A charter school in Boston held an “identity share” session on a Zoom call with kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders. During this session, one of the teachers, a transgender man named Ray Skyer, informed the children that when babies are born, doctors “guess” their gender and are sometimes wrong.
On the Zoom call, Skyer was asked to share something cool about himself, and the “coolest” thing about him is apparently that he’s transgender. Before diving into his ridiculous, inappropriate explanation of ‘transgender’, Skyer reminds the kids that they “touched a little bit about that at the beginning of this week in the book that Ms. Hammond read,” suggesting that these K-2 graders were already read a book on being transgender. This in itself is a totally inappropriate classroom topic for such young kids.
“So, something that’s really cool and unique about who I am is that I am transgender,” Skyer said.
The teacher then proceeded to explain to these children that doctors only “guess” a baby’s gender when it’s born, and can be wrong:
So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them, and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl based on what they look like. And most of the time that guess is 100% correct, there are no issues whatsoever. But sometimes the doctor is wrong, the doctor makes an incorrect guess. When a doctor makes a correct guess, that’s when a person is called cisgender. When a doctor’s guess is wrong that’s when they are transgender.
So I’m a man, but when I was a baby, the doctors told my parents I was a girl. And so my parents gave me a name that girls typically have and bought me clothes that girls typically wear, and until I was 18 years old everyone thought I was a girl. And this was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that wasn’t right. The way I like to describe it is like wearing a super-itchy sweater. The longer you wear it the itchier it gets, and the only way to make the itching stop is to have everyone see and know the person that you really are.
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This explanation of gender to such young children will implant the idea in their heads that doctors cannot tell a biological male from a female, which is wildly incorrect. Teaching these things to children will likely confuse them since they don’t even have a basic understanding of biology yet.
