It Is Always About The Children

But we have opposite views on what is best for them. The conservatives want them coddle and hiding from life, while most child experts say that by preventing children from learning about transgender people, it creates a stigma, an unnaturalness to being transgender. When the anti-discrimination bill was in committee, the Republicans proposed an amendment that said a teacher couldn’t teach while transitioning. The first problem that I had with the amendment was that the term “transition” has no definition, did they mean that the day that the person transitioned from their birth gender to their true gender or did they mean from the entire time they were undergoing the year of their “Real Life Test”, the proposed amendment was too vague. The major problem that I had with the amendment was what it taught the children, that we had to hideaway “these people”, it would have taught the children that it is okay to discriminate against people who are different.

In an article in the Huffington Post they discuss this issue,

Should We Introduce Children to the Concept of Transgender People?
Joanne Herman
January 9, 2011

Should we introduce children to the concept of transgender people? The answer is yes according to an article published in the December 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed Graduate Journal of Social Science.
[…]
Critics will cry that introducing all children to the concept of transgender people will cause children to "become transgender." But the authors found that schooling has little impact on gender identity development in children. In fact, children who develop a transgender identity seem to do so in spite of often unwitting but nevertheless pervasive efforts by schools to enforce gender conformity.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
[…]
By having schools introduce the concept of transgender people to all children, the authors assert, transgender children will "feel they are not alone and that their gender identity is as valid as any other." This will, in turn, greatly diminish the damaging consequences currently observed as these children mature.

I heard this argued out on the floor of the House last when the vote came up for on HB6599 An Act Concerning Discrimination, we must protect the children! As Ms. Herman wrote, not to allow a teacher or a student is worst for all the students, it promotes discrimination, it promotes bullying and harassment, lower achievement and worst of all, almost half of transgender students have thought of taking their own life.

The other point that the Republicans do not consider is that schools and boards of ed. can impose reasonable policies to govern the how the schools will accommodate transgender, teachers, staff and students. For example schools systems have policies that require a person to transition over the summer vacation. But the Republicans never mention that, they rather create fear of the “men-in-a-dress” where a teacher will come in one day dresses a woman and the next as a man, which will never happen. According to the Standards of Care (SOC) that the medical profession has imposed on the community, once you transition, there is no going back and forth.

When students, teachers or staff transition, it can be handled in an age appropriate manor, it not the chaotic process that the Republicans portray it as.

Update 5/24
Ops... I was going to embed this video