Jordan Peterson:
Gender theory has no place in the classroom
A six-year-old girl has been upset since her Ottawa teacher "taught her" that "girls are not real and boys are not real".
Two weeks ago, journalist Barbara Kay published an article on the Post Millennial site regarding an application filed by the parents of a six-year-old girl with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO). N. ", subject to the new theory of gender identity by her teacher
at the Devonshire Community Public School (Ottawa-Carleton District School Board).
According to Ms. Kay's account, in January 2018, in a first year class at the Devonshire Community Public School , part of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board Network, N., aged six, watched a video on YouTube as part of her teacher's lesson on "gender".
According to Pamela, N.'s mother, her daughter is a child who loves school - or worshiped it until the morning at the base of this post.
The video was titled "He, she or them?" - Sex: Queer Kid Stuff # 2. "
The video contained affirmations such as "some people are not boys or girls" and there are people who do not feel "an" he "or" she "and so may not have a gender. The young teacher, whose initials are JB, continued to teach gender theory throughout the semester. According to N.'s reactions to her mother, JB told the children that there were no girls or boys and that no more girls and boys are "real".
By mid-March, N.'s parents could see that the lessons had an impact on their daughter, who was spontaneously beginning to ask them repeatedly why her girlhood identity was "not real". She asked if she could "go to a doctor" to discuss the fact that she was a girl. She said she "was not sure she wanted to be a mom." Ms. Buffone explained to N. that adult women had a choice, but she was concerned that
the subject would be addressed in class in the first year.
The Buffones were naturally alarmed by the persistent signs of confusion of their daughter, whereas she had never previously shown any sign of dissatisfaction with her biological reality. Ms. Buffone met with teacher JB in March to discuss the impact of gender discussions on her daughter.
Parents were able to see that JB was very committed to teaching sexual fluency as a reflection of "change in society". She explained to Ms. Buffone that sexual fluidity was the school board's policy, that some children had a hard time accepting that sex was binary and confirmed that the issue of sex change had been addressed in the classroom. She did not seem too concerned about N's personal distress
and did nothing to affirm N's feminine identity.
The Buffones then contacted the principal of the school, Julie Derbyshire.
According to Ms. Buffone, Ms. Derbyshire explained that JB had started this course to accommodate a child in the class who said they would like to speak as a child of a gender opposite to their biological sex. A child with symptoms of gender dysphoria in the first year of this school was, it is true, teased for this fact. But, according to Ms. Buffone, as she later learned, the parents of the child in question did not want this problem to be solved by lessons on gender; they simply wanted to teach other children to act respectfully towards their child and not to intimidate him. Ms. Derbyshire did not suggest consulting the school's "Gender Specialist" about students like N. who did not question their gender.
Determined to get an answer on the merits of the problem, the Buffones insisted on meeting with the superintendent of the school board and the superintendent of the school program. According to the complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, "the school board did not agree to communicate with parents in sensitive discussions or to accept direction or take corrective action to ensure
that female children are comforted in their gender identity. "
Clashing with a wall at each level of the hierarchy, the Buffones made the decision to put N. in another school where, according to her mother, she is well and where she told her family to be happy to have no more teacher who says that "girls are not real". In October 2018, N. would have told his mother: "This table is real, and this fan is real, and even if the fan was cardboard, it's still real. "
The stories related to gender identity in childhood that are usually read in the press depict a child who would be upset by the disparity that exists between his biological reality and the kind he imagines he has. These stories usually present educators as enlightened allies and spokespersons for the child, while parents, retrograde and closed, resist their child's gender assertion, which would cause increased anxiety for the child. This presentation of the facts easily convinces the audience that the child lives an injustice and that he is happy that the state and its representatives will defend the child "locked in a bad gender identity". In these cases, the "right of the child to express gender identity"
prevails for the spectators and the state over the right of the parents to oppose it.
But here we have the opposite case. N. felt good about his sexual identity. She had never doubted this one. Suddenly, a person in authority tells her that at all times, what she believes to be real - that she is a girl - may not be true. The parents are the child's allies here while his school questions the reality of his sexual identity or casts doubt on him.
