Blind obedience to the papers. No thought required.
We informed the parent that documentation such as a chromosome analysis could be considered to help support or verify eligibility in accordance with policy.
I cannot imagine being the dumbass who said that with a straight face.
I don’t understand why it’s the school asking for this and not whoever updated the birth certificate? How did school administrators become the judges of who is a boy or girl?
republican laws often give the final say to the loudest karen and the cost onto the schools.
My (cis female) birth certificate erroneously was filled out with “male”. Same error happened on the birth certificate of my mother (who is also cis female). It’s never caused either of us any problems. Schools enrolled us as female, driver’s licenses say female, etc.
When I was in college in the early 2000s, my dad’s mother helped me get a copy of my birth certificate, and was horrified her beautiful granddaughter was listed as male. She called up the county clerk and raised Cain, and then informed me it had been corrected. I’ve never needed to get a fresh copy since then, so I don’t know for sure, but it sounded like the word of an angry old lady was enough to get an update filed.
Angry old ladies are the single scariest force on the planet.
Because if you make one angry, then you have to answer to all of their friends, family, caretakers, religious leaders, and bingo dealers.
They are also the reason why we are in this situation in the first play. Angry old lady energy serves both justice and tyranny.
My (cis female) birth certificate erroneously was filled out with “male”. Same error happened on the birth certificate of my mother (who is also cis female).
Do they use drunkards to fill out important registration forms in the US?
There’s something like thirty boxes of information on the thing, and all the others are correct. I suspect whoever was typing it (on a typewriter - this was pre-computers) had several in a row that really were male babies and just got that stuck in their head.
How difficult is it to correct an obviously wrong record in the US?
Used to not be a problem. But people transitioning use the same process to amend their records, so now there’s roadblocks.
They actually sent the school an amended certificate, and a doctor’s note explaining everything. The school just isn’t satisfied.
From reading the articles about this: The birth certificate was already updated, no problem. The school, however, has its internal policy regarding “amended birth certificates”. The school policy says this boy is to be treated as a girl, because his sex is F. It doesn’t go any deeper than that. This is the hell of bureaucracy.
Did anyone inform the administration that documentation such as chromosome analysis could be considered to help support or verify eligibility in participating with the human race? Because it seems like they might be a slime mold, based on their integrity and decision-making ability.
So glad kids can experience political influence in their personal lives. They will learn what needs to burn down.
What a shithole country.
That’s beginning to feel like an understatement. We need a new type of hole to describe just how shit things are. A shit-Mariana Trench country, perhaps.
How 'bout… Trumphole? Truole?
When they did a scan of my colon, they found I had pollips. Thats how we discovered I have cancer.
Then they cut the pollips off. I imagine that left a hole in the pollip area.
How about colon pollip hole?
Shitpact crater.
I think we can just call it dumpf’s diaper.
I have one, “the USA”.
A diarrhea hole.
Arizona, too. Not even one of the true asshole-of-the-country states.
This is the kind of stupid bullshit republicans create because they don’t solve problems they create contraversies in a lab and then when they actually get voted into office to “solve” them they literally do stupid shit like this.
They could make an airbud type movie like this
Nowhere in the rules says a woman with a penis can’t play basketball, in fact the rule book is very light on the mention of genitals at all!
The NBA and NFL both allow women, it’s just at that level it is extremely hard to find anyone who can compete.
Kinda makes me think of some of the early feminist movements thinking that women would become as large and as strong as men if they where rased the same. Its on paper a fair and equal system but reality just happens to be anything but. Then again just about the same percentage of men as woman make it to that level (near enough to zero to be a rounding error).
To be fair: Being “raised” differently does change a fair bit. I know a woman who’s a body builder. She’s way, way stronger than me. Male bodybuilders are still stronger than her, but she’s quite a bit stronger than the average man.
But at professional sports level it all comes down to minute differences, and genetics clearly play a large factor in there.
Most man are also not genetically fitting for most professional-level sports. I’d even go as far as to say that most professional athletes just fit their sport and are also not fitting for most other sports. A football player and a swimmer are just built very differently.
Oh yeah, this is just about that tippy top bit of pro sports.
Can we just separate kids by skill level rather than gender? My middle school cis son loves playing sports, but he’s not very good. He gets discouraged when the better kids bully him because of it.
Skill based matchmaking. Most competitive video games use it. Why not IRL?
Now I’m imagining a kid scoring multiple points and the other parents calling him a smurf
A little blue animated creature? Is that MMO lingo for pretending to be worse than you are like a “pool shark” or what not?
