Kenosha School District officials don’t seem aware of history


Ash Whitaker is a transgender boy in Wisconsin, and school officials are having difficulty dealing with it. So they’ve come up with a not at all novel solution.

A federal Title IX lawsuit filed in Wisconsin on Tuesday alleges that the Kenosha Unified School District instructed guidance counselors to have Ash Whitaker, a 16-year old transgender boy, and “any other transgender students at the school” wear “bright green wristbands” so that the school could “more easily monitor and enforce [their] restroom usage.”

First come the colorful wristbands, then the big bold armbands, then a symbol stitched to all of their clothing, and then tattoos.

Just a suggestion: the problem isn’t with Ash Whitaker, it’s with people who think they need to monitor restroom usage…which, when you think about it, is really creepy.

Comments

  1. Matrim says

    That is really disgusting. I have no idea how anyone at any level thought that was a good idea.

  2. davidnangle says

    Perhaps I should send them a daily log of my bathroom visits. I don’t attend the school, and I’m not transgender, but it seems like something they’d really like. High resolution images of my daily logs.

  3. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    can’t wait for those harmless* wristbands to come with an embedded RFID chip to alert the bathroom monitors that one entered the bathroom (as each bathroom will have an RFID sensor lining its doorway). Or even a door that will only open with an RFID tag?
    – – – – – – — – – – – – – – – – – – — – – — – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    * = only for safety you knows, never know how dangerous it would be to end up in the wrong bathroom, you know
    _______________________________________

    I can’t believe they think that a trans-boy would be predatory of cis-boys. ———-> I smell projection.

    I’ll assume* that they fear the trans-boy, will get beat-up by the cis-boys, to protect their turf from the “girl” who is tring to get a peek at their junk. So, to keep the rans-boy safe they want to keep him in the girlsroom to pee. (* yeah, I used that word deliberately for the Odd Couple meme reference, for emphasis)

    Kinda sensible about fearing a trans-girl might just be a predatory cis pretending to be trans, but … OMG even the inverse?!?!?

    tell me again about ones dread of “nanny state” ;-(

  4. zetopan says

    Actually I think that the affected persons should agree to wearing the wristbands…

    But that agreement should be contingent upon all of the school board members who voted for this rule to be tattooed with a bright red bold A (Asshole) on their foreheads. That seems like a reasonable and fair compromise.

  5. Artor says

    Are we sure that this was presented as a real suggestion? It wasn’t some Swiftian satire? Surely nobody could be that maliciously dense, right? Right…?

  6. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    ONLY the TGs to wear GreenWristbands?
    Only when Cis-Boys must wear Blue, and Cis-Girls must wear Red. *scowl*

  7. themadtapper says

    How fucking incompetent does someone have to be to even suggest such a thing, let alone implement it? How could anyone think that this idea would not blow up spectacularly in their face? “TG kids make us uncomfortable, what should we do about them using the bathroom? I know, let’s make them wear little wristbands so we can identify which kids we think are different and weird. Brilliant! Nothing bad can possible come from this course of action!”. If this happened in a work of fiction, the ridiculousness of it would break the suspension of disbelief. And yet here it is happening in the real world. My brain can’t even process this level of dumbfuckery.

  8. vaiyt says

    “TG kids make us uncomfortable, what should we do about them using the bathroom? I know, let’s make them wear little wristbands so we can identify which kids we think are different and weird. Brilliant! Nothing bad can possible come from this course of action!”

    Well, bad things happening to the kids is a feature, not a bug…

  9. says

    If this really comes about, I’d hope that someone among the more intelligent students would find a way to obtain matching green wristbands for all students. Or would there suddenly be a ban on green wristbands for the “normal” kids?

  10. blf says

    The “solution” is for all the students, and the teachers and staff, so wear wristbands of their choice (none “bright green” for added merriment).
    Why?
    To more easily monitor and enforce {their} restroom usage: “This is not ‘bright green’, therefore there is not a problem.”

