The transgender war has no place in the classroom

A 12 year-old in Texas, born male, decided to transition and live as “Maddie.” Unsurprisingly, this led to bullying at school. What made this story unique was that parents of children at Maddie’s school were bullying the student as much as the peers — online and in person. The bullying got so bad that Maddie's family may move.

Of course, bullying anyone is worthy of condemnation. Both the transgender bathroom issue and the bullying that often results in some parts of the country reveal a new and very specific problem: Kids are taking their transgender issues to school because that’s where they spend the majority of their time, which creates anxiety and fear in some parents and children. Yet school is not the appropriate place to resolve these issues. School should be a place for fun and learning. Schools have become a lab, mixing social and political experiments together, at great cost to taxpayers, families, and society.

Fighting the transgender battle in school is a distraction.

Even though the number of children who identify as transgender is still quite small, transgender issues continue to proliferate in schools, creating unnecessary distractions. (Some studies say about 0.7 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds living in the United States are transgender; according to the Williams Institute, 0.6 percent of the entire population identifies as transgender.) Or rather, children continue to come to school, announce they are transgender, and then schools feel compelled to accommodate this special desire, often to the point that it is a distraction.

For example, several schools are being forced to either correct or create new policies about transgender students, after previous ones (or none at all) prompted protests. Officials had to adopt a new transgender policy at Great Hearts Academies in Arizona after a board member for the national advocacy group GLSEN said “the former policy was written in a way that explicitly harmed students whose gender identity didn't align with the gender assigned to them at birth.”

What was wrong with this terrible policy? It provided a list of rules that included:

Using bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the sex listed on the student's birth certificate.

Following the "uniform code and grooming standards of their sex" as listed on their birth certificate.

Participating in single-sex athletic activities that correspond to the gender listed on their birth certificate.

Staff referring to students by the name listed in school records, which is based on birth certificates or by a nickname agreed upon by the student and their family.

Staff using personal pronouns consistent with the student's gender listed on their birth certificate.

The school’s new policy protects “the privacy of all students” and includes the following guidelines.

All students will receive the same level of care and respect.

Students may use single-sex facilities that correspond with their current school records. Single-occupant restroom and locker/changing rooms are open to use by all students.

No student will be forced to use a single-sex restroom or locker/changing room facility against their wishes.

Students are eligible to participate in athletic activities based on requirements of the specific league or ruling body.

Other schools have taken time and resources to focus on transgender policies. Minnesota’s Department of Education introduced an entire “transgender toolkit” to ensure that the handful of transgender students in Minnesota schools would feel safe and included.

Schools should be spending resources choosing and honing curriculum and specifying emergency procedures. How about creating toolkits and holding conferences about the way children learn? In short, school is the wrong place to coddle a movement; it’s the place to develop a child’s mind.

Responses to transgender issues sparks fear or uncomfortable feelings for many students.

As the story about 12-year-old Maddie (and others like it) show, parents and children are starting to feel marginalized for being cisgender. Granted, some are responding poorly — like I said, bullying is never okay — but it highlights a very real phenomenon: Parents and children feel uncomfortable, even fearful, because being transgender defies biological reality.

It’s a form of gaslighting, and it can elicit a strong response in some people. Also, the bathroom issue violates the privacy rights of others, accompanying the fear many parents feel.

The transgender issue is new and uncharted territory. Many people believe this issue defies biological reality. One study even said the increase of people calling themselves transgender is due to peer pressure. Because this is an undeveloped and unexamined issue — and because it goes against what seems biological, healthy, and natural — it creates anxiety and fear. It causes parents and students to feel even more protective.

Fighting the transgender battle places an unwarranted burden on schools.

Since the transgender battle has entered schools, it has placed a significant, unwarranted burden on them in terms of finances and resources at taxpayer expense. As schools have felt compelled to roll out new policies, new rules, modify bathrooms, and hold meetings, all of these activities cost money, time, staff, and other resources.

The ACLU has made suing schools for transgender bathroom transgressions its own cottage industry, forcing schools to spend money to defend themselves in court or to settle. A Wisconsin school district agreed to pay $800,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a transgender student.

A transgender student at Nease High School in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., sued the St. Johns County School Board over claims of discrimination and won.

A Pennsylvania school district settled a lawsuit with three students who sued over their bathroom policies. Collectively, fighting these lawsuits, settling, and paying out, cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Schools need to focus on facts, not feelings.

Since schools have become the battleground of the transgender war, it has created casualties on both sides. Transgender students feel marginalized, cisgender students feel privacy rights are violated, biology is ignored. A school’s purpose is to educate children in a fun, compelling, safe environment. A school’s purpose is to prepare children for adulthood by sending them into the world armed with facts, information, and a love for learning and knowledge.

