Guest post: A good teacher wouldn’t do this
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a disguise.
So wearing it in classroom settings in order to force the participation of minors legally required to be in school (a captive audience) is the whole point. The discomfort and distress of reliably accessible gatherings of kids, over whom he excercizes authority (granted him by people who could easily take it away), is the whole point of the operation. If this core, essential, personal identity is so integral to his being, why does he drop it as soon as he’s away from an audience? Call me a closed-minded transphobe, but this looks a lot more like public performance of a fetish than the right to personal expression of a “legitimate” gender identity (whatever that might be). If this isn’t the parading of a fetishistic fantasy, how are we supposed to tell the difference between some sick kinkster getting his jollies at the expense of minors in his charge whom he’s supposed to be teaching, and a genuine trans identity arising from dysphoria? How would his defenders have us distinguish truly marginalized and victimized trans identified males (like him, they would claim) from the opportunistic perverts taking advantage of the current (and one hopes, fleeting) concern for trans “rights?” Will there be appeals to some kind of “gender fluidity?” “Pippa” Bunce trolled the business world; this guy’s fucking around with children. But we can’t just stop there. What difference would his purported “gender identity” make to the acceptability of this behaviour in the classroom? None. Even if he’s “really trans,” what he’s doing is disturbing, disrespectful, and inappropriate, and his “rights” should not override the requirements for safety, dignity and professionalism that one expects to be incumbent on all teachers.
A “dress code” is not going to solve this if it still allows this teacher to wear huge fake tits. What if he started wearing a wig of dreadlocks and spoke in a crude Rasta accent? What if he suddenly sported woven-in sidelocks and claimed to be an Orthodox Jew? This charade of womanface of his is at least as repellent and deserving of censure and resistance as these Black and Jewish hypothetical examples. How long would the school board or teachers’ union support this guy if he’d chosen to appropriate either of those “identities”? He’d be let go. In a flash. And rightly so. But come to work in a shameful, humiliating, degrading get-up that mocks women and girls, and the board and the union defend you and make excuses as to why this is somehow to be accepted and tolerated. Because of Holy Precious Gender Identity.
So what other fetishes are the school board (and union) prepared to accommodate? What if a teacher showed up in baby clothes and diapers, demanding he (let’s just go with the fact that it’s gonna be men that try to pull this shit, shall we?) be changed and fed and cuddled by his students? Would that fly? What if he claimed to be a girl baby, making him trans? They’re happy enough surrendering access to children to the imposture of some wearing huge prosthetic breasts, why would they object to someone dressed up in cute baby clothes?
Why is the school board so desperate to find some accommodation with this man, to allow him to remain in the classroom? He can’t be a good teacher because a good teacher wouldn’t do this. A good teacher would not sacrifice his or her students’ needs, welfare, and dignity in the service of his or her selfish and inappropriatedesires. Teachers taking sexual advantage of students are fired and sometimes arrested. This fetishist doesn’t have to touch a single pupil, but he is forcing a grotesque, sexualized display on his students, and anyone else he comes into contact with in the school. Why is the board so reluctant to deprive this clearly disturbed man of its school property as a platform and venue for his degrading, fetishistic performance? The support of the union is unlikely going to be recalled in the years to come as a shining example of labour activism.
They should fire this guy’s ass and welcome the resulting lawsuit. Buy out his contract and show him the door. Take away his parking space. Whatever. I don’t really care how they do it, but they have to GET HIM OUT OF THE CLASSROOM. He has shown he does not deserve to be there. He is an impediment to learning, and is harming the well-being and dignity of everyone he forces himself upon. If he really wants to dress up like that, he can do it on his own time (of which he’ll have lots more), and he can round up his own audiences victims, who will no longer be offered to him by the classfull, but will consist of people who can walk (or run) away from him without being written up for truancy. I know it’s a become a cliche, but Who will think about the children? Their interests and safety should be paramount in this. If this question does not cross the minds of a GODDAMN SCHOOL BOARD, then maybe they should just resign and go home.
There’s no doubt that it’s a sexual fetish. We can even speculate about its roots, because there’s quite a lot we know about this kind of fetish in men. It’s likely that in his childhood, as his sexuality was undergoing its first spurts of hormonal awakening, he suddenly discovered a great interest in the breasts of one of his schoolteachers. A schoolboy-crushing-on-schoolteacher’s-breasts narrative became a fetishistic fantasy that never went away for him, and because he’s got the “sex-role-reversal” glitch that drives most crossdressing straight men, he’s now fixated on playing out the role of the teacher with the breasts that will captivate the student. In his case, he’s gotta make the “breasts” as big and captivating as he possibly can. And he seems to be completely out of control, like an addict gone off the deep end. He’s taken his hands off the wheel and the brake lines have been cut. (Sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors again!) I know it’s unpleasant to think about it. Because it’s unpleasant! He’s very much enacting his sexual fantasies in a room full of children. It’s truly awful. He should be fired, criminally charged, and forced to get therapy.
But I’m equally furious at the school board. Do they really not know that this is a fetish? Or are they just pretending not to know? Do they think culture war politics override the safety of the students? It enrages me. I know (or knew, as they’ve mostly abandoned me by now) far too many people who would look at this story and see it as nothing but an unpleasant culture-war episode. They see the fetishistic abuser teacher and all they can think is, “Boy, those evil MAGA monsters from the bad tribe are gonna use this to score points against the vulnerable trans people in our good progressive tribe” and then they just try and put it out of their minds (because no one likes to dwell on the times when their enemy got the upper hand and scored a hit) and completely forget about the part with the ACTUAL REAL LIVE KIDS getting actually harmed by this asshole.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on A good teacher wouldn’t do […]
HEAR HEAR!
(clapping loudly)
I’m still pretty sure that he’s just a troll. But his point IS taken.
The diaper fetish has already appeared, but it was an adult student at a University.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4400306
I’d heard of that case and that’s what inspired my example.