Trans women are not women (Part 8)

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Again we are not obligated to ignore the elephant in the room and let the wrong side dictate the narrative. The Florida Law and a lot of related discourse has absolutely zero to do with children being "taught" anything and everything to do with parents trying to shield their children from being "exposed" to things.

They want a world where the 1st grade math teacher can casually mention she has a husband but not one where she can casually mention she has a wife or that she identifies as a man or whatever.

Do not pretend it is about anything other than that.

The fact that I roll my eyes at, at this point, the forced affect from the trans side putting on a show of not wanting to really talk about what they actually want does not change that.
 
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Emily's Cat said:
Please provide evidence that Florida's bill bans social transition for minors.
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The recently announced guidelines are different than the bill. Here are the guidelines:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/_docu...022/04/20220420-gender-dysphoria-guidance.pdf

As far as I can tell, these guidelines do not have the force of law. But the guidelines do state, "Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents." As justification, it links to this study:

Not social transition status, but peer relations and family functioning predict psychological functioning in a German clinical sample of children with Gender Dysphoria

Now I'm going to do what SuburbanTurkey wouldn't: I'm going to cast a critical eye on my own side. There's an immediate problem with this paper being used as justification for the guidelines in that the paper looked at children (age 12 and under) and explicitly excluded adolescents (13-17), whereas the guidance is for both children and adolescents. So this paper doesn't tell us anything about how adolescents fare with social transition as a treatment.
 
Ziggurat said:
The recently announced guidelines are different than the bill. Here are the guidelines:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/_docu...022/04/20220420-gender-dysphoria-guidance.pdf

As far as I can tell, these guidelines do not have the force of law. But the guidelines do state, "Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents." As justification, it links to this study:

Not social transition status, but peer relations and family functioning predict psychological functioning in a German clinical sample of children with Gender Dysphoria

Now I'm going to do what SuburbanTurkey wouldn't: I'm going to cast a critical eye on my own side. There's an immediate problem with this paper being used as justification for the guidelines in that the paper looked at children (age 12 and under) and explicitly excluded adolescents (13-17), whereas the guidance is for both children and adolescents. So this paper doesn't tell us anything about how adolescents fare with social transition as a treatment.
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I have philosophical qualms about switching pronouns for young children, with respect to the expectation it plants about how they will develop... but that's completely beside the point here.

I don't see that it's any business at all of the government's to provide guidelines that touch on what children are allowed to wear or how they cut their hair or anything else similar to that. It's abhorrent that they would even try to legislate it!

I had assumed this was actually a case of schools being prohibited from socially transitioning a child without their parent's knowledge, and was being misrepresented. I'm really angry at FL for being this idiotic.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I don't see that it's any business at all of the government's to provide guidelines that touch on what children are allowed to wear or how they cut their hair or anything else similar to that. It's abhorrent that they would even try to legislate it!
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They haven't. This is guidelines for treatment, administered by medical providers. It actually says nothing about what children and parents choose to do on their own, and isn't even addressed to them. And even for health care providers, I don't think this is actually legally binding.

As for why it's any of their business, well, government is now inextricably entwined in the entirety of health care. If you want government out of health care, I'm afraid you're going to have to get government money out of health care too. That's... not likely to happen. Which means that government will continue to meddle in health care, for good and for ill.
 
JoeMorgue said:
They want a world where the 1st grade math teacher can casually mention she has a husband but not one where she can casually mention she has a wife...
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I don't doubt that they (religious conservatives) do in fact want this, but they didn't draft the law so as to achieve that specific end.

"[P]rohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation" doesn't limit discussion to same-sex orientation, it limits discussion of any and all sexual orientations. If it's okay to mention your husband, it's okay to mention your wife.

The enrolled version of the bill may be found here.
 
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d4m10n said:
I don't doubt that they (religious conservatives) do in fact want this, but they didn't draft the law so as to achieve that specific end.

"[P]rohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation" doesn't limit discussion of same-sex orientation, it limits discussion of any and all orientations.

The enrolled version of the bill may be found here.
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I... I don't even know how the explain it anymore.

THEY DON'T ******* CARE HOW THE LAW IS ******* WRITTEN.

That has nothing to do with how they will enforce it.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I... I don't even know how the explain it anymore.

THEY DON'T ******* CARE HOW THE LAW IS ******* WRITTEN.

That has nothing to do with how they will enforce it.
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Who exactly is “they”?

The people who actually write laws care a lot about how they are written. The people who vote for or against laws generally do too. It looks to me like you are using some unspecified “they” in order to make your claims unfalsifiable through ambiguity.
 
Ziggurat said:
Who exactly is “they”?

The people who actually write laws care a lot about how they are written. The people who vote for or against laws generally do too. It looks to me like you are using some unspecified “they” in order to make your claims unfalsifiable through ambiguity.
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In this case, I think he has a point. My problem with that law is that it's so vague it could apply to darned near any comment that touched on sex, even something as simple as referring to having a wife. It's a safe bet that no one would even think about invoking it, either as a prosecution or threat, if a man referred to his wife, but it's not hard to imagine doing that if a woman did the same thing.

I think it is so vague that it could be considered unconstitutional for that reason.