As the transgender “crisis” has entered schools, it has forced them to acknowledge issues that belong well outside their wheelhouse and to engage in a debate over something that defies reality.

Ideally, schools should focus on facts, not feelings, and gender dysphoria itself is largely a feeling — a feeling that the body and the mind do not match up. Gender dysphoria as a feeling often passes as children mature and with appropriate therapy. Stories abound of adults who regret giving into their dysphoria by transitioning. Unfortunately, many schools are encouraging children to transition for fear of backlash from the transgender lobby.

Author Camille Paglia, who identifies as transgender, observed similarly: “It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender.”

For many children, the only chance they have at a solid education is in the public school system. Some children do not have other significant outside influences beyond their school and home. It’s imperative children continue to receive the best education the system can give them, however flawed the system may be.

Schools need to place parameters on this issue.

Schools should not be a battleground for social experiments. Underneath the transgender toolkits, bathroom battles, and transgender bullying is a rift between progressives and conservatives. The former want to engage in this battle in the school system because it’s a soft place to land — who would deny children their right to feel however they want?

The latter are beginning to realize more than ever that the transgender lobby just keeps pushing the envelope. This has led not to more equality, more humility, or more grace, but the opposite: Now the vast majority of society, which remains cisgender, is starting to get angry as they are forced to acquiesce to yet another demand.

Schools should make district-wide, or perhaps statewide, policies ensuring that there is a facility for transgender studenets to use that is simple, conventional, and drama-free. Perhaps convert a bathroom on either end of the building or in the school office to single-sex use. (The argument that transgender children feel embarrassed using a separate or office bathroom is moot here. The children are already announcing to an entire school they are transgender. The onus is not on the school system to ensure that their announcement be accommodated as a special request.) The school should change their policies up front as a kind of liability waiver so the threat of a lawsuit is no longer applicable. Then schools should go about educating children.

Transgender issues permeating schools is an ongoing distraction, a costly venture, and one that defies the very purpose of schools. Schools should no longer be a battleground for this social experiment.

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UK: Students want to be taught not box-ticked

When diversity and inclusion are the watchwords, the real purpose of universities is obscured

As new university students across the country begin their freshers weeks, likely to be filled with bar crawls, drinking games and ill-thought-out registrations for student societies — skydive club anyone? — I wonder if they will spare a moment to think about the social inclusion ranking of their new academic homes.

This is a new ranking introduced in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, which looks at the proportion of students from comprehensive and non-selective schools in each university. I don’t imagine many freshers will be too preoccupied with it, but the heads of Oxford University certainly will, as the university came bottom for social inclusion. This means that only four in ten of Oxford students come from comprehensive or non-selective schools. The same was revealed for Cambridge and Imperial College London. Overall, eight in ten pupils go to such schools.

Commenting on the ranking, David Lammy, the Labour MP, said it was “evidence that Britain’s finest universities remain gated communities for the privileged”. This is not the first time top universities have been accused of lacking diversity.

Last year, more than 100 MPs wrote to Oxford and Cambridge universities urging them to do more to recruit students from under-represented backgrounds. This was a response to Freedom of Information requests made by Mr Lammy which revealed that 13 Oxford colleges had not made a single offer to black A-level applicants over a six-year period. A study published earlier this year showed that the proportion of black students admitted to Oxford University in 2017 was less than 2 per cent.

Data such as this always needs putting in context. Oxford University is rated number two overall in the Good University Guide and asks for a minimum of three A grades at A level for admission. Analysis by Channel 4’s FactCheck showed that the percentage of black students at Oxford University in 2017 was 1.9 per cent, which was very similar to the percentage of students in 2015 who received three As at A level who were black: 1.8 per cent.

Overall, the number of students has been on the rise for years, with almost 50 per cent of our student-age population in England now going to university. Figures from the Higher Education Funding Council for England showed an increase in the number of students from educationally disadvantaged areas in the academic year 2015-2016. There was also a significant increase in black and minority ethnic (BME) students, who made up 29 per cent of all entrants to full-time first degrees in 2015-16, despite accounting for 18 per cent of the 15-year-old population in the 2011 England census.

On the whole, university is becoming more accessible for students of diverse backgrounds. This is great news. But Oxford and Cambridge’s poor social inclusion rankings mean they will be expected, with other top universities, to focus their attention on gaining a more diverse student body. But is this really the role of a university?

Calling on our higher-education institutions to move their focus towards a diversity box-ticking exercise is to misunderstand what a university is for. But it appears over the past few years that both universities and students have lost sight of that role.

