Last week, a student came into my classroom before school started. She's someone who has been to my Gay/Straight Alliance. She was in tears. A very close friend of hers was starting to transition MtF and was going on HRT. Her biotech teacher (located in another building, so I don't know her) had told her that taking hormones was very dangerous and that "Caitlyn Jenner would probably not live another five years."

She was terrified that her friend would die. I reassured her that we get our hormone levels checked frequently, that all sorts of studies have shown that HRT does not shorten lives, lead to cancer, etc. She asked me to go talk to her teacher.

Her teacher initially didn't want to talk to me, but for some reason changed her mind, so we agreed I'd go over to her building tomorrow afternoon. I have no idea how this is going to go, but I feel like, if she's giving misinformation to students (and upsetting them), I should at least try to do something.

I hope I'm not wasting my time, or worse, poking some sort of hornets' nest.

Good luck! It will probably be an uncomfortable convo for both of you, but it's a message that she needs to hear. What an insensitive comment for her to make in the first place! I'm glad the student had someone knowledgeable to come to for accurate information.

Dear Suzi:

Glad you took the initiative . . . there's enough disinformation floating around w/o having people in positions of influence giving out just plan old bad information, especially in an educational setting!

I hope the conversation goes well or at least provides an opening for a more informed level of dialog.

Would love to be a fly on the wall . . . 

Take good care and thank you for being you,

Rachel

good luck

Good Luck, I hope it goes well. Makes you wonder what else these people tell our kids.
Sophie

Suzi, this is one of those teaching moments that you frequently mention. You'll be in your element and do a great job. I'm sure of it! 

Hugs, Devlyn

You might mention that one person here started hormones about 38 years ago and hasn't had a single problem from the hormones. There than a few infections that were treated with antibiotics, I have a clean medical record. Good luck with your talk.

Dr.  Renee Richards has been on hormones since Carter was President, and she is still alive and healthy.  I am surprised that someone with a graduate degree in biotechnology would ever say such a thing.  Anyone wanna take bets on whether that teacher is an evangelical Christian?

Where do these people get their "information" from?? Good luck, Suzi - let us know how it goes.

I'd have thought the teacher saying this is putting themselves in a very risky legal situation. They are in a position of authority and dispensing incorrect medical advise that has the potential to cause harm to students.

You might want to frame it that your are in fact helping them.

OK, it was definitely a weird conversation.

* For the entire 30 mins I was in there, she spoke breathlesslessly. I'm quite sure she was trying to keep me from saying much.
* Her arguments boiled down to three. (1) We don't know much about cross-sex hormones because they haven't been heavily studied, but we do know that hormone therapies in general are very dangerous. (2) Large portions of the body are intended to work with the hormones that pertain to the body's sex. The effect of the opposite sex hormones on them will cause them to operate differently than intended. (3) The dose of hormones required to reverse existing hormonal levels are necessarily high (I mentioned blockers. She seemed to think they introduced even more "danger").
* Regarding Ms. Jenner (whom she consistently deadnamed and misgendered), she said she was referring to probably steroid use and not hormone use. I asked whether she had information on whether Jenner used steroids. She likened it to Donald Trump being shady (interesting comparison) - no direct evidence, but probably pretty likely.
* She kept coming back to "I'm a scientist. I try not to take a position on social issues, and just focus on scientific knowledge".
* She printed out two studies that purported to show that HRT was dangerous, one from 1989, and the other authored by our Good Friends At Johns Hopkins University in 2003. She later emailed me a third one from 2011 that found that FtM HRT was completely safe and that in could not conclude that MtF HRT was dangerous.

So most of what she told me boiled down to fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but there was no way I was going to talk her out of it. Based on her general defensiveness, I got a sense that she knew she had done a bad and was doing her best to backpedal.

The most helpful exchange occurred near the end, where she talked about "a guy my husband was close to" who is now a transgender woman. When she persisted in using male pronouns for her husband's friend, I insisted upon correcting her. She went into a speech about how the way you present has nothing to do with whether you're male or female. I made a point to remind her that she may have transgender students or students with transgender friends and relatives, and hearing a transgender person misgendered would be upsetting to them. Not sure she got it, but perhaps will give her something to think about. By the end of that discussion, she had starting saying "this person" instead of "he".

Quote from: suzifrommd on October 01, 2015, 07:09:28 PM

Wow, she sounds like quite a turd.  Aren't teachers required to go through courses explaining how to handle gender with students?  And how would a "scientist" choose to ignore the ongoing data gathering that has happened since her older studies she gave were published?

Great job discussing it with her and I hope you at least got her thinking about it enough to research the subject instead of basing everything off of Rush Limbaugh type blogs.

If she manages to get herself in the news with this it could be the end of her career. Every google search of her name is going to turn it up. She might want to think about that if she's going to stay on this path.

Good luck with this person Suzi. It sounds like she has some issues that she needs help with.

My cousin, a highschool teacher, told me that teachers have been told to treat transgender students as self harming because apparently being trans is slow suicide.
I don't know if this is just the school he works at or all Queensland schools.

I did not know what to say to him and still don't.

Good try Suzi.

Sounds as if she is in denial that transgender people exist.

I did hear a cute argument for fundamentalist deniers of transgender people:

Eve was transgender. She was made from Adam's rib, so she had male DNA, her plumbing was changed by God, so she was transgender. She loved and married Adam - so she was Gay and it was the first Gay marriage.

Rubbish I know, but entertaining  to watch some people struggle!

Sarah, you could tell your cousin that SA now has a dedicated worker in the Dept of Social Inclusion for education issues for transgender school kids.  Her job is to put in anti-bullying process into schools and that transgender students are both respected and helped, her job is to help non-trans people respect and accept transgender kids, not to change the child, as there is nothing wrong with them.

Good job Susie,

The teacher is clearly trans phobic and is spouting misinformation and scaring students.

Quote from: Dena on October 01, 2015, 03:47:34 PM
You might mention that one person here started hormones about 38 years ago and hasn't had a single problem from the hormones. There than a few infections that were treated with antibiotics, I have a clean medical record. Good luck with your talk.

You go! Sister!

Makes me want to start HRT just for spite! LMAO

Educators ned to realize that their students view everything they say as hard, fact-based, research founded TRUTH. Students only come to be skeptical of Profs when in Grad School.

Quote from: Allison Wunderland on October 03, 2015, 03:44:10 PM
Students only come to be skeptical of Profs when in Grad School.

I thank my Dad for teaching me to always ask for and site sources, my primary and high school teachers were less happy about it

Quote from: Cindy on October 02, 2015, 03:17:38 AM
I did hear a cute argument for fundamentalist deniers of transgender people:

Eve was transgender. She was made from Adam's rib, so she had male DNA, her plumbing was changed by God, so she was transgender. She loved and married Adam - so she was Gay and it was the first Gay marriage.

I LOVE THIS    Mother of all human life was a Yaweh approved MTF    What a beautiful analogy.  You can also, add that (if the person you tell this to believes that medicine isn't taking the choice out of God's hands), really, all we are doing is promoting the beautiful ritual of the initial creation of woman!  How could anyone argue with that? XD

She probably didn't want to talk to you at first because she knew that she doesn't know enough about the subject of HRT. It will probably be awkward but no worries, you definitely have the upper hand with proven facts. I think you should talk to the teacher for sure though, that could make kids that are considering going through HRT reconsider.