And.....I agree with the sentiment of the law. I really don't think we need to introduce any sort of sex discussion, including unconventional gender identities, to young children. However, if it happens to come up, I don't think anyone should fear making comments. It's just that with that law, it's hard to say when you have crossed the line, and it's very obvious that the line is drawn much farther away for comments about "normal" relationships than for anything outside the lines.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The religious death cult you pretend you aren't a cheerleader for.
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"Religious death cult". That's cute, Joe.

The legislation wasn't drafted by a "religious death cult". It was drafted by the Florida legislature. They had an intention when they wrote and passed it, and it wasn't to sacrifice babies to Moloch.
 
Meadmaker said:
In this case, I think he has a point. My problem with that law is that it's so vague it could apply to darned near any comment that touched on sex, even something as simple as referring to having a wife. It's a safe bet that no one would even think about invoking it, either as a prosecution or threat, if a man referred to his wife, but it's not hard to imagine doing that if a woman did the same thing.
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If the plain language of the law doesn't forbid mentioning having a husband or a wife, the courts aren't likely to tolerate punishing people for doing so. It's strawmanning 101 to pretend otherwise.
 
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d4m10n said:
If the plain language of the law doesn't forbid mentioning having a husband or a wife, the courts aren't likely to tolerate punishing people for doing so. It's strawmanning 101 to pretend otherwise.
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Sigh....


Here's the wording.

3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third
parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur
in kindergarten through grade 3


You tell me where the line is. I don't know. If I mention a person who is a man and has a husband, is that "Classroom instruction" about "sexual orientation" or not? I can't tell. If a teacher is a transwoman and says, "I was assigned male at birth," is that instruction on gender identity, or not? Once again, I can't tell where the line is.

And I think the people who drafted the law want it that way.


And, as I said, I'm sympathetic to the drafters of the law. The truth is that if there is a person who presents as a woman at the front of the class, I don't want her to explain anything about what she was "assigned at birth", or what that even means. On the other hand, if a kid says, "Ms. Smith? My mommy says you aren't a real woman." I don't want her first thought to be, "Oh, no. I might get sued if I say the wrong thing."

I said "prosecuted" earlier, but I think it was a civil infraction. I'm not sure exactly who might get sued for what, but I know that the terms aren't defined and it could make it difficult to respond to kids without fear of something bad happening.
 
Meadmaker said:
If I mention a person who is a man and has a husband, is that "Classroom instruction" about "sexual orientation" or not?
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Not.

Meadmaker said:
If a teacher is a transwoman and says, "I was assigned male at birth," is that instruction on gender identity, or not?
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If it turns into a lecture explaining all the terms, yes. Otherwise, probably not.

Meadmaker said:
And I think the people who drafted the law want it that way.
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Assuming that they intended to create a chilling effect, pretending that this law completely forbids mentioning having a husband or being trans is just helping that process along.

And, as I said, I'm sympathetic to the drafters of the law.
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I'm not. Homosexuality and transexuality are common enough in our culture that grade schoolers should have a working understanding of what's going on around them.
 
This is a very thoughtprovoking article about "social transition" of children.

A childhood is not reversible

Social transition is a strategy with an expiry date. It’s a short-term strategy with long term consequences. It works so easily for young children – pre-puberty it truly is impossible to tell for many whether they are male or female. The young child who is transitioned is treated by everyone as the opposite sex, and because they are small, they believe that this is how things are. Everyone is happy and the social transition provides short term relief all round. Child is happy, parents are happy, we all celebrate. But in the long term, it creates a problem which is not reversible. Puberty is going to arrive, and the child who has been socially transitioned is put in an impossible situation. They’ve been told all their life they ARE a boy (and that anyone who says they aren’t is transphobic), but their body knows otherwise.
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Ziggurat said:
It almost doesn't matter, because the field is corrupted.

Remember that article SuburbanTurkey posted which, among other things, claimed that puberty blockers were reversible? And then when I dug into it, the links it claimed supported that either didn't, or actually contradicted it? This wasn't a one-off. It's sadly the norm now. If they will lie about the consequences of drugs on children, why wouldn't they lie about the existence of a consensus?
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I've been unable to escape making the same analysis, even though I expected differently. Admittedly, I got involved in these issues a bit late. It probably wasn't until sometime during the previous year, when the largest university hospital and medical research center in Sweden stopped hormonaltreatment for minors with gender dysphoria (and all hell broke loose... in online groups).
 
d4m10n said:
I'm not. Homosexuality and transexuality are common enough in our culture that grade schoolers should have a working understanding of what's going on around them.
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I'm not convinced they need a working understanding of sexuality at all at that age.
 
Rolfe said:
This is a very thoughtprovoking article about "social transition" of children.

A childhood is not reversible
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I read that a while back, and it's an excellent piece. I think this sums it up as well:

Social transition isn’t reversible, because what we tell our children for years can’t be reversed. When we disconnect them from their biological sex, we set up patterns of denial and secrets. We set them up to hate their bodies at puberty, to beg for blockers and binders, because for years we told them they could change sex, and they believed us. They are desperate to go back to the years when no one knew any different, but that time will never come again. Time is not reversible.
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