I'm not so sure that 3rd grade is too early to figure it out.

I'm no expert in transgender or bi or gay development, but I know what it's like to be attracted to someone.

I had the beginning stages of a crush on a girl in kindergarten, and it became a stronger crush as grade school progressed. I wasn't old enough to have the sexual feelings behind the crush, but I knew she was special and I liked her in a different way than I liked other girls. By third grade it was a strong enough crush to know I liked girls, and not boys.

My daughter in second grade had a crush on an older boy.

I don't think that gender identity is a sexual thing at all. In this context. He isn't "gay" ... "gay" males are still male, in gender identity.

I don't feel all that much pain for the other kids losing their share of those fractions of seconds of indecision.That's part of their job already. Kids insult about anything, and if they do it in the presence of a teacher, the teacher has to address it. Nothing new.So they put pamphlets in with a letter? I can't imagine how they managed.

And none of this supreme effort would have been necessary if they weren't worried about other parents freaking out, which isn't the kid's fault.

Ehhhhh, I'm with Bruce. School isn't a democracy. It's one of the few places constitutional rights are vetoed by the educational process. The lil' dude can just wear tight girl jeans if he wants, punk high school kids do it all the time. As long as he isn't cross dressing in the 3rd grade. Bruce is right with all the special attention he will be reeling in.

A transgendered second grader. I'm... skeptical. Frankly this is too young to know with much certainty about it's gender identity (I'm using these terms loosely, in the vernacular, not as a professional). I will say with confidence that a youngster can want to be called any number of things as they're coming up. Including identities of the opposite sex, or of a made up character, etc. This easily can include dressing accordingly.

Even this weekend SonofV and I went through a bit of the "call me Weavel, until we get home, ok?" stuff. No costume changes though. All normal.

Yeesh. What a tempest in a teapot.

good think youre kid is normal bigv hoep that never changes you couldn't handle it.,

closed minded fux here.

ohhai douchebag! so glad to see you haven't been banned yet. with the way you make friends i can see you'll have a long and fruitful stay in the cellar.

lookin forward to it

yes, i'm sure you are. i'm thinking we should get WHIP to give us the over/under on how long you last.

let's see now... joined 10/07. 31 posts. number of positive contributions... still zero.

Im the best ever

tried a contribution but closet minds cant read it cause youall know it all

by "all" do you mean "how to string together properly spelled words to make a cohesive statement"?

Your school may not be a democracy, but some are... and they work pretty well that way.

---

"Information packet" is school speak for pamphlet with a cover note.



The point is, the school is not really going "out of it's way" to help this kid. The kid is not "making them jump through hoops". All you people who think it is s big deal are clearly too far removed from the everyday running of decent elementary schools to realize that this could almost go unnoticed if silly homophobic parents didn't create a hoo-haa about it.

If nothing else, R2D3 has a good user title.

Yes. Fucketh thou, thee fuckiest fuck fuck of the Kingdom of Fucktitude.:lol:

I've seen you. You're like many others, cry because you're wealthy, tell the world what is right, yet you don't contribute to helping anyone, you don't lend a hand, you don't do much but wallow in your sadness over what you could have done if you had used your powers for good instead of evil.

A boring lot.

homophobic? not at all. sick and fucking tired of every other person playing some sort of minority or victim card? yep.

seriously, i don't give a damn what the kid thinks he is or how open minded his parents are. it's real simple: if he has a penis, he's a boy and needs to put a pair of pants on and go to class. if he wants to sit when he pees, that's cool. he can do that in the boys' bathroom. if he wants to be called sheila and wear a dress at home, that's up to his parents. until such time as his parents take him and and pay to have to his pecker cut off, he's a boy. now it's time to stfu, sit down and learn some readin, ritin, and rithmatic. *tobacco spit*

How would you know what the people here contribute to their society? Do you think they post every little thing here so that wankers like you can come and criticize them for it? Do you think the people here need to martyr themselves for the approval of worms like you?

I don't think so.

*looks over shoulder* but,but i thought the interwebz were anonymous. how did you know it was me?

Just one more note on the pamphlet thing.

If schools can send home brochures about the local dance classes or sports or whatever, I don't really see what the difference is if they're informing parents of other changes in the school.

Me lurk you long time. Well, not you in 'ticular.

so, what exactly does that have to do with this? the issue isn't whether or not the kid feels something. it is whether or not we expect schools to make concessions because one kid, one very young kid, feels different.

