trans in Texas schools

[Anonymous]

This AM at breakfast I asked how this went. To clarify some questions:

It was last year. The school said they couldn't do anything about the teacher because of Texas law.

School districts have rosters with names and nicknames these days.

The way it resolved is that he had a breakdown and spent a week in a psychiatric hospital. They assume he was assigned to different teachers afterward but she does not know.

As for the breakdown it could have been due to the school situation, but his doctors stopped providing hormone therapy due to Tx law, so there's that as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

[Anonymous]

Parents and kid should have demanded a change of teacher or dropped class. And always called him something else other than Mr [last mame]. What a nasty piece of work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

What a weird and dramatic over reaction to a comment. I too questioned the validity of this story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As someone who has a child struggling with this now (out of the blue I might add), I would like ONE teacher in my kids’ school who challenged my kid like this teacher is. Why grown adults think it’s ok to convince kids to stop their sexual growth and mutilate their bodies is just gross. Kids and teens romance transgenderism and don’t understand that they are signing themselves up for a lifetime of physical pain.

My kids’ therapist believes that existing OCD is seriously contributing to the transgender thought process in a lot of kids and by reinforcing in the schools, the instant acceptance is dangerous to a child’s mental health.

Wow. I just can’t even formulate a response to this. While what you say about your child might be true, to think it is ok for anyone outside your family and therapists to be that disrespectful of your child’s wishes just to be called by a different name is just disturbing

I agree that some kids might be jumping on the trans bandwagon, but it's not up to the teacher to "challenge" the child about their gender choices. That's a personal matter that should be left to the parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

This is really reaching to sympathize with a petty tyrant of a teacher. As an immigrant kid who went by an English name with absolutely no relation to my legal foreign name and knew many others who did the same (think Xing -> Jenny type), not a single teacher over the course of a decade had a problem with it, either in principle or in practice. Most of them, I didn’t even have to correct once, because there was a “preferred name” slot on public school intake forms even back in the 90s. This teacher is 100% doing it to flex their power over the student.

I doubt all your teachers remembered every kids name in the first week. At an absolute maximum, it has been 2 weeks and the issue has already been escalated to senior management. It could be that he's hiding his KKK hood in his closet. Or it could be that he's not good with names, he has brain fog, he's getting older, he is preoccupied with issues in his own life, etc. Be honest about which is the most like likely scenario- that this teacher is struggling to keep up, or that he's a total jerk.

Based on the OP and follow ups, it’s quite clear to me which is the more likely scenario.

Certainly I don’t expect teachers to remember 100+ names in the first few weeks. That’s why almost all of them had seating charts - either we were assigned seats, or we could pick seats on the first day and the teacher wrote down who was where.

And yes, sometimes teachers would call kids the wrong names - maybe they get James and Jack confused cuz the kids look alike or their names are similar. But the teachers generally corrected themselves instead of being like “well, I’m just gonna call you both John now cuz that’s what I prefer.” And sure, sometimes the teachers don’t have or don’t see the preferred name on the first day so they call out Xing. But once that person says “I go by Jenny” the teacher generally makes a note and will say that name instead, even if written records might still show Xing. That’s all fine, as long as you are making an effort! This teacher is obviously doing the opposite.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Gah! This is so frustrating! I mean, do they expect women named Leslie, Stacey, Carol and the like to change their names because they are actually men’s names???

That’s the ironic part about this happening in Texas. There are a ton of unusual nicknames that I don’t come across elsewhere, maybe because a tradition of family names is a bit more prevalent than elsewhere, so you have 4 living Roberts and 3 Mary Margarets in a family at a time. And while boy names being repurposed for girls is a growing trend everywhere for babies nowadays, I’ve never met so many adult women with male/unisex names as in Texas. Johnnie, Stevie, Dylan, Tate, Jerry, etc. but my reaction to that is “oh, guess I need to readjust my expectations/assumptions about names” and not “these women should have different names”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

I'm not a man. I'm putting myself in the shoes of the teacher and trying to determine the motivation, taking into account the fact that Texas has only been in session for 1-2 weeks.

Now the OP says that this actually happened last year, which makes the initial post even more suspect.

Maybe Texas's law is bad, I don't know enough about it, but this is probably not a real scenario.

[Anonymous]

If the teacher counted the kid as absent every day when he knew the kid was present in class, he should be fired for that alone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

I'm not a man. I'm putting myself in the shoes of the teacher and trying to determine the motivation, taking into account the fact that Texas has only been in session for 1-2 weeks.

Now the OP says that this actually happened last year, which makes the initial post even more suspect.

