Two school-related stories have been popping up for me to keep up with them – time to take them off my stack of stuff and get them to you folks. It’s amazing how the Edu-Industrial Complex hates Parents.
I just have to wonder what the redefinition of the redefinition of the definition of the word “involved” is. That’s what we hear all the time – that schools want “involved parents,” but when parents start to get involved, problems start. No, it’s not because of the Parents – it seems to be when parental self-interest for their children is at odds with what School Boards and staff don’t want parents messing with. It always comes down to “who should be in charge of the kids: schools or parents?”
And sometimes it’s the Board, elected to manage Districts by Parents, that don’t want to really deal with Parents:
The North Clackamas School District in Oregon is only the latest in a long string of districts where parents have grown fed up with the school’s woke leftist policies being approved by the school board. Parents have been showing up for school board meetings with a list of grievances over inappropriate, sexualized material in the schools, gender-bending indoctrination, and policies intended to keep secrets from parents regarding their children’s development. After one recent meeting, the board decided to respond, but not by addressing the parents’ concerns. They instead announced that all future meetings would be held “online,” depriving the parents of the opportunity to be heard. As a result, the school is now losing more students and the board members may face the possibility of being removed from their positions. (American Wire)
Oregon’s North Clackamas School District has decided to take the coward’s way out and move board meetings online after parents voiced outrage over LGBTQ+ content being taught in school as academic performance tanks. A Department of Education report has evidently revealed that while woke, sexualized policies are being pushed in the classroom, students are not doing well in their academics.
On October 27 of this year, parents attended a school board meeting and complained about the school curriculum. They also accused the district of trying to keep parents in the dark over various issues, according to KATV.
In response, some of the school board members attempted a move taken straight from the usual leftist playbook, accusing the parents of homophobia. Unfortunately for them, one of the mothers who identified herself as part of the LGBTQ community said, “It isn’t homophobic or transphobic to believe that children should not be sexualized or mutilated under the guise of the LGBT umbrella.” Ouch.
Cowards. If you can’t stand the heat in the “elected kitchen,” resign. Just resign. You are to be responsible to constituents and not run away from them. And once the Board started to throw the homophobia card, the rest of us know that “they’ve got nuttin” as far as a rational argument and defense of their policies go.
And the other tactic when Parents start to criticize what’s going on is to blame them for violence. Yep, criticizing anything of the Left is tantamount for calling for physical violence. Our reaction should be to simply laugh at them:
People on the Left are accusing conservatives of inciting violence by attacking gender activists. Criticisms of “drag queen story hours,” teachers who recruit children to secret communities for gay and transgender students, librarians for putting pornography aimed at children in school libraries abound. I and others point out the obvious: what they are doing is exhibiting all the behaviors of sexual groomers, recruiting children to participate in sexualized activities inappropriate for their age. They encourage children to “transition,” get mutilating surgeries, sterilize themselves, and perform sexualized shows for adults.
Is our criticism of these activities inciting violence? And if so, is that criticism unacceptable?
…With that out of the way, let’s get down to facts and arguments: there is actually no vast expansion of violence being aimed at transgender people. It is simply not there in the statistics.
The murder rate for transgender-identified people is actually lower than the national average. The epidemic of hate and violence toward transgendered folks is a myth. I would expect that they, as with any group outside the mainstream, get more than their share of nasty words thrown at them, but violence and murder? The evidence is not there.
According to the Williams Institute at UCLA there are 1.6 million people who identify as transgender in the United States. The Human Rights Campaign claims that 57 people who are transgender were murdered last year. The murder rate in the US is 6.52 people per hundred thousand. Hence the expected number of murders out of a population of 1.6 million would be 104, or almost twice as many people as identified by the HRC.
Thousands of children who…were assigned female at birth have sought gender-affirming care in recent years. And for reasons not well-understood, they significantly outnumber those assigned male at birth who seek treatment…
Professionals in the gender-care community agree that treatment of all transgender children should be supportive and affirming. The question, for some, is whether peer groups and online media may be influencing some of these patients to pursue medical transition, with potentially irreversible side effects, at a time in their lives when their identities are often in flux.
Corey Basch, a professor of public health at William Paterson University in New Jersey who researches health communication and teens’ use of social media, said she fears that some adolescents are susceptible to making faulty self-diagnoses without adequate input from medical professionals. “Teens are so incredibly vulnerable to information overload and being pushed in one direction,” Basch said. “They could be lacking the analytical skills to question who is giving this advice and if their advice is valid.”
