMoyne and WSU were in the wrong. So is anyone looking to block the woman from teaching.

40. Here we are: In those cases, LeMoyne and WSU were in the wrong. So is anyone looking to block the woman from teaching.

    Sure. But they’re still different situations. There’s a difference between, for example, mounting a campaign to fire a teacher because she happens to use anti-depressants to treat post-partum depression and mounting a campaign to fire that teacher because she says in the classroom that Scientology and its teachings on anti-depressants are immoral.

41. Yes, certainly they’re different situations. Also, I think the distinction that TangoMan’s cases involved the Education department at the college level, and the case you brought up is at the school board level. IE: his are issues of how student teachers are handled, your of how a teacher is being treated. There are other distinctions, but, well, there you go.

42. The Right is fighting back by using the same tactics.

    Good grief, in this little imaginary war of yours, the Right is only reactive? Do you think that nobody ever fired teachers for having the ‘wrong’ opinions before the 60s? My parents were teachers and had to sign a loyalty oath, for fuck’s sake. My mother was required to quit teaching when she became pregnant. I’m a little tired of the whining about PC, meaning, “the same things we dream abuot doing only we hate it when liberals do it”.

43. Good grief, in this little imaginary war of yours, the Right is only reactive? Do you think that nobody ever fired teachers for having the ‘wrong’ opinions before the 60s? My parents were teachers and had to sign a loyalty oath, for fuck’s sake. My mother was required to quit teaching when she became pregnant. I’m a little tired of the whining about PC, meaning, “the same things we dream abuot doing only we hate it when liberals do it”.

    …Yeah. I wish he’d go back to whining about how liberals and the left are too relativist to ever condemn anyone else’s cultural values, no matter how inimical.

44. I support this teacher, but I find much of the “arguments” above to be disingenous at best and oppotunistic lies at worst.

    She is being punished for who she is?

    Actually, by choosing to undergo an extreme form of voluntary cosmetic surgery she opened the door for the parents to say that this debate is about what she DID, not about what she is or feels. She did not simply wake up one morning sans penis – and willfully ignoring this difference does not make your case any stronger.

    Imagine a white man underoing surgery to become “black” and then going to a school with a 50% black student body – the outrage would be tremndous and he would be accused of trivializing the black experience and probably much worse. And many “leftists” WOULD object to that teacher being in the classroom because of the “message” his actions send to the children. Of course, a person should have as much right to choose the color of their skin as their sex, but it all depends on whose ox is gored.

45. You cant have your cake and eat it to – if you want extra-ciriccular cirteria to be counted you cant also expect to always be the one determining which criteria are looked at.

46. Actually, by choosing to undergo an extreme form of voluntary cosmetic surgery she opened the door for the parents to say that this debate is about what she DID, not about what she is or feels. She did not simply wake up one morning sans penis – and willfully ignoring this difference does not make your case any stronger.

    This debate is indeed about what she is. She didn’t volunteer to become transsexual; she didn’t volunteer to have a gender identity at odds with the body and life she lived in; she didn’t volunteer to be born with the male body she couldn’t live with. She could choose to continue to live in abject misery or she could choose to undergo procedures that would alleviate her discomfort. That’s no real choice at all.

47. Imagine a white man underoing surgery to become “black” and then going to a school with a 50% black student body – the outrage would be tremndous and he would be accused of trivializing the black experience and probably much worse.

    Are you fucking shitting me?

48. Are you fucking shitting me?

    Of course not.

49. It’s not a terribly uncommon argument.

50. And here’s another.

51. To be honest, the analogy occured to me a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t immediately sort out why it was fundamentally different on the abstract level. And I’m not sure this is the venue to delve into that.

    On the concrete level, of course, there isn’t a community of transracial people suffering discrimination for their identity. The analogy totally falls apart on that level.

52. I should add that, even if we conclude that there isn’t any meaningful difference between transgenderism/transexuality and transracialism, I have to come down on the side of recognizing transracialism as valid.

    Again, not that this is necessarily the place to have that debate.

53. Obviously Gender and Race are biologically quite different, but they have many similarities on a social level.

    I wasn’t making a reductio ad absurdum argument or a swipe at trans-people. I was saying that this is part of the wider struggle to define the exact boundary between everyones “right to choose ones own identity” and that other people ARE going to assert that same right in radically different contexts.

    I am an atheist who has no problem with letting a trans-person be a sub -> If she wants to be a woman its no sking off my back.

    However, I also appreciate the (dangerous and scary, but still real) fact that Christians are increasingly (and HONESTLY) expressing the idea that part of THEIR identity is living by their principles and that forcing them to associate with some people is a fundamental violations of their very identity. Right now, the only reaction I see is “Oh, how amusing. The Rednecks think their beliefs matter. As if ‘the opiate of the masses’ could compete with the fundamental right to gender self-determination”. If you cannot make a more compelling argument than an eyeroll and sarcastic ways of saying “Cant you see the obvious difference you neaderthal” when it comes to a person who agrees that being a trans-person should not be an issue in such circumstances, you have no choice against people who actually take God somewhat seriously (and they outnumber us by a large margin).

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