Yes, these things have become worse. I've wondered if one reason isn't that it makes it possible to sell more things to people. There's also some interesting research that suggests that in societies where men and women have more similar lives, they make more differentiation in terms of things like clothing and social signals for sex. So maybe that is a factor. Unfortunately the gender norms like non-binary identification and such seem to be making all that worse rather than better.

So something I noticed this past year that disturbed me with my daughter who is struggling with anxiety is that we realised, after a while, that the various symptoms she was manifesting seemed to be tied to either what they were covering in health class, or things she'd heard about on You-tube videos. And while it might just be chance, the whole ramping up of her anxiety seemed to correlate with a large unit they did in school on it. And that's not to say it isn't real, because it is, but it seems a lot like somehow it was triggered by this focus on introspection through these classroom materials trying to identify problems. There was some kind of brain loop created that has not been helpful. But whether that's true or not she was getting ideas about what anxious people with problems do from sources that were supposed to be telling her it was ok to deal with these things.

I'm not sure. My gut feeling is that giving options out as if they are just normal things can have the opposite effect that you are suggesting, and actually I think the research supports that inasmuch as it exists. Because in some ways it becomes much easier to accept something that is an inevitability - you will be male or female, and so rather than try and be something else, often with quite limited success, you have to mature and realise that you are yourself, and that the kind of person you are is what a female or male person is. In a way you could say that it forces a kind of transcendence of the categories. I'm not convinced that telling young people they belong to some specific category of sexual orientation that they have to figure out is terrible helpful either, compared to stressing that sexuality is often emergent through the teen years and even the early twenties and there is really no need to give it a label until then, or ever if you prefer. It really isn't uncommon for girls at 15 to not be all that interested in sex in a real way (some are of course quite the opposite.) That doesn't make them asexual, it just means they aren't that interested in sex at the moment. And that's true whatever age it happens at, or if it stays the same your whole life. For some these things are quite stable, others less so, and you don't really know till you die though most people settle into something of a predictable pattern by adulthood.

In her case it wasn't the function she was thinking of. It was how she looked. She said her inner sense of herself was as a young woman, and when she looked in the mirror she saw someone else, and it made her feel disembodied. And FWIW that's how I felt in my early teens when I started puberty. It was like I was in the wrong body, it didn't correspond to my inner sense of my vision of myself, which was of a pre-pubescent body. Again, like an out of body experience.

This is exactly how my grandmother described the experience of getting old.

Possibly there is a real increase here, some people have suggested porn and harder gender stereotypes have put off many girls, for example. But I think there is actually another factor which is sometimes expressed not as clearly as it might: it's completely normal for teenagers to be what we now call "dysphoric". Many, especially girls, have always felt this way during puberty. But typically it wasn't medicalised, and the message that adults tried to give kids was that these feelings were common, developmentally normal, generally would pass or at least they would reach a place of acceptance, and that their bodies were good and all kinds of bodies were attractive. And as far as clothes, the message was that to at least some degree you could wear what you wanted, a lot of things were pretty general neutral, and also that clothes were not so important that we should get too upset about them. Instead what you have now is kids being given a completely different set of messaging about these normal feelings, about how to be "authentic", that presentation is important. And the possibility of opting out of the difficult elements of girlhood - menstruation, the experience of suddenly having quite a different kind of body, accepting that men will think of you in a different way that might seem intimidating or even creepy. Once that road has been taken, even socially, the formation of a comfortable female identity which only comes by passing through adolescence is actually prevented. And for a lot of boys it's very similar. I have a close gay male friend who says the same thing a lot of women I know say, which is that as a teen he would have been very vulnerable to that way of thinking.

