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Good News from New York State

piny

Just a quick half-entry on this article in the NYT (thanks to pmoney in comments):

After learning that a male science teacher planned to return this year as a woman, school district officials spent nearly nine months worrying and wondering how to keep the transition from causing an uproar.

It seems to have worked.

Students at Batavia High School returned from summer vacation on Wednesday morning and sat through a short presentation on the teacher’s transition and the medical condition propelling it — gender identity disorder, the fervent desire to become a member of the opposite sex and distress at one’s own gender.

Then it was like any other first day of school, officials and students said.

Hee. “Fervent.”

But no job loss! No harassment! No battle between teacher and administration! No mass exodus of hothouse children!

Just this woman:

“It’s wrong,” Amber Robinson, the mother of a 14-year-old boy who is in one of the teacher’s classes, said after the meeting. “If you’ve got a problem, go away. My son is academically challenged and immature — he’s not prepared to handle this. The district is encouraging my son to fail.”

It’s true, you know. There’s a direct correlation between access to transition and falling teenage literacy rates.

26 thoughts on Good News from New York State

  2. Surely if your son is immature and academically challenged, you should be doing something to help him instead of telling his teachers to go away.

  3. Zuzu, you got to it before I did. He’s “academically challenged” because she can no longer ignore his failure to perform to grade level. Now, she wants a scapegoat. But he was a failure already.

  5. Batavia is seriously not a liberal town, so this community reaction is really quite impressive (there’s a bigot in every town just biting at the bit to spew at a camera…)

  6. “If you’ve got a problem, go away…”

    Wow, she very succinctly captured the attitude of every bigot. The very existence of people who are in any way “different” is a threat to these jackasses.

  7. She’s ignoring the very real teaching opportunity.

    “Read, ya little bastard, or I’ll speak fervently to you about my reasons for making this decision!”

  9. Casey, you beat me to it.

    Good for Batavia!

    Having taught 14-year-olds, they couldn’t care less about their teacher’s lives…they are FAR too engrossed in themselves and their peers. If the adults don’t make a fuss, the kids won’t either.

    I can’t believe that Amber Robinson could think that having a trans teacher creates a hostile environment in some way. That’s just silly.

  11. While I don’t want to paint a rosier picture of social-conservative attitudes towards transpeople than is accurate, I think that transition can be perceived as compatible with a regressive, sexist social philosophy. The good people of Batavia seem very accepting, but their acceptance might have to do with “corrective” attitudes towards transition that were traditional in the days of the gender clinics.

  13. I just thought it was nice that -for the most part- the town seems to be handling things sanely.

    I also couldn’t help but cringe at the thought of Amber’s son in school tomorrow…. you know when all his peers are laughing at him for being “academically challenged and immature.” Thanks, mom!

  14. pmoney beat me to it. This kid will be going by the nickname “academically challenged and immature” till he gets to college. I would have died from shame if my mom did this to me. Way to go to the rest of the community though. Makes me feel a little better about living in NYS.

  15. pmoney beat me to it. This kid will be going by the nickname “academically challenged and immature” till he gets to college. I would have died from shame if my mom did this to me. Way to go to the rest of the community though. Makes me feel a little better about living in NYS.

    Yup. But then, she didn’t seem terribly self-reflective, you know?

  16. I just heard about this yesterday, my mom was telling me about it, as we only live a couple hours from Batavia. She is more on the side of Ms. Robinson, so I was trying to explain to her why it was important to be supportive and explain this to the kids in a positive, non judegemental manner, but she didn’t see it. I actually mentioned you Piny, and how much I’ve learned about trans issues from you. Hopefully some of what I was sayng will sink in eventually.

  18. “If you’ve got a problem, go away…”

    So people with problems like being academically challenged and immature should go away, Amber?

  19. “Academically challenged and immature” applied to about, oh, 90% of the kids I went to high school with (myself included, at least in the “immature” bracket). And I’d say we were much more “encouraged to fail” by each other (Trisha’s skirt doesn’t touch the floor when she kneels, Jake’s not starting the homecoming game because he got busted drinking, John’s mum caught him and Jamie rolling pot on her fine china and they’re in all sorts of trouble, Lindsay’s thong is still hanging outta her skirt and it’s leopard-print today) than even the hottest or quirkiest teacher we had.

    Scapegoat indeed.

  22. Hee! Luckily, Marginalia is very close to Margaritaville.

    Piny, by “corrective” attitudes toward transition, do you mean casting it all under the disability accommodation plan? Because I’m thinking that’s what would ease the news in a conservative town.

    It’s interesting how a diagnosis of gender identity disorder paves the way for better manners and community support. It reminds me of how, in order to qualify for federal disability assistance, one has to pledge that they are truly incapable of being useful at all in this world. The stigma of disability paves the way for acceptance. I’m curious how it shakes out in the minds of her students — is it no big deal because transition is sold as a cure to a mental illness, or because it’s just one big yawn?

  23. Piny, by “corrective” attitudes toward transition, do you mean casting it all under the disability accommodation plan? Because I’m thinking that’s what would ease the news in a conservative town.

    It’s interesting how a diagnosis of gender identity disorder paves the way for better manners and community support. It reminds me of how, in order to qualify for federal disability assistance, one has to pledge that they are truly incapable of being useful at all in this world. The stigma of disability paves the way for acceptance. I’m curious how it shakes out in the minds of her students — is it no big deal because transition is sold as a cure to a mental illness, or because it’s just one big yawn?

    Actually, I hadn’t thought of it as a transparent parallel with disability accomodation–although that’s there, too, with the idea of gender identity disorder. But this is specifically gendered disability, and more a matter of cure than accomodate. Transition was originally sold as the way to make freaks normal; that was why there were so many restrictions on who could transition (e.g. no transmen who liked men, or transwomen who were not sufficiently feminine). That model fell apart largely because transsexuals strenuously resisted the Ward/June model of approved transsexual behavior. I get the sense that this impression persists, such that a transitioned woman is better than a woman trapped in a man’s body.

  24. Hooray for Batavia ! I grew up not too far from there, and have eaten many a slice of pie at a rural diner while passing through. It makes me proud.

    Except, well, for Amber. She should be grateful that her ‘academically challenged’ son was given an explanation and presentation on a topic he’d likely not before encountered (in her house, anyway) so that he can grow as a person.

  25. I’m thinking that making high school students sit through a presentation that explains anything might well cause them to lose any interest in it. That’s why the absinance-only programs are so bad. If you have assemblies on the advantages of oral sex and cooking meth you could probably somp them out.

    Poor son of Amber Robinson.

  26. What occurs in the womb or in the birth canal or during the first years of life that makes people so pathetically stupid? I just can’t imagine how people can think such crap in any serious way.

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