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a 4,000-member organization of medical, legal, academic and other professionals. Several clinics in the United States told Reuters that among their patients, the ratio was nearly 2-to-1, and similar phenomena have been documented in Europe, Canada and Australia.
…In its new Standards of Care, published in September, WPATH acknowledged for the first time that “social influence” may impact an adolescent’s gender identity. The organization recommends that youths undergo an in-depth evaluation in part so that clinicians “can discern between a person’s gender identity that is marked and sustained and an identity that might be socially influenced,” according to Dr Eli Coleman, director of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health who oversaw the update of WPATH’s guidelines.
As I have said before, “misgendering” isn’t a “thing” except for those who wish to control your speech. They want to shut you down, and this behavior is WORSE when it is a government official. And this is what happens when School Board members go Woke – and we’re right back to the nitwittery that “words are Violence”:
A Rhode Island elected school board official involved in promoting a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda in the district, recently came under fire for claiming that intentionally “misgendering” someone is an “act of violence” that “needs to be dealt with accordingly.”. Jennifer Lima, elected member of the North Kingstown School Committee, shared a social media post from an activist group on November 12 that read, “Purposefully misgendering students is an act of violence. Respond accordingly.”
My “respond accordingly is to laugh at the person hurling that slur at me. Like “assault weapon,” it’s only purposes are to:
- Force you to speak using THEIR terms (and you lose)
- Make you feel guilty for not adopting their ideology (and you lose)
- Shut you up (and then we all lose)
And if you ignore all that, her response is “…she believes appropriate responses to someone using the wrong pronoun included “investigating and disciplining such occurrences in the same way as any other biased-based assault.”. And guess who does the investigation and (to use the proper word) punishment (fees, fines, and/or jail)? Yep, Government.
“Her public call for students to ‘respond accordingly’ to non-existent violence is her own tacit call to violence against those who oppose her radical ideology,” Solas continued. “She creates a hostile, paranoid school environment where violence is now more likely to happen thanks to her hysterical message that danger lurks around every pronoun.”
…A study published in the scientific journal Plos One surveyed 256 parents whose children experienced rapid onset of gender dysphoria. The vast majority (86.7%) of adolescents either started spending more time online or were in a friend group with at least one other transgender person prior to identifying as transgender, according to the study.
Similar to the above but with other studies and people. Worth a few minutes.
And then we’re back to porno books again:
A Texas mother, frustrated by her school board’s reluctance to remove books with graphic sexual content from school libraries, found an embarrassing technique for getting board members and the public to pay attention. Her unusual method may have hastened the removal of one objectionable book from shelves and brought the issue of sexual content in school libraries to the attention of social media viewers worldwide…The video shows Shannon Ayres reading from the book, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” at a board meeting of the Frisco Independent School District on Nov. 16.
In the clip, Ayres takes her spot at the podium during public comment and begins reading a passage from the book found in the library of at least one district high school. The excerpt graphically describes a young girl protesting and crying as a boy forces her to perform oral sex…Off-camera, a school board trustee can be heard talking over her as Ayres’ microphone is turned off at the end of her comment period.
“Thank you. Your time is up. Thank you so much. There’s a child in our boardroom, so I’d like for you to please stop reading that,” board president Rene Archambault interrupts, drawing loud complaints from the audience…The irony of Archambault’s comment seems to amaze viewers—that a school library book is too graphic to be presented in front of children.
In their library, sure. Read at the meeting of those who are supposed to manage that District, including its libraries, nope. Next school board meeting, I’m going to do the same thing.
And back to what started this Stack of Stuff – CRT, Critical Race Theory:
Faculty at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law have created a database to identify and record efforts to block critical race theory (CRT) being taught in schools across the country. The database, called the CRT Forward Tracking Project, allows users to “track attacks on critical race theory” and filter the information as part of an effort to “support anti-racist education, training and research,” according to the school.
CRT, according to the school, is “the study of systemic racism in law, policy and society,” and suggests efforts need to be made to fix these alleged injustices. Meanwhile, critics say CRT pushes a controversial worldview related to Marxism that analyzes all aspects of life through a racial lens instead of through the concept of class struggle.
UCLA Law announced earlier this month it would track anti-CRT activity through the database at all levels of government across the nation.
