Books Are Feared

The right quake under the fear of books that open children minds, they afraid of people who can think for themselves. That want schools only teach reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic.

Book About Transgender Girl Breaks Ground — And Stirs Controversy — In Oregon Schools
OPB
By April Baer
May 19, 2018

As grown-ups start to shop for summer reading, school kids are laying into the titles they’ll read for next fall’s Oregon Battle of the Books, or OBOB.

It’s a statewide competition, in which kids read from a list of about dozen books, curated by a team of librarians. They duke it out answering Jeopardy!-style questions about the books.

One of the books contenders will read this summer is unlike any before it.

The novel “George” by Alex Gino is the first OBOB selection to feature a transgender protagonist. Gino’s fourth-grade heroine thinks of herself as Melissa, and the narrative identifies her with female pronouns throughout, but she’s carrying the male name she was born with and hiding feelings she can only let loose when she’s totally alone…
[…]
“We liked the story,” Berkley said. “We liked that it was about a trans child — something we’ve never had on the elementary list before.

OMG! A trans book in school! What is this world coming to?

But the book has raised some hackles. Two Oregon school districts will withhold their third- through fifth-grade students from regional competitions, in which kids might be asked about “George.”

Of course you know who are behind this censorship.

The range of reactions to “George” varied. The conservative group Parents Rights in Education rolled the debate over “George” into their existing arguments against transgender rights (arguments in direct conflict with existing science on the mental health of transgender people).

PRIE director Suzanne Gallagher suggested that a reading list including stories about transgender people could cause children to question their gender identities for “attention.”

Let’s bury our heads into the sand.

Down in Texas they are also covering their ears…La, la, la, la la, I can’t hear you!

Opposition to 6th grade transgender lesson recalls battle over bathroom bill
By The Star-Telegram Editorial Board
May 19, 2018

The hysteria that surrounded bathrooms for transgender students may have found a new target.

It comes in the form of a 6th grade health curriculum guide, Abstinence, Puberty & Personal Health, published by ETR Associates, being used in 26 Fort Worth middle schools. It includes a lesson on gender identity where what it means to be transgender is discussed.

We hope we’re wrong, but the flap building over this lesson feels like the transgender-phobic crowd is gearing up for another fight that could help revive a bathroom bill when the legislature convenes again in January. Or it might add fuel to a looming battle over what state education officials approve next year in the health curriculum.

We don’t need or want the legislature to revisit the bathroom bill and waste the taxpayers’ money. And when the new health curriculum is written it would be wrong not to acknowledge we have people living among us who do not identify as heterosexual.

The editorial goes on to say…

The real aim of Stand for Fort Worth seems to be in taking gender identity off the table as a topic of classroom discussion.

“There is no such thing as gender expression,” said Pent. “You have boys and girls,” he told the Star-Telegram.

Two years ago Stand for Texas referred to transgender people as possible “predators” during the debate over bathrooms available to transgender students. The group, which includes parents, opposed the Fort Worth school district’s guidelines for allowing transgender students to use a restroom where they feel “comfortable and safe.”

What gets me is these so called “do gooders” point to the high suicide idealization rate among trans people and they don’t even see the correlations between their hate and suppression of anything trans as the cause of the depression in trans people.