  11. Scientismist says

    Well, we know now that the color for the transsexuals’ badges in the coming American Fascist State will be green. I suppose it’s only logical that liberals and progressives will get blue. But with so many different groups to hate, won’t they soon run out of colors? What color do you suppose scientists and atheists will have to wear? I’m hoping for infrared or ultraviolet. Philosophers, of course, get grue and/or bleen.

  12. busterggi says

    perhaps school officials should be wearing armbands as well – maybe red with an appropriate logo.

  13. Gregory Greenwood says

    This is getting really frightening – the first step before a pogrom is making sure that your targets are easily identified at a glance. Pair that with the testerical rhetoric about trans women seeking entry to women’s bathrooms and other spaces as a means to prey upon cis women, and this is all heading in a very dangerous direction, and heading there fast. I can’t imagine how much worse this will get under a Trump Presidency, despite his recent convenient lies about being in the corner of LGBTQ people.

  14. cartomancer says

    Leaving aside the creepily Nazi overtones for a second – which are obviously the most appalling bit – it says something about the school that it thinks it needs coloured wristbands to help monitor the behaviour of its pupils.

    Schoolchildren already come equipped with helpful signifiers that allow teachers to identify them. Each one has their very own unique “face” and “name” for starters, and if that alone doesn’t help much then they all have a whole rich backstory of unique characteristics that can be learned and that will help identify them around the place.

    If the teachers can’t tell one pupil from another after a few weeks then they clearly aren’t very good at the job. Then again, if they think that monitoring toilet visits is an issue I’m not sure that needs pointing out.

  15. tkreacher says

    busterggi #14

    perhaps school officials should be wearing armbands as well – maybe red with an appropriate logo.

    As I read the story I immediately thought that someone is going to send a package of Nazi armbands to the school with a statement about supplying the officials with their proper identifiers as well.

  16. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 18:
    yeah, not quite.
    The HighSchool, I went to, was populated enough that only a few teachers knew my name; most teachers called me “hey, you.”
    Seems these Natsees [pun] want to have any possible Random [generic] able to monitor who enters the lav, so the forbidden can instantly be redirected to a secondary facility.
    And teachers are so preoccupied with all their work, they need those wristbands to instantly recognize a TG without thought.
    Not just to direct them to the alternate facility, but to be nice to them and be extra polite, and not the rude authoritarian they are to plebe students. </s>

  17. says

    Just a suggestion: the problem isn’t with Ash Whitaker, it’s with people who think they need to monitor restroom usage…which, when you think about it, is really creepy.

    School systems institutionalizing things which are really creepy is nothing new, though the proto-Nazi stuff is at least not usually so overt.

    At my high school, the locker room showers were along a sort of corridor which you had to walk through at the end of gym class — no private stalls, let alone curtains. Everyone had to go through, single file. Partway through the corridor there was a window so the teacher could watch the kids going through. Wrong on so many levels.

  18. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    Look, Kenosha gearing up for TinkleNacht is bad enough, but Holy Hand Grenades, Lance-a-lot, THEIR SOLUTION DOESN”T EVEN BEGIN TO OPERATE AS A SOLUTION.

    The difficulty is that we can’t tell if the trans kids are really trans and thus really belong in one bathroom or another? Sure criticize that for all the creepiness inherent in obsessing over others genitals, but then take note: The trans kids get green armbands, ALL the trans kids:

    federal Title IX lawsuit filed in Wisconsin on Tuesday alleges that the Kenosha Unified School District instructed guidance counselors to have Ash Whitaker, a 16-year old transgender boy, and “any other transgender students at the school” wear “bright green wristbands” so that the school could “more easily monitor and enforce [their] restroom usage.”

    – first paragraph of the primary linked article.

    So wearing a green armband means you use which restroom? Do the school officials even know? Are they even vaguely aware that they haven’t don’t a damn fucking thing to BEGIN to solve the problem?

    A-maze-ing.