Why could not she be treated as well as the child who asks questions about his "gender"?
After all, a minimum of goodwill from JB and his superiors would have easily defused the situation and alleviated Buffone's concerns. Why could JB not have explained that some people feel uncomfortable about their sexual identity, but that it is a rare thing (a fact); that it is often a passing phase; that clothing and non-compliant play preferences in childhood are normal ("missed boys") and rarely indicate deep or lasting discontent with the biological sex (fact); that most children stop having these doubts when they are teenagers (done); most importantly, almost all children are perfectly happy to be exactly what they are and do not have to worry that they are not real boys or girls . Why is this so difficult for the school? N. would have been reassured and the only child in the class who was suffering from sexual confusion would not have been affected.
The request from the Buffalo HRTO concludes that JB "subjected N. to continued discrimination based on gender and gender identity, through a series of lessons that denied the existence of the female sex and biological sex and undermined the value of identification as a woman [..] The principal and school board perpetuated and reinforced the discrimination that N. had suffered in her first year class because neither Ms. Derbyshire nor any school board official had taken corrective action to remedy it. "
The relief sought is for the Tribunal to order the Board to (i) ensure that classroom instruction "does not devalue, deny or in any way undermine female gender identity"; (ii) mandate teachers to "inform parents when classes on gender identity will take place or have taken place, including educational objectives and materials that will or will have been used for these courses"; and (iii) to pay Buffone $ 5,000 in general damages "to compensate for the damage to dignity, feelings and self-esteem caused by discrimination".
Counsel for the school board responded to the parents' request that it be dismissed "on the grounds that the application had no reasonable chance of success", rejecting the allegations and promising to provide a "complete answer" if the Tribunal did not dismiss the case after an accelerated procedure.
The solicitor also cited another complaint against the Ontario Elementary Teachers' Federation by referring to the Tribunal's finding that the Tribunal "did not have the authority to rule on general allegations of unfairness "and that the facts, even if true, do not" imply discrimination prohibited by the [Human Rights] Code ". It also states that the right of teachers to teach gender identity has been recognized by the Minister of Education and that "The relevance of a class discussion does not result in prohibited discrimination as defined by the Code. . In summary, even if the teacher's lessons have negative effects on N., the girl would have no grounds for redress under the Human Rights Code.
The famous professor of psychology Jordan Peterson spoke on this case :
Consider this: at the age of six, "N." first had to question an identity that she had been continuously and continuously developing since (at least) the age of two - learning the rules that she considered her social role to be a girl, so that she knew how to integrate, do what is expected of her, get along with others, refrain from violating the expectations of her peers and adults she meets and prepare her best for her female career. Secondly, she was asked to question what constitutes the "real" - because if you are six and you are a girl and you know it (like everyone else), and you are told now that none of this is "real", so the very idea of reality becomes fragile and unstable. We must not underestimate the seriousness of the philosophical and psychological confusion that such demands may engender.
I find it hard to imagine a pedagogical strategy that is less conducive to stable early childhood development, especially for a thoughtful child, which is exactly what "N" seems to be - for his greatest misfortune in this case. Apparently trusting her teacher, "N." listened to her lessons and tried to understand the complex and contradictory salmigundis she was presented with. This exercise was doomed to fail because this information does not mean anything reasonable, logical, practical or true. Regardless: "sexual fluidity" is the school board's policy, even for six-year-olds and the previously normal child's distress following these classes is a reasonable price to pay for purity ideological. This policy, however counterproductive and absurd, must be strictly maintained. It is better for the child to suffer than the teacher to think. It is better for the whole education system to be transformed around the new dogma (and too bad if the experiment goes wrong) than to see the ideologues who manage its structure question their absurd presumptions and fundamentally born of resentment.
[...] And now we're going to find out - with the permission of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (an organization where I could hardly have less faith and should be abolished as soon as possible) - if the little girls the right to maintain their views of the world and their opinion on their own bodies - normative, common, practical and realistic visions and opinions - or if this is administratively and legally supplanted by the existence of an inconsistent set of rights inexcusably conceded and forced to a very small minority of people who insist that their "identities" are fully self-generated and absolutely inviolable socially and legally. I would bet on the second option and I think that the fact that we are there is a great shame and a danger for all of us.
