How do you enforce something like that?
This is exactly like mandating that nobody gets driver’s ed until most of the class already has their license and a car.
The actual law isn’t saying people can’t talk about it, it’s saying that Sex ed wouldn’t happen until 6th grade.
Less crazy sounding, but still problematic, because some girls have their period in 4th or 5th grade. I seem to recall having sex ed in 4th grade when I was a little kid.
Back in the day in California it was 6th grade. Each sex was taken into the cafeteria separately and talked to for an hour.
I remember having to take a health class in junior college and how parts of that ( the live birth film) freaked out everyone.
Hah, yeah that’s how it was done here as well. I think I remember the girls had their one hour “class” earlier. Can’t remember if it was an entire grade earlier or months, but I remember there was a bit of a buzz of mystery in the classroom as the boys wondered what had occurred when they were sequestered.
For me it was 7th grade. The boys were shown a film in the auditorium. The cutaway cartoon penis ejaculating got gales of laughter.
For reasons I don’t understand or maybe that I have just been ignorant about until now because it seems like a new thing, girls entering puberty frequently starts at 9 years old these days. AKA 3rd-4th grade. I kinda recall a few girls developing back in 4th grade, just like the guy that had hairy armpits in 5th or 6th. This sort of education needs to start with education, aka first grade.
I think there was speculation hormones in meat may be related, but maybe that was disproven?
“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics.”
That falls under my “reasons I don’t understand”, could be it’s always been the case and there was a satanic panic, could be it changed, and if it changed it’s too rife with politics etc. for me to commit to having an opinion. I’ll wait for the endocrinologists to make up their mind.
If the kids can’t talk about their periods, how are they going to target the trans kids just trying to play sports?
Lots of theories. White and Asian children are less likely than Hispanic and Black children to hit puberty earlier, but the rates for ALL groups are increasing.
Weight seems to be a big indicator - obese children seem to hit puberty earlier. Stress may be another - children who are have been abused tend to go through puberty earlier.
But those two are chicken-and-egg things. Are children heavier because they are somehow genetically prone to hitting puberty earlier, or are they hitting puberty earlier because they are heavy? Does the fact of abuse cause early puberty, or are kids who hit puberty earlier more at risk of abuse?
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals and environmental factors are another possible culprit. This correlates to the increased rates among Black and Hispanic kids - they tend to live in more polluted areas in the US.
Body Mass Index (BMI) seems to be a good predictor of early puberty. Nationally, children’s BMI increased during the pandemic lockdown, as did instances of early puberty. High BMI predicts an increase in a hormone that may play a role early puberty.
Another theory (going back to stress) is lack of sleep. During the pandemic, kids overall seemed to get less quality sleep than before, and this may play a part in the pandemic-correlated increase in early puberty.
And it may be that the increase (especially the pandemic increase) is simply one of increased awareness. The kids were home and couldn’t hide the fact that they were getting their periods, whereas they may have concealed it from their parents in a “normal” world.
Humans are complex and weird.
And there are billions of them, which means that there is a vast range of opportunity for that complexity to manifest itself differently.
She’d found out a few years earlier, aged 21, when she went to the doctor after waiting years to get her period. She expected to be told to put on weight. Instead, Khumalo discovered she had the genetic condition androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS): her body has XY chromosomes but is unable to respond to male sex hormones, so her genitals developed as female. In a 2016 blogpost after Miss South Africa, she spelt out what the condition is: “[It] resulted in me being physically female, but genetically male. I’ll spare you the long biology and genetics lecture.”
This is apparently a condition that occurs ‘fully’ in at least 1 in 20,000 live births, and less fully in a lot more cases.
Intersex conditions are shockingly common given how much the culture warriors on the right want to pretend that God made man and woman and that’s it.
Or, maybe not so shocking, if you’re willing to learn about the world around you.
An open mind is like a fortress with the gates unbarred!