Smurfs happen more in shooters, or competitive games like Rocket League, Smash Bros etc. much less in MMO. It’s easier to be a smurf when the game is skill based, and less or no dependency on what gear you own as it takes much longer to earn top tier gear that helps keep you at top.
Not necessarily MMOs but yes, you create an alternative account with the purpose of being matched with lesser skilled players.
I don’t see why bottom tier teams shouldn’t be co-ed. PE we did co ed sports days all the time and its more about getting exercise than winning.
Maybe, for “rec league” or whatever, but school teams are usually meant to be competitive, and non-gendered sports would mean girls wouldn’t have equitable access to athletics.
But even for non-competitive teams, girls are unlikely to be able to access shared sports to the same level as boys. At a
partyhigh school I worked at, there was a major challenge with girls being willing to access open gym time, feeling uncomfortable advocating for access to basketball nets for practice—even girls who were on the competitive team felt they couldn’t use open gym time.TL;DR: Sexism runs deep. We need policies that recognize that and build equity, not just offer “equality” that perpetuates, or even magnifies, the problem.
Maybe we just need new sports.
i think sport, exspecially in schools, should always be mixed. Also i think the competetivness of american school sport is kind of toxic, it should be about having fun
Ultimate Frisbee did this by forcing a certain number of boys/girl per team. If you don’t impose that you end up with a boys team anyway at high level.
This is basketball, a sport that rewards tallness. By eighth grade boys are on average taller than girls. Even before you look at other gender differences, girls would be at significant disadvantage.
Many/most people are competitive, and competitiveness doesn’t have to be toxic. It’s fine for you not to be competitive, but people are, and it’s unreasonable to ask them to repress that part of their personality
can everyone play basketball in us schools (if they offer it) or is this like limited (i mean tryouts?)
It’s going to depend on the school and level
Given this example of eighth grade basketball, my kid technically had tryouts but everyone made the team. It was a small school though, and bigger schools may be different. He came in cold, not knowing the game but is a natural athlete. He had fun and learned the game and that one year was enough. I pushed him to play this year because he had been interested, he had a bunch of friends in the team, and he is an athlete. Importantly he’s not really tall enough for basketball, so eighth grade was likely his last chance to play. (It was funny to watch his crew of three soccer players and a hockey player take over the team and try to adjust their skills to a new sport)
Sports tends to get competitive in high school, especially for varsity teams, but there are usually options. For example my kid made the varsity soccer team after competitive tryouts. Part of the competitive nature was encouraging the kids to play competitive club soccer in the off season. To secure his starting spot, my kids spent the off season lifting weights, gaining about 30 lbs of muscle while cutting any remaining fat. Yes it was competitive. But he also joined a town league and a rec league for fun off season because he just loved playing: non-competitive, no tryouts
i think sport, exspecially in schools, should always be mixed
At the middle school age range, girls are typically bigger and stronger than their male peers. Boys don’t catch up until 14-16, at which point they rapidly put on height and mass to exceed their girl peers.
Yeah, that will work out well. I cannot think of a sport that is played in school that would fair to the girls if all sports were mixed teams. By the time kids are 13-14 years old, the boys are starting to get to be bigger, taller, faster, and stronger. And the disparity only gets worse as they age.
And one of the driving tenants of sports IS to teach competitiveness.
Why should we be teaching competitiveness? That’s how you turn society into individuals who only look out for their own needs and are apathetic when you do things like a fascist coup. Oh wait…
Nah, I’d much rather be teaching kids cooperation.
(Sports are still great, but not for the reason of teaching competitiveness).
Competition is literally the basis of almost every sport. How would hockey, for example, be played without competition?
I’m saying we shouldn’t teach competitiveness as a value in and of itself. Competition in sports is fine.
I feel like that could be fixed by just doing a weight class so gender does not become the factor but overall strength and that also gives the opportunity for weaker boys to play sports and not get boxed out in boys only sports and stronger girls “like girls with PCOS” to not dominate girl Sports.
Or maybe it’s already fixed by larger schools having multiple teams, such as varsity, Jv, freshmen. Or different leagues, like rec leagues, town leagues. Or gym class sports which are never competitive.
But it’s ridiculous to think it fair if the high level teams are essentially all boys, and the girls are stuck on the crappy team with boys who can’t play. No one will be happy with that
The kids WILL turn everything into a competition no matter what you think you are doing to prevent that. Humans are naturally competitive. Like it or not.
