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memento mori's avatar

Credit to you Jesse for the deep dive. I am just one of those who find this all so insane that I had to stop reading about 1/3 the way in. And then I promptly went over to my Twitter account and deactivated it. This is all so crazy. I am checking out of the madness and going back to reading Russian literature.

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Theodric's avatar

It’s still shocking to me how fast the mere idea that teenagers might be genuinely uncomfortable around naked opposite-sex bodies, and that parents might have issues with that, has gone from common sense to shockingly, dangerously regressive, and a “page out of the fascist playbook”.

Why do cis teens have no right to accommodation or even consideration for their own physical hang ups (or even sexual trauma)? Call them “transphobes” all you want but being around a naked dick doesn’t immediately become non-awkward just because the owner goes by she/her. Even the most “conservative sensitive” liberal board member seems to come to this accommodation for cis-students extremely reluctantly.

(What’s particularly weird about all this is the handwringing about “outing” a trans youth, causing bullying from their peers, when the whole point is that the policy is for the situation where the trans student is already out - do they think the other students are just not going to notice at all?)

I’m a bit disappointed in Jesse because, despite an otherwise very reasonable article, he still largely accepts the core framing: the school board Democrats, in crafting trans inclusive accommodations, are being “cautious” while the Republicans attempting to protect some rights for discomfited cis students and their parents are merely “stoking the culture war flames”. It all starts from the assumption that one side is entirely bad faith (despite in this case that side representing something probably closer to the median public opinion).

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