It's not gender neutral clothes that are the issue, it's the idea that they will solve some sort of problem that is caused by our sex. Make people see men and women as the same, or mean they don't notice who is male and who is female.It won't do that. It's actually, even now, not that difficult to get gender neutral clothing in our society, especially casual ones for adults. Men and women both can easily wear a pair of straight leg jeans, a pair of converse or cowboy boots, a hoodie or a plaid lumberjack shirt, and a t-shirt. I worse that through the entirety of high-school as did about 70% of the other girls and 99% of the boys. There is a big difference between something that is a fact about a population and a stereotype. It is not a stereotype to say women are generally shorter than men, with different proportions, smaller feet, etc.

You've been arguing that people are not really seeing what they're complaining about across the country, so that kind of seems like an extrapolation to me.

Many people who are complaining about CRT are doing so because they think it's a racist theory. Not because it makes white people feel bad or something like that, but because at a fundamental level they think that's what it does and it's foundation. That's not just conservatives either, many people on the left also think that to be the case. They would say that in places where CRT approaches come to dominate in schools you are likely to see a worsening of problems with racism. CRT is not the only way to address racism or history and it's controversial, even in academia, so it's not some kind of zero sum either, CRT or nothing. So while I think you are entitled to your view that those places need CRT most, other people would think that it's about the last thing they need. And there really isn't much empirical support for the effectiveness of CRT approaches to anti-racism. So basically you have a theoretical approach with a questionable application in schools, without an evidence base, and controversial among both parents and academics as to whether it accurately portrays history or helps fight racism. It doesn't sound like a slam-dunk winner.

How is that not local?

If stores that cater to young people think it will appeal to them to organise their stores that way, whatever. But it doesn't change the reality that the designers that design the clothes are basing their sizing on male and female bodies, not gender neutral bodies. And it does bugger all to fight sexism. It's just a marketing ploy.

What? Christians and white people don't have different sorts of bodies than other people. Though I have seen places which specialise in small size shoes mainly for Asian ladies.

Young women and to some extent young men are often much more likely to be able to wear opposite sex clothing easily. Especially if they are thin.

I don't really understand what the point of gender would be in your scenario. If it's some inner feelings of being masculine or feminine, with no outward manifestation, surely that's basically completely irrelevant to everyone but the person with the feeling? If there is supposed to be some outer manifestation, like you are going to ask for other people to use different than the usual pronouns, or want to go into the feminine change rooms, than it's no longer a personal thing, it's social and public.

They type one and two is now a thing as well. But as for jeans, I know lots of women who would like pants labeled that way, but even if you put them together in one big group, you have still in the end pants proportioned for male bodies and pants proportioned for female bodies. The sizes and combinations they manufacture are not just random, they are based on the structures of two separate kinds of bodies. The result is that people either realise this and so you really are not further ahead, or they don't, and that means that they are out of touch with the physical world. Which isn't really something that helps anyone.

Maybe?

Yeah, I don't get this business of not categorising clothes by sex but calling them something like "type 1" or "type 2". All that means is clothes designed to fit men and women but with a euphemistic label.

And I'd add, that while legislation of this type seems likely to be ineffective, part of the reason it's happening is that schools seem altogether too ready to implement curricula that many parents object to, that are clearly underpinned by a particular and often controversial ideological viewpoint, that parents don't want, and it's often done on the sly as well, and even with the explicit goal of undermining the home culture and beliefs. Often there seems to be little parents can do about it and they risk being called bigots if they speak out. That approach is bound over time to produce parents who are angry, reactionary, mistrustful, and will do whatever they can to undermine what's going on at the school.

Any kind of law like this would be impossible to write well, IMO. It's just too difficult to define what falls within the range of a theoretical system like this. It's always going to include a lot of overlap with other systems. So it would be easily badly applied and used. However, I'm not reading many of the posts in the thread as saying that, quite a few seem to think that CRT is the only reflective way to study history, as if historians didn't understand how history can be political or biased, or people interested in sociology or law didn't understand systemic problems, before CT.

