Imagine that your daughter goes on an overnight school field trip and you learn that a boy bunked with her because he claimed to be a girl. Well, if she attends school in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, you may have to imagine.
For while that very thing could happen, school teachers and administrators have been ordered not to tell you.
As the Washington Times reports:
Bob Mosier, chief communications officer for the Anne Arundel County public school system, says in a training video (shown below) on how to accommodate transgender students that privacy issues prevent the district from informing parents about such arrangements.
“So, many of you might be asking yourselves, ‘So I’m at an overnight field trip, and I have student who’s biologically a male, identifies as a female, and we’ve worked with that student and her family, and that student wants to sleep in the dorms, or whatever sleeping arrangements are, with the females,’” Mr. Mosier says in a video of the training session. “‘They don’t want to sleep in a room by themselves, [sic] they want to sleep with the rest of the females. So what do we do?’”
“And the answer is, they sleep with the females,” he said. “That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer. And in some cases, it’s going to cause issues, because … the private information piece doesn’t allow you to share that with parents of all of the other campers. Right? So that’s difficult.”
(Note: relevant portion of the video begins at 27:50)
The June training session was given in response to the May Obama administration order dictating that schools should allow students to use whatever bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities they wish, in accordance with their self-professed “gender identity.” The order was justified based on Title IX, and that Anne Arundel County and other localities are submitting to it indicates that not only don’t they understand the science behind the “gender” agenda, but they don’t even understand its terminology.
The Times tells us that two “coalitions of states, totaling 24 in all, have sued the administration over the mandate,” prompting a federal judge in Texas on Sunday to grant “a preliminary injunction blocking the edict’s implementation nationwide.” And rightfully so. Note that Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education, and, contrary to popular belief, “sex” and “gender” are not synonymous.
Historically, “gender” was rarely used in reference to persons; it was a grammatical term describing “one of a number of categories, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which words are divided.” In recent decades, sexual revolutionaries have co-opted the term and successfully applied it to people, but they have never said it was a synonym for sex. Rather, they point out that it is a psycho-social construct, and today it generally pertains to a person’s perception of what he is. How else could the social engineers define literally dozens of “genders”?
Now, notable here is that the quoted definition above is from my 1975 edition American Heritage School Dictionary (which, of course, says nothing about applying the word to people). Yet Title IX was created in 1972, well before the current man-on-the-street misconception that “sex” and “gender” are synonymous and the common embrace of the psycho-babbler conception of the term as a psycho-social descriptive. In other words, when Title IX’s framers said “sex,” they meant one and only one thing: the biological distinction that word denotes — male and female. Thus, the Obama administration’s convenient “interpretation” of Title IX violates not only the law’s original intent, but also the definitional intent of the transgender activists whose bidding it’s doing.
While no one should expect those ends-justify-the-means activists to complain or miseducated educators to refrain (from cooperating), caring Americans should understand the above and more: that the “transgender” agenda is as scientifically incorrect as the feds are definitionally incorrect. Consider, for instance, a new comprehensive study by two Johns Hopkins University scientists, which states on this matter, “The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.”
This is indisputable. Consider: Imagine you tell a psychiatrist that you’re certain you’re trapped in the body of the wrong sex, a condition known as “gender dysphoria.” What physiological markers will he look for to ensure that at issue is a biological, and not a purely psychological, phenomenon?
Answer: There are none.
As I wrote in 2014 about gender dysphoria:
There is no blood test for it. There is no identifiable genetic marker. There is no medical exam at all. Rather, the diagnosis is made based on, as PsychCentral.com puts it, “strong and persistent cross-gender identification”; in other words, strong and persistent feelings that you actually are a member of the opposite sex.
Yet such a diagnostic standard would constitute malpractice in any other branch of medicine. Could you imagine a patient telling a cardiologist that he has a strong and persistent feeling he has heart disease and the doctor, on that basis alone, performing bypass surgery?
Moreover, if one is to accept gender dysphoria as indicative of biological reality, what of species dysphoria, the sense that you’re an animal stuck in a human body? What of “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” the sense that a body part — an arm, leg, etc. — doesn’t belong on your body? People thus afflicted also have “strong and persistent feelings” that their mind/body mismatch should be remedied physically. In fact, Body Integrity Identity Disorder sufferers have sometimes self-amputated or even found doctors willing to do so. And what really is the difference between this and so-called “sex-reassignment surgery”? Sure, it strikes us as the most horrid malpractice when a doctor amputates healthy body parts, such as a pair of legs. But, then, should we call it something else just because those healthy body parts are between the legs?
The conclusion is inescapable. “Transgender” is not a scientific designation but an ideological one. There is no proof whatsoever that gender dysphoria is anything but a psychological problem, yet doctors refuse to treat the mind and instead mutilate the body. And to the point here, “educators” and others do far worse, mutilating society and children’s grasp of reality with destructive social engineering based on junk science.
This also raises another question: Since “transgender” status is defined by feelings, what about the feelings of the girls who don’t want a boy masquerading as a girl in their intimate spaces? Why are the feelings of the majority subordinated to the feelings of less than one percent of the population?
And in a somewhat saner world, Bob Mosier and some other educators would certainly be pondering these things — while being run out of town on a rail.
