From the Salinas Valley
This is where the stapling on of the T to the LGB has been such a destructive mistake:
Hm, I thought when I saw the headline. Are we talking about LGB, or T?
This fall, a pair of middle school teachers from the Salinas Valley traveled to Palm Springs for the California Teachers Association’s annual LGBTQ+ Issues Conference. There, on a Saturday afternoon, Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki spoke to a few dozen people about a subject they knew well: the difficulty of running a GSA, or gay-straight alliance, in a socially conservative community.
So far so good. GSAs are a good thing, and gay kids need support.
Speaking about recruiting students, Baraki said, “When we were doing our virtual learning — we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing schoolwork. One of them was Googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
Uh.
Maybe they meant “recruitment” that little bit too literally.
Shortly after the October conference, a surreptitious recording of the presentation was handed to a conservative writer known for asserting that transgender adolescents are part of a dangerous “craze.”
Guess who that “conservative writer” turns out to be. Abigail Shrier, of course. Danielle Echeverria at the Chronicle seems very confident that teenagers thinking they’re trans isn’t part of a dangerous craze. So there’s no danger at all in puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, amputation of healthy breasts or penises?
She published a story Nov. 18 headlined “How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids,” criticizing Caldeira and Baraki for actions they had seen as proper: keeping club members’ identities confidential from parents and finding a couple of potential members by viewing their online activity in class.
The trouble here is that the two are different. Suppose some teenagers are unsure about whether they’re gay or straight, and they lean toward gay and join a gay-straight alliance and later change their minds. What happens? They change their minds, that’s all. They haven’t had their breasts cut off, they haven’t disrupted their puberty with blockers, they haven’t set themselves up for health problems in adulthood. In short it’s not a problem. It may be an emotional upheaval but then adolescence is that.
Needless to say the same is not true if teenagers think they might be trans and join some school LGBTQ+ club or group or union, and proceed to the medicalization stage. Then change their minds later.
But the Chronicle wants us to think it’s all the same basic thing, L and G and T, and it’s only evil people who worry about teenagers being nudged (or shoved) into thinking they’re trans.
So the club was suspended and the teachers were placed on leave.
The controversy has roiled the small district south of Salinas and east of Monterey, alarming advocates for LGBTQ youth and marking one of a number of recent incidents in which influential conservative voices have forced the hands of local officials.
But this isn’t about left v right in any clear-cut bright lines way. Supporting lesbian and gay teenagers is one thing, and rushing teenagers into thinking they’re trans is another. That kid could have Googled Trans Day of Visibility out of curiosity or any number of other non-transitioning reasons.
On the other hand I sure as hell don’t want schools closing down gay-straight alliances or any other efforts to support and protect lesbian and gay students. It’s complicated.
I read the article. The focus seemed to be on trans. The teachers talked about re-naming the group something innocuous so parents wouldn’t know what it was, like “You Be You!”
I guess “The Good News Club” was already taken.
I am amazed at how understated any expression of privacy concerns is in all this. Those two teachers seemed to believe they had an absolute right, if not duty, to know what students were viewing.
Naif, that’s what caught me, too. A teacher “stalking” students online? That’s not okay.
I am faculty sponsor for our Freethinkers club (moribund at the moment). If I were to “stalk” students’ social media accounts to see who is questioning god, or even looking up something like Pascal’s wager, I would be wrong. This is not part of a teacher’s right or duty.
And I’m not even sure about keeping their confidence. Parents are the legal guardians of minors and are the ones who have rights to their records. I’m not sure if that applies to school clubs. When they reach college, we keep their records private from their parents, but that is because they are now adults and covered by different laws.
Lot of craziness on the group
Identity left these days. Like the “activist” pining that math is racist and the only way to teach black kids is through segregated schools.
Brian M,
Can you point to even one reputable source claiming that math is racist?
Reputable? As I said….activist. I rarely find “activists” reputable.
I found it on a questionable anti trans site Arielle Scarcella. Take her with a grain of salt but yes….she had snips from a black activist calling for black only education and the math is racist trope. Now Arielle is an apostate from the modern left but many of us here would be charged the same?
Anyway, simple Google-fu finds this concept is not all that unheard of. One of the first sites was Scientific American. Not all the links were to right wing sites.
Still…reputable? Of course not. But much of the noise from BOTH fringes of politics these days is not exactly reputable. My favorite was an article vocally (and correctly) condemning the far right. Yet one of the groups quoted was a MAOIST society. Who killed more people in the 10th century? Yet Maoists are somehow still legitimate?
Arielle Scarcella is not what I would call anti-trans (though the TRAs obviously do), but rather pro-L.
I suggest looking up the term “ethnomathematics”… or locally we’ve got “detracking” of math classes (in other words, killing Gifted and AP math courses). You probably won’t find “math = racist” anywhere directly, but that’s the feeling guiding the dumbing down of math curriculum.
Holms: you are right. In haste I mischaracterized her. My bad. In fact she may be more sympathetic than I to some of the claims.
More broadly, there is for instance Robin DiAngelo – remember that post from way back about her drivel? One item was along the lines of “logic is white.” If logic is white can math be far behind?
This one from August 2020:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/steak-and-potatoes-bland-is-best/
There’s a graphic that the African-American History Museum was using, explaining what “whiteness” is, in which item 3 is “emphasis on scientific method,” listing “objective, rational linear thinking; cause and effect relationships; quantitative emphasis.” The source was an even cruder graphic created by Judith Katz in 1990. Robin DiAngelo peddles the same appalling bullshit.
I looked over that graphic again. If it didn’t say anything about whiteness, I think it would work quite well as a description of American culture. History is taught with a preponderance of Northern European immigrants and an emphasis on the British Empire; steak and potatoes are stereotypically popular home meals; rugged individualism; an average of 2.3 children per family; and so on. But these are descriptions and averages, and they generally have little to do with “white culture” except that white people had been a majority in the US. There are various subcultures in the US that have values and demographics that differ from the average. Some of them might be considered “white” as well. It might be clearer and more honest if these attributes were described as “average American culture”, and then subgroups could differ from the average in certain ways, even as they contribute to the average in other ways.
I haven’t been to the Salinas Valley for a long time, but back in the 1980’s it didn’t strike me as particularly liberal or conservative. The story paints the place as a hotbed of anti-“LGBTQIA+_%@#” yahoos who hate kids being GNC.
But are these the same two teachers who had been the target of parents of a child who the teachers had encouuraged to go down the transition path, including re-naming and re-gendering, without consulting the parents?
Are they the spiritual successors of the sort of counselors who through leading questions convinced kids that they had been subjected to satanic orgies?
Michael: it may depend on who you are looking at. As the “Salad Bowl” of American, I would describe it as conservative in a catholic, traditional way given the overwhelming demographic dominance of Mexican immigrants. But it is not that far from the Bay Area, so some of the crazier aspects of that culture may be a factor?