The headline reads: Virginia teacher sues school after being fired for not using transgender student's pronouns1, 2
The female student in question wants to identify as a male.
The student asked that teachers address the student using the male version of the student’s name and to apply masculine pronouns.
The fired teacher, apparently concerned for the student’s physical welfare — the student seemed to be about to crash into a wall, called out to other students to “stop her.”
DEFINITION, PLEASE
According to dictionary.com3
- Sex is “a label assigned at birth based on the reproductive organs you’re born with.” It’s generally how we divide society into two groups, male and female—though intersex people are born with both male and female reproductive organs. (Important note: Hermaphrodite is a term that some find offensive.)
Gender, on the other hand, goes beyond one’s reproductive organs and includes a person’s perception, understanding, and experience of themselves and roles in society. It’s their inner sense about who they’re meant to be and how they want to interact with the world.
While a person can only change their sex via surgery, one’s gender is more fluid and based on how they identify. If someone’s gender identity aligns with their biological sex, we refer to them as cisgender people.
grammarist.com4 states
- Gender was traditionally used mainly in grammar, language, and linguistics contexts to refer to the sex assigned to nouns (especially in non-English languages).
On the other hand, Sex has narrowed, and the word is now mainly confined to uses having to do with sexual intercourse and sexual organs.
In my grammar school days, “sex” meant male and female; later in high school “sex” took on additional significance.
“Gender” basically was a language thing. Fortunately, in English, most words are “gender free,” a situation that sometimes causes communications difficulties. Over the years, a number of female “gender” nouns have disappeared, e.g., actress, hostess, and some words were replaced by new terms, e.g., airplane stewardess and stewards have become “flight attendants.” (What are stewards called on cruise ships?)
TODAY’S REALITY
It is my opinion that if a person born a male, e.g., with a penis, he is a male until he surgically transformed into a female, e.g., a person with a clitoris. Likewise a person born as a female who wishes to be a male requires a surgical transformation.
A person who simply considers himself or herself of the other sex sans a sex change operation is, at best, a person with a desire to transition.
MY PROBLEM
I have no problem with a person who has surgically changed from one sex with its attendant obvious physical attributes to the opposite sex with its obvious physical attributes.
I DO have a serious problem with an “incomplete” (e.g., not surgically altered) person presenting whatever attributes they have in the opposite sex’s facilities because “they feel like” a man or woman, regardless of attributes.
I would imagine the transition must be both mental as well as physical. It is, I think, more than just wanting to do guy things or dress in girly fashions — that’s “gender.
IS TRANSGENDER A MISNOMER?
If a man wants to be a woman does he need a sex-change operation or is it sufficient that he dress like a woman — a man in “drag?” Are the ”queens” who parade in Key West transgender or just guys who like lipstick, silk undies, and panty hose? Are the women with “butch” haircuts and tats transgender or not.
Note I did not suggest that either the “queens” or the women who look and act like stevedores are homosexuals.
Are cross-dressers transgenders?
Are homosexuals transgenders?
As far as I am concerned, the person known today as a “transgender” is more accurately labeled “trans-sexual.” That term may have been usurped by men and woman who “go both ways.” (I have lived a sheltered life.)
Sources
1. http://tinyurl.com/y6jg3zrc
2. http://tinyurl.com/y4w9vjbr
3. https://www.dictionary.com/e/gender-vs-sex/
4. https://grammarist.com/usage/gender-sex/
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
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