Submitted for Your Consideration....

[Joe Guy]

[BoSoxGal]

I have a lot of feelings and am very, very conflicted.

I settle on feeling glad that I don’t have kids/grandkids so I can avoid school board meetings.

I *will* say this: the presumptively binary patriarchal paradigm and its entrenched gender roles into which everyone on this board was born and has lived and loved and by which have been shaped along with everyone they know is a deeply damaging influence. It is unquestionably the cause of massive suffering among girls and women and if we are honest it limits and damages boys and men to causing endless suffering among them as well. It limits our capacity to fully actualize and achieve as individual human beings. It prevents us coming anywhere close to achieving peaceful society.

I don’t know if the LGBTQ+ community and the gender theory researchers have perfect answers to these concerns, but I have observed that the way many younger people think in our society about the issues seems to promote more compassion than the way things were in the past, and that alone is a net positive.

But obviously the price of progress is often higher than we would want it to be and the current weaponization of gender issues as a political tool to inflame tensions and create conflict and stoke the atmosphere to make it ripe for autocracy is beyond unfortunate.

I have to acknowledge that the rapidly changing landscape that American adults are encountering in recent years is understandably unsettling. I think I can say that without being an enemy to anyone. The human animal is simply highly resistant to change in status quo - even if the change is opening a door to positive growth. The fact that we can’t know for certain is why many people are afraid.

I admit to having some serious misgivings about the medicalised aspect of treatment of transgender patients in early to middle childhood - because there is very legitimate debate among the medical professionals themselves (not an imaginary debate as the right always asserts on the issue of climate change) on this issues of early intervention medical treatments of trans kids. When there is that level of disagreement among doctors on relatively new treatment modalities it gives me pause, especially having seen up close and been damaged by the limitations of modern medicine.

I just know I want all kids to feel loved and accepted for who they are even if that changes over time- but I don’t want kids to become unwitting victims of adults with agendas and spend their whole lives suffering the consequences of irreversible decisions made in early-mid childhood when the frontal lobe is very far from fully developed and full appreciation of potential long term effects is pretty much impossible to grasp.

[Burning Petard]

The video lays out the argument, without any basis, that gender is an objective description, binary, and obvious from birth.

She clearly does not approve of this book, for 4-8 year-olds, because among other things, it teachers the meaning of 'cis-gender', which she says the child probably cannot even spell. Right there she lost me. I would have been a very limited communicator when I was 4-8 years old, if I had been limited to words I could spell. At that point I lost all interest in her goals for education, whatever they might be. I pity her children.

OK. it is an accepted rhetorical tactic to present the conclusion at the beginning. But After listening to it all, I still found she had present little to support her beginning that gender is binary and obvious at birth. I am amazed at her chutzpa, to clearly state she understands just what individual consciousness is while that challenges the understanding of our finest scientists of brain structure and out greatest philosophers have struggled to refute or clarifiy "I think therefore I am." Or that physicists are just fooling around with no hope for reaching 'factual' understandings with their imaginary 'thought experiments."

snailgate

[Joe Guy]

…..OK. it is an accepted rhetorical tactic to present the conclusion at the beginning. But After listening to it all, I still found she had present little to support her beginning that gender is binary and obvious at birth…..:

Are you saying that gender is not a physical reality?

Is it a state of mind?

[Burning Petard]

"Are you saying that gender is not a physical reality. . . ."

Is physical reality a state of mind? Is state of mind a reality? Am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?

so many questions and so little time. I am reminded of the Mothers For Liberty organization which met recently in Philadelphia. Their primary objective was to reduce the liberty of mothers who disagree with them.

HAPPY NATIONAL FRAGILE X AWARENESS DAY.

SNAILGATE.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I reject being labelled by others as "cis-gender". I am normal. It's a wide field though

[Sue U]