I am glad someone is calling the Florida school system on their bullshit. Being non-binary hard and being treated like the coping mechanisms you use for avoiding hating the experience of dealing with people and existing in your body are somehow a delusion, some sort of sexual kink or deliberately confusing is like trying to go about your day with weights strapped to you. It makes dealing with every social interaction so tiring. It really feels like everybody else in the room is obsessed with your sex organs and characteristics like complete perverts that they don't see the question is about how happy you are and how you feel about all the people in your life and whether you feel anxious and isolated being around them or just comfortable and able to express your full range of personhood.
This teacher is standing up because they know there's others much worse off who aren't secure enough to do it. Pretty admirable I think.
Thank you for sharing how thus affects you. It’s important for people to see that this is affecting actual people and not some strawman concept they don’t understand.
It's something even a lot of my friends don't even really get. I ended up going to a Birthday party where across the street from the restaurant there was a 250 plus rally of anti-trans protesters with zero counter protesters. We didn't realize the thing would be there. I ended up not being able to eat because the stress from proximity made me throw up everything.
I know we get called sensitive snowflakes but having that level of outright hate shoved in your face can easily make anyone feel very small and very vulnerable and at some level it's visceral.
It's not "fairly simple if you have common sense". The known abbreviations have been in use for a hundred or more years and are widely known. Everyone knows how to pronounce them, the only curveball is Mrs being misses since it was originallymistress but that word later became associated with cheating and "ladies of the night".
Mx was made up recently, it stands for nothing AFAIK. They just took the standard M beginning and slapped X on it because X tends to mean "unknown".
It's akin to asking you to address me as "Zf. Cat" because that's what makes me feel comfortable.
Like senorxs or señor@s. Where the X or @ means 'o' or 'e' (male) or 'a' (female). I like the way they do this.
This has some issues as it doesn't include non-binary options. I think it's also more of a protest against the patriarchal nature of the Spanish language which always defaults to the male version in the case where the gender is unknown or a mix.
How is pronounced I don't really know. People don't really speak it in practice. It's more used written.
Spanish is my first language. Spanish defaults to masculine of words, but so do all Latin based languages. Here in the states we see Latinx. In Mexico and South America, "latine" is becoming prevalent.
Linguistically speaking, it's absurd. Polls in the USA, where Latinx was invented by uncomfortable, uninformed white people to try and be inclusive, show that 93% of the latino / hispanic population either disapprove of or don't care about it.
To be fair Mrs. (And to a lesser extent Mr.) Don't have an obvious pronunciation from the spelling either. You've just been hearing them said out loud for most of your life.
I'm not saying it's difficult to teach or learn, but if you first encounter it in a book are you going to know it's pronounced "mix?" And if you hear is are you going to know it's spelled "Mx?" You can argue difficulty all you want but if you have something that is spelled how it sounds and pronounced how it looks it's still easier and there will be less confusion.
“Just be normal” is the first step toward “just be straight” then “just be white” then “just be Christian” then “just be our version of Christian”. Why can’t people just be who they are? Like, literally no one is hurting anyone in this scenario, yet your absolute paper thin fragile porcelain toilet of an ego is hurt because the teacher isn’t exactly how you picture the ideal person your children think the world is filled with.
My brother did Florida Virtual School and graduated in 2011 or so. It was actually pretty great, and what they should have switched all the students to during COVID. It's exactly what it sounds like, online coursework, just like if you've ever taken a college class online, but its a public high school option meaning its free. Some stuff doesn't work quite as well, the lab kit they sent my brother to use wasn't quite as good as my in person lab classes. Florida actually invested the time and money to make it good because a lot of child actors and some of the kids training at sports schools use it.
Edit: to clarify, "public" in the US means state government funded, I'm aware that some places mean the opposite when they talk about public/private schools.
It's a public school that's attended primarily online.
When I was enrolled in one, they had us do 99% of our work at home, and we could do the work at our own pace, but we had to come in to the building to take the more important tests to move to the next semester-equivalent. That was to make sure that we weren't cheating like we were fully able to do for the regular tests, because this was before spyware was the norm.
It was great for anyone who could stay motivated to do school work and would go out of their way to interact with other students, and it was the worst possible method of schooling for my lazy, unsociable ass. I'd likely not have graduated if my high school hadn't started giving what basically amounted to a GED test for seniors who couldn't pass their classes in time. I knew the stuff, I just refused to actually do the stuff. Highly recommend for extraverts. Cannot recommend for introverts.