Many schools have adopted rules that prevent school administrators and teachers from notifying the parents of students who identify by a different gender at school that their child may be transitioning.
No Tattle-Tailing on Trans
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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First. And most important. Shouldn’t it be Tattletaling, as in tattletale, in the title? Or am I Ted Title Tattling?
Anyway, moving on. I notice the use of language in this abbreviated cartoon. “Many schools have adopted rules that prevent school administrators and teachers from notifying the parents of students who identify by a different gender at school that their child may be transitioning.”
Adopted? Prevent … from notifying? Transitioning? I understand the metonymy in each case, but I resist it. Adoption is a soft-soap way of putting it. If a school “adopts” a policy, that binds the teachers to a specific response. The teacher is forbidden from performing in any way that disagrees with the requirements “adopted.” Further, the term “transitioning” is being used in both a psychological and physical sense, but the two facets are different and require separate consideration and response.
My big problem/concern/issue here? A teacher is not (usually) a psychologist, and even more rarely trained in child psychosexual development. (Read up on Fells Acres Daycare for a sense of what happens when amateurs try their hand at this sort of thing.) A teacher is already babysitting, teaching, grading, etc. Teachers have what the British call “a duty of care” to their students. Tampering, for good or bad, in secret, with a parent’s privilege/obligation/right/etc. of raising their child, is not in the teacher’s domain because, when the teacher screws up — and was gonna quit teaching anyway cause, like, it’s really hard — the parent is the one who gets to pick up the pieces.
Salem Witch Trials, Fells Acres, the recent Internet “Beans!” thing, there’s loads of mass hysteria cases in the literature. Young girls are particularly prone to these, but boys can have them too. Certainly there are transgender children out there who need help, but I have little confidence that the same school systems that can’t teach Johnny how to read and cypher are, somehow, magically capable of sussing out this issue correctly on the first try.
Thanks to end-stage capitalism, I never had children because I know how miserable childhood can be when poverty moves in. But, had I ever been confident of earning a living wage consistently, maybe I would have had a kid or two. So I’d be particularly interested in what parents think about this issue.