Teach your children well
New proposals to keep gender identity knowledge from children are likely to backfire. Kids already know far more than they are taught in school — even if their information is usually incorrect, corrupted, or even corrosive.
There are bigoted people who want to deny LBGTQ people have a right to exist. These laws say much more about those who want to sway voters than they do to display concern for the children. They sway, or hope to persuade others, to buy into the idea of a a homophobic, or even inequality-based sets of classroom guidelines.
It is no exaggeration to say that culture wars, conspiracy theories about Q-Anon, and absurd rumors about pedophiles are running rampant. They are fabricated out of sheer fear and gossamer to cater to the base instincts of the base voters.
Don’t “prey” gay
For every “queer” child molester lurking under the stairs there are at least 100 heterosexual coaches, teachers, neighbors, and relatives of young, vulnerable kids. They are far, far more prevalent as older, whiter, males who prey on children, or, at the very least torment them with their Matt Gaetz style suave, or their Jeffrey Epstein-esqe privilege.
In other words, it is not the gay who prey on your children, yet no such rules forbidding, or canceling, cis-gender people have ever been proposed.
Being different is a school bully bonanza
Nevertheless, we have bathroom bills, sports complaints about phantom transgender athletes stealing contests, threats made to anyone who considers age-appropriate surgery when advised by health professionals, tattle-tale trials for getting children, and/or their parents condemned for their right to use pronouns, wear hair unconventionally, or even dressing in ways considered “wrong.”
Despite no clear indications on what behavior, or words, constitutes violation of the new rules, teachers, parents, students, and anyone they associate with is at risk of offending the powers that be.
These emboldened attitudes will be a bonanza for school bullies, and that is just the teachers, administrators and parents to say nothing about the fellow students who can pick on others — but now with blessed encouragement.
Freedom of speech, and teaching common, honest decency to your fellow human being seems to be rapidly vanishing.
What we are given instead, is new lists of ever-increasingly burdensome rules on how to be a non-threat by displaying no diversity, no compassion, no creativity, and no freedom of being to identify as one is most comfortable to do. It is antithetical to the rights and freedoms of individuals, quite unpatriotic, and downright dangerous to us all.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Taylor Heery on Unsplash