This struck me as kind of weird, so I looked it up, and it seems like the data on this is conflicting… and I’m getting the impression that some of what is on the web is perhaps based on incorrect citation of other sources.
The Wiki page cites a few things, but kind of seems to be contradicting itself.
AIS represents about 15% to 20% of DSDs and affects 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 64,000 males.[94]
Estimates for the incidence of androgen insensitivity syndrome are based on a relatively small population size, thus are known to be imprecise.[5] CAIS is estimated to occur in one of every 20,400 46,XY births.[95] A nationwide survey in the Netherlands based on patients with genetic confirmation of the diagnosis estimates that the minimal incidence of CAIS is one in 99,000.[57] The incidence of PAIS is estimated to be one in 130,000.[96] Due to its subtle presentation, MAIS is not typically investigated except in the case of male infertility,[71] thus its true prevalence is unknown.[11]
So, on one hand it’s saying that AIS, in the general sense, affects 1:20,000 to 1:64,000, and CAIS is only a subset of all those cases.
I think maybe the source of some of the confusion may be this particular statement:
CAIS is estimated to occur in one of every 20,400 46,XY births.[95
At first I was confused by this, because there is some weird spacing and commas going on there, and it seemed to conflict with the prior statement about the prevalence of AIS in general. Then I realized that it’s saying the prevalence is 1:20,400, in a specific type of situation, that being 46,XY DSD.
At least I think that’s what’s going on here. Of course, AIS is also likely more common than we know, since non complete cases wouldn’t be known unless you did extensive testing, and even CAIS isn’t necessarily going to be known unless you do a genetic test, since their outward appearances are a typical female form.
This is a really interesting thing though, in that what would the crazy GOP laws even say about this case? I mean, her body is genetically male kind of, in that she has a Y chromosome, but everything about how her body developed is essentially female, since it can’t respond to testosterone. Like, from the perspective of athletics, she would have none of the advantages that trans women would normally get from development as a male.
That’s really my point, that There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, meaning in this case the philosophy of the bigots. With billions of people and the science to better understand what makes the them tick, we are going to more and more discover that ‘normal’ covers a much broader range of being than we suppose. And efforts to categorize and constrain people to a narrower range of ‘normal’ are going to look more and more ridiculous.
I understand and agree with you here in one sense, but from another we do need to recognize that humans naturally do categorize things, and have a very deep need to identify things as “normal”.
Now, that sense of “normal” changes and evolves, but I don’t think we can ever really get away from it, just based on the very low level processes which make up our brains. On a very fundamental level, your brain is a pattern recognition and expectation creation system. I don’t think we can ever get to the point where we cease to have a notion of “normal”, just because I don’t think our brains can actually function that way.
Even if we are enlightened enough to understand how weird the world is, I think that in our heart of hearts, we still have those neurological processes that naturally group things in the world.
We do, but we can also recognize when that natural way of thinking leads to injustice, oppression, and so on. We don’t excuse e.g. racism on the grounds that it stems from a way of thinking we inherited. We should expect people to be more than their instincts.
I’m not saying the bigots will disappear or stop being bigots. I’m saying that their bigotry will just look increasingly more irrational all the time, and their attempts to legislate or regulate based on ‘normal’ human behavior are going to run into precisely the problems you noted before. They want to legislate based on the idea that gender is something that is fixed and binary, but it isn’t at all clear that they can even know to decide what gender someone actually is. If they say it is genes, then they can have no objection to elective surgery by people in this situation. If they say it is genitals, then they’re saying sex change operations actually do change gender; that it isn’t a fixed property. If they say it’s actual reproductive organs, then lots of people are gender neutral, either naturally or as a result of necessary medical care.
I would be in favor of adding a high-school age expansion to sex education, after maybe 2nd year biology. It could cover some of the X,Y chromosome permutations and expression details, so adults aren’t so surprised by non-binaryness.
Naturally all such content would be instantly Republi-censored into oblivion in most states.