Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/new-study-finds-27-of-califor.html
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I think it’s great that kids don’t feel as much pressure to fill arbitrary gender roles these days but I always thought “gender nonconforming” meant people who don’t feel comfortable being labeled as male or female? This wording makes it sound like a girl who participates in sports or a boy who joins the school choir would be classified as “gender nonconforming.”
ETA: On reflection I was probably mixing up the term with “nonbinary.”
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It still just boggles my mind how vastly, absurdly separated some of the poles of norms are in the United States. We’ve got people in their 70’s shrieking about how marriage is between ‘one man and one woman’ and ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ at the same time as we have people in their teens saying ‘Who gives a shit about marriage, or men, or women?’ This just has to be a total mindfuck for conservatives. Which is just fine, of course.
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I love that middle-schoolers like my niece talk about the openly LGBT students in their classes as if it’s no big deal. Granted, she’s in a liberal school, but adolescents of all kinds are still pretty horrible when it comes to finding reasons to exclude others; I’m glad that being gender nonconforming is increasingly not one of those reasons. Age demographics are slowly but surely relegating the bigots to the place they belong: the dustbin of history.
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Hark, what’s that? It’s the sound of rigid gender roles breaking! (And about damn time.)
Though the culture shock is also driving the support for people like Moore, unfortunately.
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If true, that’s certainly a revolutionary moment, arrived at through a massive expansion of individual freedom from societal expectations. With totally unforeseeable consequences.
Seems weird that they asked the students how they feel that other students perceive them. What does that tell us about the student’s identity? Why not ask how the students present themselves, and how they wish to be perceived?
A student might say, “Other students view me as feminine, but I wish to be perceived as masculine.” This study seems to have a blind spot to that.
Actual identity vs. double reverse perceived identity.
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Jesus - we’re gonna run out of toasters!
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Not to worry, there are still loads of rainbow gender blenders when the toasters are gone.
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It doesn’t seem like there’s anything to celebrate with this study. I just reread it and I don’t think it shows what they’re claiming it shows. It is very much about the gender assigned to the students, both at birth and by their peers, not the gender the students self-identify as. The study may accidentally capture the students’ actual gender identity through the question “are you male or female?” but there’s no way to know whether students are answering this question based on their physiology or their actual identity.
It also shows a correlation between students identified by the study as “gender nonconforming” and increased levels of psychological distress. That’s a huge problem.
What the heck with this thing.
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These being teenagers, I would expect a considerable proportion to think, “Other students view me as feminine, and I don’t care what those losers think, I am so sick of them, ugh.”
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That’s what we would hope, but there’s no indication that’s what the study is telling us. The increased psychological distress associated with how other students perceive their gender would seem to indicate otherwise.
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I find this encouraging. I view myself as non-conforming (different to non-binary). I’ve discussed it here in the BBS in the past, i don’t relate to the typical male stereotype that most people have. I like cute things but i don’t view myself as effeminate though i’m sure some dude might look at me and think so.
Anyway i’m all for people being able to be themselves and not worry that they don’t fit into some preconceived notion of what it means to be a man or woman, what whathave you. A lot of the shyness i have is kind of related to that, always been uncomfortable with me not fitting in.
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I foresee that in 10 years a large number of adults in California will happily and routinely reject 20th century gender norms, and they will experience far less societal discrimination for doing so than do such adults today.
Nope. Not totally unforeseeable at all, really.
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I’m not as sanguine about blindly messing with basic building blocks of society. It may turn out we can handle it just fine. Or not.
Change is scary, but not nearly as terrifying as the status quo.
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Given that the situation for gender-nonconforming people has never been better - what are you talking about?
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From the Time article:
On Aug. 14 the number of transgender people murdered in America this year hit a historic high of 15, according to advocacy organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Fifteen in August. So perhaps 30 over the whole year. The Advocate article gives 21 in November for transgender women, so this is probably roughly correct. Given that the total number of homicides in the US is somewhere around 15.000 per year, that’s 0.2%.
Wikipedia tells me that 0.3% of the population identifies as transgender. Given the sampling error, this means their risk of getting murdered is in fact entirely in line with anyone else’s.
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