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A Texas public school district has decided to prohibit the use of pronouns that do not match students’ biological sex, regardless of their pronoun preferences or gender identity.
The controversial policy that the Keller Independent School District (ISD) adopted will require teachers to refer to students with pronouns correlating to the gender on their birth certificates, Fox 4 reported.
The rule also states that parents must be alerted if their children request to go by different names or pronouns at school and that parents must write a notice granting permission for schools to call their students by alternative names or pronouns.
Students have protested the policy, with one high school senior saying the district was prioritizing “a political agenda” during a public comment session.
“Every day I walk into a school and myself and my peers are suffering. It seems like more and more the school district is prioritizing budget cuts and a political agenda over the health of its students,” said Kennedy Schultz.
Madison Hickman, another senior, called it “hate.”
“You’ve created an environment where fear and isolation might just become the norm for our most vulnerable students. I hope this brings you the kind of community you’re striving for, one where conformity is valued over compassion. Hate is not a Keller ISD value,” she said.
Fox 4 also reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent the district a letter of concern, warning it that the policy is discriminatory, but the board passed it anyway.
Keller ISD also found itself in controversy in 2022 when it pulled dozens of books from shelves for review, including the Bible.
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This is a good time to remind people:
Animals have a SEX. Animals can be MALE or FEMALE, and that's it, and it all depends on what role they have in reproduction. If you have a case where an animal is incapable of reproducing for whatever reason, it still has a sex, but we note additionally that they are neutered and incapable of reproducing. IE, there are cows, bulls, and steer.
Words have a GENDER. Depending on the language, of course. Some languages don't have genders assigned to words, but most of the European ones retain gender. English, a derivative of proto-Germanic, has gender although it is not as important as it used to be. The 3 English genders are MALE, FEMALE, and NEUTER. The ONLY CASE where the gender of the noun matters is when using the 3rd person pronouns and related words. We do not modify our adjectives based on the gender of the noun unlike many other European languages.
PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE A GENDER. This is a made-up "fact" by people who paid men to rape their own babies.
When you demand that people recognize YOU as a specific GENDER, you are REWRITING ENGLISH and FORCING OTHERS TO CONFORM. YOU ARE THE TYRANT. Let us use words the way we want, in whatever manner we decide is appropriate. Let US determine the language.
gender and sex are synonymous. people have always been identified as one gender or the other. making a distinction between sex and gender is playing their language game.
Gender doesn't apply to people. It applies to words.
Sex applies to people. It doesn't apply to words.
This is the way it has always been. The only reason the word "gender" exists is because we needed a way to describe how languages work.
would you mind backing that up with any sauce? as far as I know, gender and sex have always been interchangeable. saying people never had genders sounds nuts.
Go find a dictionary published before, say, 2000. Better yet, 1900.
Look up those words.
Bees are Queen, Drone and worker
Snails and slugs are hemaphrodites
Some animals reproduce asexually
Those aren't animals
Bees, snails and slugs aren't animals now?
In the taxinomical kingdom, yes. Conventionally, no. I think casual conversation would dictate in this case and the above poster would be discussing mammals and possibly birds. The poster was definitely not talking about insects and arthropods. I think you both are being pedantic and using that to ignore the point being made.
Exactly. The way people actually speak nowadays, gender and sex are synonymous when referring to whether humans are XX or XY.
We use "gender" as a more genteel way to talk about male and female, rather than using the word "sex" with all its juicy behavioral connotations.
Many of us don't like the expression "the sex of the baby". Like words, BABIES DON'T HAVE SEX. They have GENDER, unless pedophile perverts are involved. "A baby's gender is either female or male." Sounds nicer to the average listener.
"But it's still technically accurate to say babies have sex, and their sex is male or female!" Maybe, but you lost the listener at "babies have sex." Yes we have sex to make babies, but when we are discussing the baby rather than intercourse, we use the word gender.
Gender isn't a bad word. It is related to the word gene. Genes are where the XX and XY chromosomes are located, which genuinely determine the gender and genitalia of the babies in each generation of our genus.
Babies don't have a gender. They are an animal. They have sex.
Words have gender. Babies are not words.