The kids WILL turn everything into a competition
In my experience, it’s the parents that need to make every Little League Rec scrimmage into the final game of the world series.
I’m glad the people that had emotional meltdowns over the chance of boys being on girls teams… have made a boy, by their own actions and stupidity, be forced on the girls team
Sex segregation in childrens sports is legitimately a powerful indoctrinating force for binary sexism and the enforcement of gender roles.
Now do same sex schools
Makes sense. Although when you word it that way my first thought was to expect teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers the Philly Sandwiches
If that were me, I’d start wearing skirts and mascara. Let my nails grow out, tweeze my asshole, shave my treasure trail into a facsimile of a set of ovaries. Pitch my voice up, incorporate the words “bitch” and “tea” into my daily vernacular. Cry after sad movies and even harder after happy ones. Entirely unrelated to the article, btw
I don’t know how American birth certificates work. Is he officially female for life, unless he wants it changed?
I imagine trans people would be quite happy in such a situation. Like winning the lottery.
There is a process to amend birth certificates, presumably initially intended for errors like this. But then people who successfully transitioned used the process to amend their birth certificates to reflect their new gender, because there was no other way to do it. The transphobes seized on this, and started processes that refuse to honor any late changes to birth certificates.
It should have been a simple matter to resolve - his doctor wites a note saying “This kid has boy parts, and always has. The birth certificate was always an administrative error”. But then, that would force the transphobes to acknowledge a role for facts and science to contradict their feelings. So, we can’t have that either.
So, they go on claiming that they are just out for the best interests of kids, and that justifies why they are treating this kid so poorly. When in reality, they are just protecting their narrative, at his expense.
In current US, he’s probably going to have to transition.
Normally people use common sense, it’s obviously a clerical error and you can get the paperwork fixed.
This is an example of right wing scare tactics against trans people in sports creating stupid laws that also don’t allow for the messiness of real life. I didn’t pay attention but it’ll be local to either the state or city
From the article it sounds like the birth certificate was corrected but the school isn’t accepting the change without a chromosome test, which costs $1,500. There’s another test that they could do that’s free, slightly embarrassing, and takes just a moment, but would require an adult to look when the kid drops his pants. It’s such a stupid non-issue. I can’t believe this happened, that we know about it, and that it hasn’t been resolved yet.
That wouldn’t work. Conservatives needed to write iron-clad laws that no trans person could find a way around. If you base it on genitals, what happens when someone goes and gets sex reassignment surgery? That’s not done on minors, but conservatives don’t know that. How’s a school coach to know that he isn’t a trans guy that snuck off to Thailand one summer and got a dick installed? This is why these laws reference the original birth certificate. The entire point is to make it so sex is immutable and unchangeable.
Geez, I think you’re right. I guess homie better get used to using the women’s restroom from now on or else he could find himself getting beat up or prosecuted.
This is what doctor’s notes are for. And they had one.
These laws were written to hurt trans people. They were written to make it very difficult for trans people to find loopholes to get around. That is the problem here.
Let’s say the errors on sex could be corrected with a doctor’s note. But what you’re really asking for is for a sex marker to be changed, simply citing an error in original sex assignment. You are going to plead that your real sex is unmatched to your documented marker. But what is sex? “Sex” is a very fuzzy thing. Is it genetics? Genitals? Chromosomes? Secondary sex characteristics? Conservatives like chromosomes because their inalterability serves the conservative worldview. But historically we used primary and secondary sex characteristics to define sex. We talked about “male” and “female” since the dawn of time, but we’ve known about chromosomes for less than a century. Historically, your sex was simply your observable physical form. If you alter that, in a very real sense you do change your biological sex. There are many interpretations of the word “sex” and the phrase “biological sex.” Some allow them to be changed, some not. And, wherever you fall on that question personally, you can find doctors who follow any of the possible definitions of the terms.
In fact, in states that allow you to change your sex on your birth certificate, traditionally this is how it was done. The state would require a letter from a physician saying your biological sex has been changed. Some states specifically required surgery. Some just left it up to the doctor’s interpretation. If you could convince a doctor that you had changed your sex, then your sex could be legally changed.
And this is the problem. You would think you could correct this error with a doctor’s note. But the Republicans already thought of that. This cis kid could use a doctor’s note to prove that he’s biologically male. A trans kid could use that exact same mechanism to get a doctor to say that their sex is now male. Just find a doctor that believes that sex is largely hormonal. A trans boy gets on T, and, in that doctor’s eyes, their sex has now literally been changed. And they could write a letter to that effect. And the doctor wouldn’t have to lie at all. It all comes down to your interpretation of “sex.”