But what concessions are they making? They're informing the parents - which is consideration in my opinion. They're advising the student to use the unisex toilets instead of having to make the choice of boy or girl.

The only concession is to allow him to wear a girls uniform, but even that could be viewed as his right anyway. I doubt you'd find any school specifying that girls have to wear girls uniforms and vice versa for the boys, even though it's implied. So if that's the case, there's really no concession there either.

most schools that require uniforms are very specific about what is allowed for boys/girls right down to length of hair and color of pants.

maybe my opinion on this is tainted because i have serious doubts about the origin of this kid's gender concerns. he's a kid. kids are always confused and curious. that doesn't mean you have to salute everything they run up the flagpole. my opinion is that if the kid sat his parents down and told them he wanted to be a girl, they should have been compassionate and non-judgemental and told him that's ok, but for now he's a boy and needs to live as a boy. when he is older and more capable of understanding the ramifications of this, then they can explore the possibilities, but now? doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah, I gotta agree with Aliantha here. They're not just wasting money to accomodate a kid. They're informing the parents about what's going on. My high school sent home a bunch of literature to parents when a fellow student brought a gun in too--it's about being informative and honest, not about catering to that individual. I'm sure it wasn't the goal of the kid in question to get the school system to waste a bunch of money sending out letters, and no doubt parents would throw a fit if their kid was in the class with Joe/sephine and they were not informed of the change at all.


(And just in case anyone caught this, I'll clarify--I've been to public schools, been homeschooled and went to a private high school... I'm not just being inconsistent in any lies!)

I get what you're saying lookout, but if our society wasn't so judgemental of people who choose to be different (or simply just are different), there would be no ramifications and I think that's the point the myself and others are trying to promote. Allow it, and bust one more barrier for those kids who have to pretend they're something they're not till they're old enough to know what they are.

I don't know about you, but I always knew I was a girl who liked boys. Why is it so hard for people to accept that most kids do know what they are.

In fact, I'd go further even and say that if our society weren't so stifling, there'd be a lot more kids out there who'd choose to dress other than how society says they should.

And of course i don't mean wearing batman outfits because it's fun.

As a parent, some lessons I *tell* to my son. Some lessons I *show* him. Some lessons I leave for him to discover on his own. Of the three, the third one is the most potent teaching method. It's not always appropriate. "Don't play in the street" is a tell lesson--the stakes are too high to permit an error. How to ride a skateboard is a show lesson--at least at the beginning--he's way better than me now. How to get along with his peers is mostly a (series of) self discovery lessons.

The three methods are not mutually exclusive, of course. And parental temperament plays a big factor in this kind of social dynamic. I prefer the self discovery angle, but not exclusively. Others here have posted their preference for a much more authoritarian stance, mercy and Radar are a couple of examples that come to mind.

I see the parents taking this third track. They may also be doing (or have done) the others too. Where's the harm? What are the stakes, the cost of failure? Pretty low in my estimate. That's a good candidate for learning on their own.

Kids at that age have very clear ideas about whether they're a boy or a girl in my experience. The fact that this child's identity doesn't match his physiology is creating some difficulties. If he was very clear that he was a boy there would be no problem. Unfortunately he is very clear he isn't and that is causing problems. If he was five years olde we would barely question his knowledge of himself, but we assume that boys know they're boys and girls know theyre girls at this early age.

For the record, I knew I was gay before I knew what gay was.

How many of you had crushes on the opposite sex when you were little? How many had crushes on a teacher of the opposite sex then?

Anyone who thinks don't have more than a few clues about what's what are either stupid or..well, actually they are just stupid.
And shame on you for thinking a childs life is OK to force inot a neat little box just to make it easier on you.

Well said Sheldon

Wow, BigV, that's a very astute assessment. Kudos.

Just because they've been told what the are ,and how what they are should act, at that age. There's no way a second grader can comprehend what being one or the other is going to entail.

The implication here - as I read it - is that you can change a kids sexual orientation for the time being, simply by telling him or her how to act.

Kids at that age know a lot more about their sexual orientation than some give them credit for. It's just that at that age, it's not appropriate socially or biologically for those feelings to be acted upon, even though they certainly are in some cases.

OK, I've been thinking about posting this but couldn't remember the boys name till now which was somehow important to me.