Earlier, the psychology professor recalled:
Worse, this characteristic insistence of the bill [C-16] and the associated policies and the tenth academic dogmas that underpin all this joke, that "identity" is determined solely by the individual in question. (Whatever that identity is) Even sociologists do not believe it: neither the older classic genre, which is sometimes useful, nor the horrendous and utterly counterproductive modern genre. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is necessarily socially negotiated. And there is a reason for that. An identity - a role - is not just what you believe to be, moment by moment or year after year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says (more precisely in its sociology section), "a complete set of behaviors socially recognized "which provides a means of identifying and placing an individual in society", it also serves as "a strategy for dealing with recurring situations and knowing how to deal with other roles (eg parent-child) ".
Your identity does not match the clothes you wear, the fashionable sexual preferences or behaviors you adopt and display, or the causes that motivate your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas other than your own. Rather, it is a complex set of compromises made between the individual and society about how each other could support each other and support each other in the long run. We do not change this set lightly, because this compromise is very difficult to achieve, it is the essence of civilization. It took centuries to achieve this. It must be understood that the absence of socially acceptable roles is simply the permanent conflict, both psychological and social.
Insofar as this identity is not only biological (although it is largely, but not totally), it is a drama that is played in the world of others. An identity provides rules of social interaction that everyone understands ; it provides a generic but indispensable meaning and purpose in life. If you are a kid and play role-playing games to laugh with your friends, you negotiate your identity so that the game runs smoothly. You do the same thing in the real world, whether you're a kid, a teenager, or an adult . Refusing to engage in the social aspect of identity bargaining - stressing that everyone must accept what you say you are - is simply confusing you and everyone else because nobody understands the rules of your game,
especially because they simply have not been formulated.
Jordan Peterson ends his open letter as follows:
The silence of the majority on such questions - justified, I think, by the real fear of being purposely ostracized for daring to raise objections (regardless of the representativeness of those objections) - will, in my opinion, put our children and adolescents in a situation
that we will regret bitterly in the coming decades .
Two weeks ago, journalist Barbara Kay published an article on the Post Millennial site regarding an application filed by the parents of a six-year-old girl with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO). N. ", subject to the new theory of gender identity by her teacher
at the Devonshire Community Public School (Ottawa-Carleton District School Board).
According to Ms. Kay's account, in January 2018, in a first year class at the Devonshire Community Public School , part of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board Network, N., aged six, watched a video on YouTube as part of her teacher's lesson on "gender".
According to Pamela, N.'s mother, her daughter is a child who loves school - or worshiped it until the morning at the base of this post.
The video was titled "He, she or them?" - Sex: Queer Kid Stuff # 2. "
The video contained affirmations such as "some people are not boys or girls" and there are people who do not feel "an" he "or" she "and so may not have a gender. The young teacher, whose initials are JB, continued to teach gender theory throughout the semester. According to N.'s reactions to her mother, JB told the children that there were no girls or boys and that no more girls and boys are "real".
By mid-March, N.'s parents could see that the lessons had an impact on their daughter, who was spontaneously beginning to ask them repeatedly why her girlhood identity was "not real". She asked if she could "go to a doctor" to discuss the fact that she was a girl. She said she "was not sure she wanted to be a mom." Ms. Buffone explained to N. that adult women had a choice, but she was concerned that
the subject would be addressed in class in the first year.
The Buffones were naturally alarmed by the persistent signs of confusion of their daughter, whereas she had never previously shown any sign of dissatisfaction with her biological reality. Ms. Buffone met with teacher JB in March to discuss the impact of gender discussions on her daughter.
Parents were able to see that JB was very committed to teaching sexual fluency as a reflection of "change in society". She explained to Ms. Buffone that sexual fluidity was the school board's policy, that some children had a hard time accepting that sex was binary and confirmed that the issue of sex change had been addressed in the classroom. She did not seem too concerned about N's personal distress
and did nothing to affirm N's feminine identity.
The Buffones then contacted the principal of the school, Julie Derbyshire.
