Will the last NORMAL person leaving the US, please turn out the solar powered light!

[Busybody]

Schools seeing an increase in transgender students
Posted: Nov 25, 2014 1:56 PM EST Updated: Nov 25, 2014 6:03 PM EST



SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) - School can be a struggle for many students, not just academically but socially, especially students who question their own identity. A local outreach group for transgender and gay teens said they've seen an increase in the number transgender students attending school in the Savannah area.

School social workers and counselors are now faced with the challenge of how to help these students.

“There seems to be a greater acceptance and recognition of people of differences whether that difference be around sexual orientation or gender identification,” said Bob Dunn, Volunteer at Stand Out Youth Savannah.

Dunn has been volunteering at Stand Out Youth Savannah for nearly eight years but believes in recent years, youth are feeling more comfortable to express their sexuality. The reason, he said society has become more accepting.

“I think that gives youth hope and understanding that there is opportunity out there,” said Dunn.

Nevertheless, Dunn said it's no walk in the park for teenagers especially at school.

“Using the bathroom becomes a stress point and an anxiety point,” said Dunn.

For example a male student who says he is female, may have trouble going into the boys bathroom or locker room. They also struggle with their birth names versus the name the want to be called.

So how can schools help? School systems in New York City already have transgender student guidelines in place for teachers and students to follow. But Savannah-Chatham County Public School Officials said there's no standard protocol.

“I mean certainly we would want kids to feel safe and comfortable and be able to use whatever facilities without any harassment, so I mean it would be a school based issue,” said Jeff Baker, SCCPSS Social Worker.

Baker said they would accommodate to students case by case but Dunn said schools need to be doing more by providing more outreach opportunities like Gay-Straight Alliances.

“Schools can create a much more positive learning environment and reduce some of the trends of high risk youth,” said Dunn.

Bullying he said is a big problem with transgender students. SCCPSS has a zero tolerance bullying policy but Dunn said teachers should use bullying as an opportunity to teach about diversity.

“It's not just about yes, it's really about action and doing it,” said Dunn.

SCCPSS offers school counselors and social workers at all schools to offer support for students. Officials say Savannah Arts Academy has formed a Gay-Straight Alliance and Islands High School has a diversity club along with a partnership with Stand Out Youth Savannah. Students can get support at Stand Out Youth which is the only community youth outreach group. They meet on Fridays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.



Copyright 2014 WTOC. All rights reserved.

 

[Busybody]

Student Mugged, Says He Deserved It Because of His ‘Privilege.’


Not the Onion, apparently. Actually, it’s from the Campus Reform education blog:


Senior Oliver Friedfeld and his roommate were held at gunpoint and mugged recently. However, the GU student isn’t upset. In fact he says he “can hardly blame [his muggers].”





“Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people.’ I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay,” wrote Friedfeld in an editorial featured in The Hoya, the university’s newspaper. “The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.”

Friedfeld claims it is the pronounced inequality gap in Washington, D.C. that has fueled these types of crimes. He also says that as a middle-class man, he does not have the right to judge his muggers.

“Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’” asks Friedfeld. “It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.”

Who are you? Well, you’re an inadvertent clone of Robert Fisk, the leftwing British journalist and namesake of the popular Blogosphere technique of fisking, who famously wrote after being attacked while covering the war in Afghanistan in late 2001, “My Beating is a Symbol of this Filthy War.” Fisk added, “In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” Or shorter Fisk: “I totally had it coming.”

Not mention the second coming of a zillion effete doctrinaire Manhattan liberals from the bad old days of the 1970s. Or as Jonah Goldberg noted in his August G-File on “Ferguson Agonistes”:


I grew up in New York City in the 1970s, when race riots were a thing — though not as much of a thing as they were in the 1960s. And that’s part of the problem. In the 1960s, you could see the point of race riots (though less so in the North where they were quite common). But by the 1970s, liberals had incorporated race riots into their mythology as noble “happenings” even though the romance of rebellion had lost its plausibility. And by the 1980s, tragedy had been fully swamped by farce. It is an axiomatic truth going back to Socrates: Nothing can be wholly noble if Al Sharpton is involved. Nonetheless, it was amazing to watch New York liberals act like battered spouses as they tried to explain why blacks are right to loot while at the same time they shouldn’t do it.

To mash-up George Santayana and Irving Kristol, a leftist is someone who refuses to learn from history, and is thus doomed to get mugged by it, but refuses to press charges afterwards.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Si señor...

 

[phrodeau]

All those nuclear explosions are coming back to haunt you.