Roderic O’G: Transgender issues added to primary curriculum

That's already happening.

Boys playing ebcouaged to play football or rugby is a gender identity being taught.

What you're against is non-trsditional gender identities being taught - probably because you see it as 'woke'.

So football is sex now? OK...

It’s not.

people take up sports because they want to, because they may enjoy it. Nobody ever seriously equates sport with the teaching or encouragement of gender identity….Look at the success over a number of years, that the girls teams have enjoyed in this country … Rugby, Soccer, Cricket, Athletics , GAA….. those girls achievements had little to do with encouragement of anything , more desire, talent, skill, hard work and aptitude.

when I played tennis, soccer, when I swam competitively, there was zero gender identity being taught… you like it, are good at it…. Go at it….no sports person, amateur, professional or in between gives a flying figroll about gender identity… train hard, work hard and win…

nobody even gives it a second thought. :) a complete non issue.

So why was my nephew pushed to join the team but my neice - two years older - never got rhe same option?

I'm.not saying this happens everywhere - just that it does and is happening

I don’t know…. do you believe it’s gender based, gender identity based ? I’d have to be there to know…

Yes and no in that order.

I'm making the point that gender identity are already being pushed.

And that, is the only sentence in that entire post that actually adresses the issue: a gender identity is being pushed.

QED, good night.

No it's not. It's a sex-based stereotype being pushed. It's improving, slowly, with more emphasis being put on encouraging girls into sports, but I'd agree that it's bad to teach children that there are "boys' things" and "girls' things" beyond biological function.

Which is part of why I'm against letting people who don't know their 'gender identity' from their sex stereotypes being allowed to run rampant in the curriculum.

The gay social scene would not be accepting but 'tolerant' of gay men who dress up in a skirt and high heels, as a sexual kink. That is tolerant of transsexualism not transgenderism. In no way do gay men find men dressing up as women 'fabulous' because the last thing a gay man would want in their homosexual relations is men who mimic women for the obvious reason that gay men are into men not women. So men dressing up as women would be a total turn off and that's why I say tolerant not accepting. I wouldn't be accepting of men dressing as women in obviously my sexual relations, but tolerant of them if I came across them on the gay scene in a purely social way. I'm fairly tolerant of laddish blokes too to a point if they don't overstep so it's not like my tolerance of transsexuals indicates any kind of affinity for transsexualism or general gender bendy fashion no more than my tolerance of laddish blokeish banter indicates any affinity for that demographic either.

Yeah but I'm afraid the tolerance is waning. Increasingly gay men are being depicted in the media as gender bendy. Every gay pride event that was reported in the media over the last gay pride season, (oh pride not gay pride) began with a voxpop from a drag queen I noted. What happened to all the masculine muscle crowd with their leather garb as a costume for the pride marches. All that is gone and the whole look of the gay scene now is one of gender non-conformity. This has been brought about intentionally.

Look at this poster for world aids day last year for example, where they used a drag queen, i.e a man dressed as a woman to represent gay men. https://www.hivireland.ie/what-we-do/campaigns/wad2022/ Horrible slutty imagery was well, the last type of person a gay man would be interested in. So yeah, gay male tolerance of this is waning.

You didn't say it explicitly but reading between the lines you could have been taken to infer it. And in fact the trans rights activists don't infer it they say as much which is why there is now a war within the whole LGBT 'community'. Personally I feel absolutely no 'synergy' with transexualism or transgnderism, they have nothing more to do with me speaking as a homosexual male than it has to with my 'cis-gendered hetro-normative' stereotypical rural dwelling farming background parents. In fact I much prefer the social company of 'normal' people.

And to inform him that it is possible for him to become a girl is cruelty in the extreme. Because he will believe it.

I have to ask, because this is one that keeps coming up time and time again as though it’s a legitimate concern - do you imagine children are stupid or something? There’s plenty that children are taught in school that they don’t hold onto as adults, and that’s if they ever believed it in the first place. Thing is though that as far as children who are transgender are concerned - they already believe they are the opposite sex.

So it would be attempting to alter that belief by demanding that they behave in accordance with the expectations of their gender as it is perceived by the people who are making demands of them that they conform to the prevailing gender stereotypes in Irish society.

It’s that sort of attitude towards other people is the reason why Enoch finds himself in hot water, at odds with school’s policies regarding anti-bullying policies and so on. It was ten years ago that the DES sent out a circular to combat bullying in primary schools, and part of that included the following -

These procedures require that the prevention of bullying must be an integral part of a school’s anti-bullying policy. The education and prevention strategies that the school will implement must be documented in the anti-bullying policy and must explicitly deal with the issue of cyber-bullying and identity based bullying including in particular, homophobic and transphobic bullying.

https://circulars.gov.ie/pdf/circular/education/2013/45.pdf

The NCCA also suggests an inclusive approach to education about RSE/SPHE in the classroom, and provides the following guidelines in regards to same which promote understanding, collaboration and respect among children -

https://www.curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/f016e798-f87b-4c93-93e0-fe58ecb79aca/An-inclusive-approach-to-SPHERSE-–-LGBTI-identities_final.pdf

Of course how well the ideas are developed and how they are expressed and executed will often depend upon the individual schools themselves, or the Board of Management of the school, the Principal or the teacher in the classroom. There’s so many variables there that you’re on a mission to nowhere to think you could possibly police what is or isn’t imparted to students in the classroom in all schools in Ireland.

I know I certainly experienced it when my young lad was in primary school and it was around the time of the referendum on the 8th amendment. He came home telling me they’d been discussing it in class and I was a bit taken aback at first. Then I remembered who his teacher was, and I knew that she would facilitate discussion in accordance with the ethos of the school, as opposed to imagining she had the authority to impose her own opinions upon the children in her classroom in contravention of the school’s ethos, à la Enoch, who imagines he has some God given right to behave whatever way he wants towards other people.