According to Ms. Buffone, Ms. Derbyshire explained that JB had started this course to accommodate a child in the class who said they would like to speak as a child of a gender opposite to their biological sex. A child with symptoms of gender dysphoria in the first year of this school was, it is true, teased for this fact. But, according to Ms. Buffone, as she later learned, the parents of the child in question did not want this problem to be solved by lessons on gender; they simply wanted to teach other children to act respectfully towards their child and not to intimidate him. Ms. Derbyshire did not suggest consulting the school's "Gender Specialist" about students like N. who did not question their gender.
Determined to get an answer on the merits of the problem, the Buffones insisted on meeting with the superintendent of the school board and the superintendent of the school program. According to the complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, "the school board did not agree to communicate with parents in sensitive discussions or to accept direction or take corrective action to ensure
that female children are comforted in their gender identity. "
Clashing with a wall at each level of the hierarchy, the Buffones made the decision to put N. in another school where, according to her mother, she is well and where she told her family to be happy to have no more teacher who says that "girls are not real". In October 2018, N. would have told his mother: "This table is real, and this fan is real, and even if the fan was cardboard, it's still real. "
The stories related to gender identity in childhood that are usually read in the press depict a child who would be upset by the disparity that exists between his biological reality and the kind he imagines he has. These stories usually present educators as enlightened allies and spokespersons for the child, while parents, retrograde and closed, resist their child's gender assertion, which would cause increased anxiety for the child. This presentation of the facts easily convinces the audience that the child lives an injustice and that he is happy that the state and its representatives will defend the child "locked in a bad gender identity". In these cases, the "right of the child to express gender identity"
prevails for the spectators and the state over the right of the parents to oppose it.
But here we have the opposite case. N. felt good about his sexual identity. She had never doubted this one. Suddenly, a person in authority tells her that at all times, what she believes to be real - that she is a girl - may not be true. The parents are the child's allies here while his school questions the reality of his sexual identity or casts doubt on him.
Why could not she be treated as well as the child who asks questions about his "gender"?
After all, a minimum of goodwill from JB and his superiors would have easily defused the situation and alleviated Buffone's concerns. Why could JB not have explained that some people feel uncomfortable about their sexual identity, but that it is a rare thing (a fact); that it is often a passing phase; that clothing and non-compliant play preferences in childhood are normal ("missed boys") and rarely indicate deep or lasting discontent with the biological sex (fact); that most children stop having these doubts when they are teenagers (done); most importantly, almost all children are perfectly happy to be exactly what they are and do not have to worry that they are not real boys or girls . Why is this so difficult for the school? N. would have been reassured and the only child in the class who was suffering from sexual confusion would not have been affected.
The request from the Buffalo HRTO concludes that JB "subjected N. to continued discrimination based on gender and gender identity, through a series of lessons that denied the existence of the female sex and biological sex and undermined the value of identification as a woman [..] The principal and school board perpetuated and reinforced the discrimination that N. had suffered in her first year class because neither Ms. Derbyshire nor any school board official had taken corrective action to remedy it. "
The relief sought is for the Tribunal to order the Board to (i) ensure that classroom instruction "does not devalue, deny or in any way undermine female gender identity"; (ii) mandate teachers to "inform parents when classes on gender identity will take place or have taken place, including educational objectives and materials that will or will have been used for these courses"; and (iii) to pay Buffone $ 5,000 in general damages "to compensate for the damage to dignity, feelings and self-esteem caused by discrimination".
Counsel for the school board responded to the parents' request that it be dismissed "on the grounds that the application had no reasonable chance of success", rejecting the allegations and promising to provide a "complete answer" if the Tribunal did not dismiss the case after an accelerated procedure.
The solicitor also cited another complaint against the Ontario Elementary Teachers' Federation by referring to the Tribunal's finding that the Tribunal "did not have the authority to rule on general allegations of unfairness "and that the facts, even if true, do not" imply discrimination prohibited by the [Human Rights] Code ". It also states that the right of teachers to teach gender identity has been recognized by the Minister of Education and that "The relevance of a class discussion does not result in prohibited discrimination as defined by the Code. . In summary, even if the teacher's lessons have negative effects on N., the girl would have no grounds for redress under the Human Rights Code.