These laws were written to hurt trans people. To do this, they needed sex to be legally defined in a very strict and unalterable way. They wanted to make the process so ironclad that no trans person could ever weasel their way past them. Thus, they only allow corrections of birth certificates in some very specific ways that no trans person could use. They don’t just leave it up to a licensed doctor. Licensed doctors are the ones providing medical care to trans people. The laws instead require things like chromosomal testing. Chromosomes are one thing that can’t be changed. If you require chromosomal testing to correct an error on an original birth certificate, then you can make it virtually impossible for a trans person to change theirs. But it does have the slight downside of making it very expensive to correct actual clerical errors.
And this will be true regardless of how you want to screen for original biological sex. The tall and strong gate will make it hard for your enemy to pass. But it will also make it difficult to let in a friend that gets accidentally trapped outside in the night.
So they believe a person’s gender is up for negotiation with their doctor, who is a member of the elite and therefore is likely corruptible. This makes sense. I’ve heard of doctors doing favors for their rich clients and writing notes declaring the client’s son to be suffering from painful bone spurs, preventing military service. I guess every accusation truly is an admission of guilt.
The district pointed to a state law enacted in 2022, which mandates that school sports teams must be designated “based on the biological sex of the students who participate” in the sport. A federal judge blocked enforcement of that law in 2023, but only against two trans student-athletes who filed suit against it. (An appeals court upheld that injunction last year, and the Supreme Court declined to take up the case this summer.)
Any chance this is some malicious compliance?
It’s really a no win situation though if the boy complies. Newsmax will show footage of a game he plays in as evidence that boys are playing in girls sports, and the idiots who watch will believe it and support even worse politicians and laws.
Could be! I was just commenting that the kid could engage in malicious compliance. Let’s see what happens when he exits the girls locker room with wet hair and a towel around his neck.
I don’t see what part of that even requires them to use the birth certificate
It’s the stupid conservative part. If they make an exception for him, then they need to make exceptions for trans girls
Unfortunately, no they don’t. You think these people believe their constituents have brains?
Any chance this is some malicious compliance?
It could be fear. No one wants a bunch of Karen’s screaming in their face. No one wants to be sued or fired. Maybe this is just someone who thinks they need to protect themselves over the kids they’re responsible for
I’m genuinely curious what happens for example if this cis gender boy wants to get married with a cis gender girl. Would that be a gay marriage (I dunno what is the correct term). And if they are in a state where it’s not allowed, how does it go?
(I am not from US. I assume union of same sex is not fully accepted and every state and/or community have different laws and practices)
Gay marriage is legal in every state since 2015. Supreme Court ordered it with Obergefell v Hodges
I like how US laws are cited. “Can Asians own SUV?”. Yes they can since Mathews vs Jonathan in 1994.
Sounds like they threw two people in the pit and the victor of the bout decided the law on that.
For now. That’s next to get the ax on the conservative agenda.
What a USA thing to do. Holy shit.
Because trans issues are completely solved in other parts of the world.
This isn’t a trans issue. It’s an absurd bureaucracy failing to function because of political incontinence
It’s a trans issue. It only became a bureaucratic issue because of a rule rooted in transphobia.
I would say it’s trans adjacent.
The kid is, was, and always has been a boy, in every sense of the word. Both as their “biological” gender and their actual gender.
Some doctor fucked up and put “female” on the birth certificate. It was noted, corrected and now the birth certificate has been amended.
The USA part of all of this is that bureaucratic bullshit is prohibiting the school from recognising the fact that a mistake happened and allow the poor kid to participate like everyone else. He’s stuck in limbo because some dickhead on a power trip who has a hard on for making life difficult for people who are different from them, made a short sighted decision to put such a policy in place, without comprehending that doctors are people who can make mistakes, exactly like the one in the OP. It’s the bullshit bureaucracy that’s very USA. It’s the inflexible rules that are very USA.
The rules were made to punish trans people for daring to try to like who they are, instead of being miserable in the cast they were born into, and it bit them in the ass, inadvertently punishing one of “their own”.
So yeah, trans rights, or lack thereof is the reason behind the problem, but the problem is affecting someone who is distinctly not trans.
Even a rule rooted in transphobia could be well written. This one is not.
Transphobia can never be well written. That’s the point.