Maybe Texas's law is bad, I don't know enough about it, but this is probably not a real scenario.

+1 I think OP made up this story. Then this supposed student had a breakdown over not being called their desired name leading to a psychiatric inpatient stay? If this is a true story and their mental health was so bad why wouldn’t the school just switch them to a different classroom?

[Anonymous]

The timing seems wrong for this story to be real. I would help student change classes. If that didn’t work, I’d call him by his first name, then launch into a monologue about how the state can’t compel speech if calling on it.

[Anonymous]

Called*

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NP. This is appalling and wrong. And look, I think that medicalized transition of children is one of the biggest medical scandals of our generation. I think in fifty years, what we did medically to kids in the name of gender affirmative care is going to be looked at with horror.

But if you don’t want medicalized gender affirmative care for kids, then you absolutely need to support forms of social transition to be reasonable. Kids need an outlet, have always needed an outlet. Stuff like this, what this jerk of a teacher is doing, is driving kids to seek out medicalization. People who are bullied are easily radicalized.

What a jerk. I’m sorry OP.

+1 I consider trans desires to be a mental health disorder. But if this story is true, then the teacher is bullying the child and that's not ok.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

I'm not a man. I'm putting myself in the shoes of the teacher and trying to determine the motivation, taking into account the fact that Texas has only been in session for 1-2 weeks.

Now the OP says that this actually happened last year, which makes the initial post even more suspect.

Maybe Texas's law is bad, I don't know enough about it, but this is probably not a real scenario.

+1 I think OP made up this story. Then this supposed student had a breakdown over not being called their desired name leading to a psychiatric inpatient stay? If this is a true story and their mental health was so bad why wouldn’t the school just switch them to a different classroom?

It is 100% real. If I provided any more details, I would out them. I cannot tell you the sequence of events that led to the hospital stay. But if you think it is implausible for a school to take too long to solve a problem, you aren't a parent.

As I stated before, I cannot say that the breakdown was specifically about the teacher. It is just part of the sequence of events. It could have been due to the loss of hormone therapy or other challenges. Who knows. But the events are all real.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems petty, but without any context about why the teacher refuses to use the new name, we are left to speculate. Even in the most extreme scenario, that the teacher is doing to register disapproval of the trans identified kid, it's not clear that the teacher is doing anything wrong by using the legal name on the roster.

More likely... the teacher just doesn't give a crap about a teenager feeling like the other gender, or being some alternate status of non-gender. Most likely, the teacher has over 100 students per day, and the school year just started, and he doesn't remember that Larlo wants to be called Casey. He's probably just reading off a roster. And the other nicknames are probably easy to remember because they somehow relate to the actual name. I'm not a huge apologist for teachers. But this seems like a case of your friends picking a fight with someone who is working their ass off and doesn't have time to validate the choices of Little Lord Fontleroy, who is apparently picking apart every interaction and making a capital case.

The administration brought it up with him, and he would not budge.

School has been in session 1-2 weeks in Texas. This is so much drama that I strain to believe it. Even if it's true though, you don't know why he "didn't budge" and the idea that the teacher is getting his bearings with the names of over 100 kids is pretty reasonable. It's also a bit reactionary to reach out to the administration and get action taken in the very first week of school.

Quite a pretzel you are twisting into to defend a bigot. Then again your snide comment about Lord Fontleroy suggests you are defending your own bigotry.

Go a head and be man enough to admit you despise trans people. Have the courage of your convictions and don’t be a wuss afraid to state them.

I'm not a man. I'm putting myself in the shoes of the teacher and trying to determine the motivation, taking into account the fact that Texas has only been in session for 1-2 weeks.

Now the OP says that this actually happened last year, which makes the initial post even more suspect.

Maybe Texas's law is bad, I don't know enough about it, but this is probably not a real scenario.

+1 I think OP made up this story. Then this supposed student had a breakdown over not being called their desired name leading to a psychiatric inpatient stay? If this is a true story and their mental health was so bad why wouldn’t the school just switch them to a different classroom?

It is 100% real. If I provided any more details, I would out them. I cannot tell you the sequence of events that led to the hospital stay. But if you think it is implausible for a school to take too long to solve a problem, you aren't a parent.

As I stated before, I cannot say that the breakdown was specifically about the teacher. It is just part of the sequence of events. It could have been due to the loss of hormone therapy or other challenges. Who knows. But the events are all real.

I doubt this story is true but if it is then this kid needs all the mental health resources they can get because it is not a normal reaction to have to be hospitalized. Unfortunately in some cases underlying mental health conditions are largely ignored or unaddressed in favor of gender affirmation.