Last week, as the new academic year began, Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, wrote to university heads asking them to prioritise their students’ “mental health and wellbeing”. This won’t have come as a surprise to most people, considering the constant reports from campuses of safe spaces and stories of using therapy dogs to get through exam stress.

University lecturers are now routinely asked to be conscious of students’ sensitivities by including trigger warnings in any lectures that might include potentially difficult or traumatic material. In July, professors at Bath University were advised to stop using the expression “as you know”, lest it be deemed patronising or made those who didn’t know feel stupid. And that’s just one example of many in which students and professors are told to prioritise personal sensibilities over education.

I don’t remember it being like this when I went to university, not so very long ago. I graduated in 2008 from the University of Liverpool. I went to university for two reasons: the love of my subjects (French and Spanish) and a desire to improve my knowledge of them, and to get my first real taste of independence.

During my time there, I don’t remember any suggestion of safe spaces or of special wellbeing or exam de-stressing activities: we just went to the pub.

Had anyone asked me during my student years what improvements I might like to see in my university, I wouldn’t have given a thought to social inclusion rankings or access to therapy. Instead, I would have liked more contact hours with tutors and for our shabby old languages building to have had a refurb.

Demanding that universities focus on diversity box-ticking and the wellbeing of their students wholly misses the point of these institutions. University is a unique experience and it isn’t for everyone. It’s an opportunity to strive for academic excellence while learning how to function as an independent adult. We should let students take care of looking after themselves and ask our universities to focus on providing the highest possible standard of education.

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Australia: Bettina Arndt names to shame Sydney University’s ‘free-speech bullies’

After being targeted by demonstrators at Sydney University, journalist Bettina Arndt has hit back with tactics that could force the protest leaders to give her a written apology and undertake anti-bullying training.

Arndt has lodged a formal complaint with vice-chancellor Michael Spence accusing five named students of breaching the university’s code of conduct by trying to prevent her giving a talk questioning the existence of a rape crisis on campus.

Attorney-General Christian Porter yesterday backed calls for universities to do more to protect free speech and said they were supposed to be the epicentres of free speech.

“It is a bit of a Pyrrhic victory if you have to ask governments to come in and maintain free speech at universities,” Mr Porter said. “This buck stops firstly with the universities themselves.

“Some universities do better than others so why can’t they all lift themselves to the optimal standard of enhancing free, open and civil public debate on campus,” he said.

Dr Spence defended Sydney’s University’s approach to free speech, saying a variety of views was regularly expressed. “The picture that sometimes appears in the flyers of the culture warriors — of our university as a camp of indoctrination in which free speech is inhibited — is simply unrecognisable to those who work and study here,” he writes in today’s opinion page.

“On any given day, on almost any issue, there is a diversity of views presented on campus, in the classroom, in student groups, and by organisations to whom the university provides a platform.”

If Arndt succeeds in showing student demonstrators engaged in bullying and intimidation to prevent her talk, penalties under Sydney University rules include an oral or written apology, anti-bullying training and a “management plan” that would need her agreement.

In an email to Dr Spence, Arndt wrote on Friday that she could supply witness statements and a video of the September 11 incident in which police were called when demonstrators tried to prevent her from speaking at an event organised by the student Liberal Club.

The video shows key people “encouraging protesters to block the entrance to the venue and harassing, abusing and physically intimidating students trying to attend the lecture”, she wrote.

“I am calling for action to be taken to enforce the university’s bullying policy. “I ask the university to take action against the students who demonstrated and encouraged abusive behaviour towards me and towards Liberal Club members and my audience.”

This comes soon after a similar incident at La Trobe University and a warning from former High Court chief justice Robert French that universities faced the risk of legislative intervention unless they provided a robust defence of free speech on campus.

Arndt called on Dr Spence to initiate complaint proceedings under clause 4 of the university’s code of conduct, which says students must not unreasonably impede access to lecture theatres and must not become involved in harassment or bullying.

If her complaint is upheld, clause 17 of the university’s policy on bullying, harassment and the prevention of discrimination says breaches of the policy may result in action that includes an apology and a management plan containing agreed actions by the parties.

In a separate email with Liberal Club president Jack O’Brien, Arndt asked Dr Spence to refund the $475.20 that the Liberal Club had been required to pay for security. “The security officers ended up calling in the riot squad because they were unable to protect us nor hold back the violent, abusive protesters,” they wrote.

Education Minister Dan Tehan has suggested to university vice-chancellors that campus activists should be required to pay for security but in today’s opinion page Dr Spence argues against that proposal.

Arndt told The Australian the Liberal Club had paid for security services that the university was unable to provide.

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