When I was kid of about 7 or 8, we had some neighbours move in up the road from us and they had a couple of kids, but the one closest to my age was a boy named Hudson. He used to come to our place each day after school (as most of the other local kids did), but he didn't play rough games in the yard with the boys. He preferred to play with my barbie dolls by himself. I wasn't interested in them, and in the end I gave a heap of them to him to take home. I didn't think anything bad about it at the time. I kind of thought it was weird that he didn't want to play the same games as the other kids, but it didn't bother me, or the other kids as far as I know. Hudson was just a bit different.

Apparently he turned out to be a gay cross dresser and it really didn't surprise me. I think my gaydar must have been tuned in already at that age. I don't think there was anything unusual about me though. All the kids knew something was different. Mum definitely did cause she told us we should be nice to Husdon and make sure the other kids were too. So we did.

The point is, kids know stuff.

In the second grade there is no sexual orientation, there's just kids.

I disagree Bruce. There have been plenty of studies showing that kids have very refined sense of what is 'boy' behaviour and what is 'girl' behaviour. It manifests in the choices they make regarding which toys to play with (from as early as 3 yrs old boys will have a tendency to choose toys with particular properties and girls likewise: eg. in one study children were asked to choose a toy to play with. The choice was between a traditionally 'female' type toy, ie a doll, which was made out of hard materials in colours that were harsh and clashing such as black and red, or a 'boy's toy, that was in soft pastel colours, such as a gun. The boys went for the toy with male properties in terms of colour and shape, rather than content and the girls likewise. This suggests an instinctive, rather than societally formed choice.) Other studies were done whereby male teachers acted in a particular way and female teachers acted in a different way and the children were observed to see which they followed. The boys generally favoured the way the man was acting, and the girls favoured the way the woman was acting. These were very young children, but they had a clear perception of whether they were male or female and followed the role model that most closely associated with that.

I don't buy that conclusion in the slightest. Society tells girls they should play with dolls, but society doesn't tell girls their things should be pink? I think it's interesting the girls chose based on the color rather than the fact that it was a gun, but I don't think you can make the claim at all that this means pink is somehow "instinctive." Hundreds of years ago pink was societally a boys' color because it was agressively vibrant, while blue was a girls' color because it was more demure.

That said, I do believe there is an instinctive understanding of what one likes--and typically, those do fall along the traditional gender expectations. We have stereotypes for a reason. My son has shown a very distinct preference for toy cars since he was six months old. But that doesn't make him a boy, just like wanting to wear dresses doesn't make this kid a girl.

I agree with you and monster that this kid should be allowed to act however he wants to act. But I agree with Bruce that the adults (by which I really mean his parents; even if they didn't want to comply the school's hands are pretty much tied by the threat of a discrimination suit) are trying too hard to be accomodating. It is a medical fact that he is not a girl, he is a boy who likes to wear dresses. I was a big ol' tomboy, who wore dirty t-shirts and played rough games and had almost exclusively male friends until puberty--and while it occurred to my mother that I might end up being a lesbian, no one ever encouraged the idea that I was male, because I wasn't. The girls in my school thought I was a little strange, to be sure, but I am quite certain the boys would have rejected me too had I suddenly started claiming I was one. And that is ultimately my problem with this whole situation: it is not going to accomplish what the little boy wants. His peers are not going to simply pretend he is a girl, even if the teachers manage to keep the bullying to a minimum. You can't make the other kids believe something they know isn't true, and they are going to reject him. The parents ought to be wise enough to see that, and while there is a time and place for letting kids learn their own lessons the hard way, I think in a situation this psychologically delicate they should be helping him choose the path that will ultimately have the least traumatizing outcome for him.

Clod, what I get from your post is that you think the boy's parents should just tell him to dress like a boy because it'll be easier for him (and everyone else). Am I reading it correctly?

No. I'm saying the boy should dress however he wants. He can wear a dress--or a girls' top with embroidered jeans, or whatever--just like a girl can wear pants and a ratty t-shirt.

He should, however, continue to use the same name the students have already called him for over a year, use the boys' bathroom, and allow the teachers to refer to him as "he."

Why not the unisex bathroom? After all, he does seem to be a bit of a mix right now.

Because it will serve to isolate him further from the other kids in the class. I suppose if it's unobtrusive it won't matter one way or the other, but in most elementary schools the bathrooms are connected to the actual classrooms, and if this kid has to go out the main door and down the hall to some other location, it will stigmatize him more than just going in the boys' bathroom with the dress he already has on. Everyone's already going to know him as 'that boy who wears dresses' anyway, so no one will think there is a girl in the boys' bathroom.