  19. Nightjar says

    Crip Dyke, I was wondering the same thing. It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Maybe the “logic” goes like this:

    – Trans girls look like girls
    – Trans boys look like boys
    – If you see a kid that looks like a girl going into the girl’s bathroom, you check if she has a green wristband. If not she can go in, if yes she is blocked. Same applies to kids who look like boys. So, basically, green wristband means “ATTENTION, genitals do not match appearance, BLOCK!”

    ?

    (Yes, I know. Not all trans people are obviously gender conforming. But from their point of view a trans boy is a girl actively pretending to be a boy and trying very hard to look like a boy.)

    It’s not very practical, I agree, but in terms of making the life of trans kids into hell I suppose it would work very well!

  20. rrhain says

    I have an idea: Those who wanted the trans kids to wear wrist bands need to be made to wear wristbands so that we can make sure that they are not allowed anywhere near public restrooms.

    Clearly, they think way too much about what other people are doing in the restroom and thus present a danger to other people who merely want to use the restroom.

  21. rietpluim says

    I just don’t understand the link between restrooms and sex. That’s what this is about, after all. The simple fact that our urethras are so close to / intertwined with our genitals can’t be enough reason, can it?

    I admit that I’ve had sex in a restroom occasionally, but only because we couldn’t find privacy anywhere else.

  22. Siobhan says

    @slithey

    Kinda sensible about fearing a trans-girl might just be a predatory cis pretending to be trans

    No. It’s not even slightly sensible. Do not legitimize transmisogyny. Crime stats have shown year after year that trans women are far more likely than cis women to be victims of violence and far less likely to be perpetrators of it. Might have something to do with assuming we’ll be called a rapist for existing.

  23. Saad says

    Kinda sensible about fearing a brown skinned man might just be a suicide bomber.

  24. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    1st: Shiv, I love you.
    2nd: Saad, I love you.
    3rd: I apologize to folks for not putting “solution” and “problem” in quotes in my #23 wherever they appeared – that is how they were intended.

    4th: Slithey, I made a mistake, so I’m in a forgiving mood, but I think what you meant here:

    Kinda sensible about fearing a trans-girl might just be a predatory cis pretending to be trans,

    was something kinda like:

    It at least has some surface plausibility to fear a trans-girl might just be a predatory cis pretending to be trans

    but even interpreting it generously like that requires you give meaning and effect to the second part:

    but … OMG even the inverse?!?!?

    No. Just no. This requires people to believe that the sexual abuse of children is split along lines of sex to such a degree that it’s at least reasonable to suspect any boy of being predatory & any girl of being a victim, but UNreasonable to suspect any boy of being a victim or any girl of being a predator.

    This is the kind of shit that makes women teachers who sexually abuse their cismasculine students into public oddities instead of public demons the way the media treated the bus driver just sentenced to a term commensurate with statutory rape instead of rape that caused him to be let out for time served a few days ago.

    ========
    5th: Nightjar, your theory still requires the teachers to be perfect at identifying both sex and gender, since the green band – at most – could give the information that one’s sex is not that expected for one’s gender (or vice versa, it’s the same thing). Even in this case, though, teachers still wouldn’t know which sex and which gender are involved. When you get stopped, you just say, “No problem Teach – for I AM the Kwisatz Haderach this is the correct bathroom.

  25. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 29:
    sorry I wasn’t clear. Your reply to my statement:

    No. Just no. This requires people to believe that the sexual abuse of children is split along lines of sex to such a degree that it’s at least reasonable to suspect any boy of being predatory & any girl of being a victim, but UNreasonable to suspect any boy of being a victim or any girl of being a predator.

    My point exactly. sorry I misspoke, saying it was “reasonable to fear one and not the other”. I used “reasonable” in the way the unreasonable were using it. Incorrectly said “I understand their fear”, meaning actually “I hear them saying they fear”, while strongly disagreeing. oops words failed me again.
    ~~~ ack. I hope that clarified my mud a little.

  26. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    @slithey, re:30:

    Well enough. You have a long enough track record with me that you get to make mistakes at least as often as I do, without me holding any long term grudge.

    Criticism? Sure. I expect it on my own stuff. Grudge? Nah.