“The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks on the ability to speak truthfully about race and racism through the campaigns against CRT,” said Taifha Natalee Alexander, project director of CRT Forward, in a statement.
Can you say “lying through your teeth”? Don’t know what it is? Short version I’ve seen in schools: White are bad and are the Oppressors. Minorities, especially Black, are good but are Oppressed. Marxism sideways – instead of wealth, the Marxist lens is now focused on one of the sorest points of American history: racism. And throw in Saul Alinsky’s axiom to “rub it raw” to create animosity between groups that otherwise were fine to split us all apart.
Transgressive activists are seeking to manipulate and pervert children into sexual identities in order to undermine Western values, institutions, and norms, according to Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro. Shapiro delivered a speech at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, on Tuesday night. The focus of Shapiro’s speech was identifying and countering the ideology of leftists using education and entertainment to groom children into embracing sexualized identities and lifestyles: transgressivism. Shapiro first explained the ideology in depth earlier Tuesday in an op-ed in The Daily Wire.
…Mulvaney and Jennings’ new lifestyles as trans women are anchored through a process known as gender-affirming health care, which “ought to properly be termed sex-denying health care.”
Transgressivism treats both behavior and desire as immutable characteristics, like race or sex, thus removing freedom or responsibility,” the conservative commentator continued. The removal of responsibility, and thus purpose, has generally left people feeling aimless, empty, and depressed.
Transgressivism seeks the destruction of Western values, institutions, and norms because they are seen as corruptive influences that constrain and warp one’s true identity, which lies in pure animalistic freedom and desire. Transgressive identities have not just become normalized in society. Large swaths of the Democratic Party, the legacy media, academia, and corporate America are celebrating them, and, conversely, punishing those who criticize them.
Transgressivism has spread with the aid of three factors: the decline of religious practice, the advance of science and easy birth control, and the spread of a belief that traditions and values must be explained “tabula rasa” without an appeal to ancient custom. To further their ideology, the transgressives’ chief target to remake society is children, according to Shapiro.
U.S. citizens’ opinions are turning increasingly negative toward the transgender movement, according to a poll conducted by Christian nonprofit Summit Ministries. In an interview with NTD’s “Capitol Report,” Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, pointed out that people are thinking about the transgender movement as a voting issue.
“And some of it is because the president made it a voting issue. He said, ‘We ought to support every minor when they want to have procedures done,’ pharmaceutical surgery, whatever. And he seemed to be indicating that he supports this at any age with no restrictions. A lot of people in America disagree with that,” Myers said.
“We are doing a lot of polling just to understand the cultural moment. And 75 percent of people in our most recent poll say they believe the transgender movement has gone too far.”
Myers believes that people oppose the transgender movement mainly due to its support of actions such as “mutilating kids.” There are 70 Planned Parenthood clinics offering cross-sex hormones and puberty-blocking drugs to children, many of them being offered without seeking parental consent.
- Ohio school district sued for transgender bathroom policy that caused students to ‘hold their urine’
An Ohio school district is facing a lawsuit from a group of Muslim and Christian parents after allowing students to use bathrooms corresponding to their stated gender identity rather than their biological sex. America First Legal filed the federal lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of the parents against Bethel Local School District, located north of Dayton, accusing the district of violating the Title IX protections of students and infringing on parental rights.
According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, the Bethel school board adopted a new policy in January 2022 that allowed students to use bathroom facilities based on their gender identity. Previously, transgender students predominantly used a gender-neutral bathroom, according to the lawsuit.
The interfaith group of parents who sued Tuesday say the district is infringing on their ability to exercise their religious beliefs and to direct the upbringing of their children by forcing them to conform to the district’s policy favoring transgender students. The lawsuit also says the district has violated Title IX and Ohio law by implementing the policy. Gene Hamilton, the general counsel at America First Legal, told the Washington Examiner that school district officials like those in Bethel “are actively destroying fundamental rights in ways that would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago.”
“Generations of Americans have grown up in environments that have unquestionably respected students’ personal privacy in intimate spaces, separated by biological sex,” Hamilton said. “Boys are boys, girls are girls, and every student has the right to privacy in intimate spaces that has been enjoyed by every single generation of students before them. We are proud to fight for our clients in this important area.”
Since the policy has been in place, the lawsuit claims that the children of the plaintiffs have felt uncomfortable using the bathroom at school and have resorted to “hold[ing] their urine and avoid[ed] using the restroom at school if at all possible.”