The famous professor of psychology Jordan Peterson spoke on this case :
Consider this: at the age of six, "N." first had to question an identity that she had been continuously and continuously developing since (at least) the age of two - learning the rules that she considered her social role to be a girl, so that she knew how to integrate, do what is expected of her, get along with others, refrain from violating the expectations of her peers and adults she meets and prepare her best for her female career. Secondly, she was asked to question what constitutes the "real" - because if you are six and you are a girl and you know it (like everyone else), and you are told now that none of this is "real", so the very idea of reality becomes fragile and unstable. We must not underestimate the seriousness of the philosophical and psychological confusion that such demands may engender.
I find it hard to imagine a pedagogical strategy that is less conducive to stable early childhood development, especially for a thoughtful child, which is exactly what "N" seems to be - for his greatest misfortune in this case. Apparently trusting her teacher, "N." listened to her lessons and tried to understand the complex and contradictory salmigundis she was presented with. This exercise was doomed to fail because this information does not mean anything reasonable, logical, practical or true. Regardless: "sexual fluidity" is the school board's policy, even for six-year-olds and the previously normal child's distress following these classes is a reasonable price to pay for purity ideological. This policy, however counterproductive and absurd, must be strictly maintained. It is better for the child to suffer than the teacher to think. It is better for the whole education system to be transformed around the new dogma (and too bad if the experiment goes wrong) than to see the ideologues who manage its structure question their absurd presumptions and fundamentally born of resentment.
[...] And now we're going to find out - with the permission of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (an organization where I could hardly have less faith and should be abolished as soon as possible) - if the little girls the right to maintain their views of the world and their opinion on their own bodies - normative, common, practical and realistic visions and opinions - or if this is administratively and legally supplanted by the existence of an inconsistent set of rights inexcusably conceded and forced to a very small minority of people who insist that their "identities" are fully self-generated and absolutely inviolable socially and legally. I would bet on the second option and I think that the fact that we are there is a great shame and a danger for all of us.
Earlier, the psychology professor recalled:
Worse, this characteristic insistence of the bill [C-16] and the associated policies and the tenth academic dogmas that underpin all this joke, that "identity" is determined solely by the individual in question. (Whatever that identity is) Even sociologists do not believe it: neither the older classic genre, which is sometimes useful, nor the horrendous and utterly counterproductive modern genre. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is necessarily socially negotiated. And there is a reason for that. An identity - a role - is not just what you believe to be, moment by moment or year after year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says (more precisely in its sociology section), "a complete set of behaviors socially recognized "which provides a means of identifying and placing an individual in society", it also serves as "a strategy for dealing with recurring situations and knowing how to deal with other roles (eg parent-child) ".
Your identity does not match the clothes you wear, the fashionable sexual preferences or behaviors you adopt and display, or the causes that motivate your activism, or your moral outrage at ideas other than your own. Rather, it is a complex set of compromises made between the individual and society about how each other could support each other and support each other in the long run. We do not change this set lightly, because this compromise is very difficult to achieve, it is the essence of civilization. It took centuries to achieve this. It must be understood that the absence of socially acceptable roles is simply the permanent conflict, both psychological and social.
Insofar as this identity is not only biological (although it is largely, but not totally), it is a drama that is played in the world of others. An identity provides rules of social interaction that everyone understands ; it provides a generic but indispensable meaning and purpose in life. If you are a kid and play role-playing games to laugh with your friends, you negotiate your identity so that the game runs smoothly. You do the same thing in the real world, whether you're a kid, a teenager, or an adult . Refusing to engage in the social aspect of identity bargaining - stressing that everyone must accept what you say you are - is simply confusing you and everyone else because nobody understands the rules of your game,
especially because they simply have not been formulated.
Jordan Peterson ends his open letter as follows:
The silence of the majority on such questions - justified, I think, by the real fear of being purposely ostracized for daring to raise objections (regardless of the representativeness of those objections) - will, in my opinion, put our children and adolescents in a situation
that we will regret bitterly in the coming decades .
thank you for your visit