I think this is completely impossible, for two reasons: The first being that human beings have thousands of years of evolution directed towards reproduction. We notice the sex of other people without even trying. And we think about that, and our sex, quite a lot, because most people are interested in sexual activity, particularly at certain points in our lives. Many (most?) young men and women are very interested in identifying themselves as prospective sexual partners, even if it's only n a small way. Men and women who interact, even with no intent of looking for a sexual partner, are often very aware of each other as sexual beings. The only societies that I've even seen that manage to somewhat overcome that do so mainly by more or less segregation and rather strict codes on behaviour between the sexes. (I'll also say, my own first career was in a workplace where the jobs and uniforms were completely standardised - identical for all right down to underpants, and it actually seemed to increase the awareness of sexual difference. The second problem is that much as the social constructionists deny it, there are behavioural differences at the population level that differ between men and women. People notice these and can't help but do so, no matter how much the culture tries to tell us it's not true. The brain is very much designed to pick up on those small but widely spread differences. And that kind of pattern recognition always influences our thinking.

This sounds a lot like my daughter at the moment, who is early teens. She cannot see any good things about being a girl, and feels that if she were not a girl, all her problems in this area would be gone. A lot of the difficulty is focused on her breasts though she has quite a boyish figure really, but she also hates getting her period, and the girl drama at school, and the way the boys treat the girls in gym etc. But she's hyper-focused on the breast thing, which is typical for her. The thing that really strikes me is that I was not dissimilar at that age. I found the physical changes in my body made me feel like I was in a sort of out of body experience. I struggled with menstruation because I had painful heavy periods and couldn't wear a tampon. I found the girls difficult to get along with and most of my friends were boys (as is still the case really.) But the idea that I could rename myself and opt out wasn't there, and frankly I think that made things easier. I learned to deal with some of the problems, to accept others, to see my body as mine again, and mainly it took time and brain maturity. Not only that, but had I had the option of trying to disassociate from my body to cope, or hide the changes in my body, that would not only not have helped the problem resolve, I think it would have made things much, much worse. And that's what I am seeing in a lot of these kids. They can't work through to the formation of an adult woman's identity because they try and opt out and society reinforces that rather than allowing them to find their places as women. Or indeed helping them do so - I've been really startled by the extent the kids seem to see body modification as a healthy response, or think psychological or emotional discomfort is permanent and means something is wrong. When I was in school it was constantly ehasised that it was normal and k to feel distressed at times, almost to be expected due to the nature of the teen brain, and there was a lot of body positivity that now seems wholly absent.

Anthropologically. Gender means cultural structures that are attached to sex in society. It could be customs around clothing that are fairly arbitrary but are related to people's interest in differentiating sex. It could be laws round maternity provisions which clearly related to significant biologically based differences between the lives of men and women. It could be an artistic or literary tradition that tells us something about the different experiences of men and women in society and also how they are viewed in society. So not the same as sex, and not all societies have the same approach to gender, but inherently tied to sex, and it's inevitable that human societies have gender.

Yes - this. And while I have no research to back this up, I'm not convinced it even creates an attitude that is desirable around poverty and problems in non-white communities. CRT typically very reductionist even in terms of the problems it claims to be elucidating. And there is some interesting research that tells us that when people are told problems are in systems beyond their control, it makes them less likely to try and fix them, and in some cases it also seems to make them more wary of the people being affected by the problem. I really don't understand why people keep saying that without the lens of teaching being CRT it means not teaching about racism, historical slant, bias, and so on. Those ideas are not confined to CT approaches.

I didn't have you in mind particularly, and I don't really care what other people do. If they want to mask until they day they die it's their business so long as they don't expect other people to. But most people would like to have some sense of when the risk is low enough that they can go back to a more normal routine.

I'm not sure people are even saying they aren't useful at all. The problem is people keep comparing surgeons wearing masks in surgery to show that efficacy in other settings must be real and significant. But it's just not the same kind of thing, for a lot of reasons. As far as I can see, people are also not so much questioning whether masks can be useful generally so much as, at what point would some of the more fearful be willing to say, ok, the risk is low enough. Because the risk is never going to be gone, just like with every other disease in existence, some quite serious.