I thought someone posted earlier in this thread that most of the bathrooms attached to classrooms were unisex.

Why can't he hold on till morning tea or lunch anyway? By the third grade that shouldn't be too much to ask.

We don't have toilets attached to our classrooms here. There are toilet blocks which are generally well away from classrooms and eating areas.

Two things,

The bathrooms meant for the students at our kids' schools were down the hall from all the classes, not attached to the classroom. Are you saying, Clodfobble, that there are two bathrooms attached to each classroom, in the schools you're talking about? Because if it's single bathroom, then both boys and girls use it, in turn, don't they?

And the second thing, UNIsex bathroom? Ahem, shouldn't this be MULTIsex bathroom, for the one that doesn't have a SINGLE sex sign on the door? Arent' the little boys' room and the little girls' room examples of UNIsex bathrooms?

We have one bathroom at home. What sex is it I wonder?

I have no idea what the bathrooms at this school are like, other than the article indicates that there are separate boys' and girls' bathrooms that are in general use by his class, and a few unisex* bathrooms do exist in another part of the school--presumably farther away--and the child in question will specifically go to use those whenever he needs to go.

In the two elementary schools I attended, as well as two others I have been inside as an adult, classrooms are connected in pairs (usually both the same grade) by a short hallway between them, which is not the main hallway of the school. Within this connecting hallway are two doors leading to bathrooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. I've also seen private places like preschools and daycares use this floorplan. Maybe that's just standard building procedure in Texas, I don't know. By the time you get to junior high, the bathrooms are higher-capacity and accessible from the main hallway, like in any public place.


*As for the definition of unisex, well, it is what it is. The Latin roots may not make the most sense, but very little in English makes sense anyway...

And yet, you keep showing up ??

:blush: Thanks!

Does the seat stay up?

I can solve this confusion about male-female identity. If the kid has a penis, he goes to the boys room. If not, the girls room.

This sounds simple enough. But, what about when a baby is born with inditinct genetalia, and the doctors make a cosmetic alteration to assign a gender? And what if they assign the wrong gender? This goes to the heart of the "there is no medical reason that he should be considered a girl" argument. What if he really is a girl, that has been arbitrarily assigned the male gender?

This happens to a large number of people, and the subject is so socially awkward that nobody even knows that it exists. That same social awkwardness is the reason that the parents/doctors decide to assign a gender to an infant who can't possibly consent to such a procedure.

We assume that gender is a either/or attribute, but it isn't. And we don't know how to react when the lines are blurred.
__________________

Thread drift: Another possible outcome of the confusing-gender baby scenario is that the doctors chop off part of the clitoris, to make it look "normal" - and the child grows up to be a female that has no capacity to enjoy a normal sexual exprience. Essentially, this is a form of genital mutilation that people believe happens only in "other" places.

Did that happen to you, Flint?


I'm so sorry.

No, I read about it a long time ago in an article in the New Yorker, so I don't have an internet source to site conveniently.

This was mentioned on the first page of this thread, and I'm the only one who responded to it. After that, the person who posted it went psycho.

sexual enjoyment would only get her into trouble anyway. can't trust her with that kind of temptation.

Bad day?

nah, just sarcasm. had a knuckledragger in the lunchroom guffawing about how the study concluding some women don't have a g spot. of course, he'd find it and if he couldn't find it they were obviously rug munchers. that of course led into his bitch of an ex wife cheating on him. she wasn't woman enough for him or some such shit. bring on the chastity belts, blahblahblah.

And are you proposing to demand they prove it before entering?

In an extreme case, such a stance could lead to a little boy mutilating his own genitalia to become the girl he feels he should be. Would you then just chalk him up as a sicko the world is better off without?

The school's actions cause no harm to anyone. If they demanded that he behave like a boy, it could.

Wearing a pair of pants and peeing in the boys room is not demanding he act like a boy. He can play with dolls, hand with the girls, read girls books and swap beauty tips for all anybody cares.

He isn't wanting to 'act like a girl' he feels he is a girl.

feeling like i'm the king of england doesn't make it so. somehow my dna didn't line up in the right order for that.

And if the kid felt he was the king of England, the school should have no problem treating him as such. Future monarchs are treated just like everyone else in school. Except for the bodyguard thing. Which is not paid for by the school. Presumably it would be the same for reigning achild monarchs these days, although in the old days, child monarch were "home-schooled" :lol:

This is true. However, a transgender person actually IS the the other sex. They were just born with the wrong body.