Anyon

This week in class we read a article by a lady named Jean Anyon. She wrote about how our schools today only let us excel into the neighborhood we were born into. She said that "students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata...." Meaning that when you are from a certain neighborhood, your curriculum is based on that neighborhood and you are already destined to a certain level of productivity in society. I do not agree with this completely. I believe that the government makes certain curriculum for certain areas of the nation to fit the needs that are in that area. I do not agree with that idea though. I think it is wrong to assume that someone that grew up there will stay there long-term and it is foolish to think that someone is only as good as their neighborhood. There are many people that rise above there neighborhood to achieve personal success. It is amazing what people can overcome when they have had someone believe in them. People should not judge children based on where they came from, because we are the writers in their brains during the most impressionable years of their lives. If we have an undercurrent of failure on them before they even come in the classroom, where will they go from there? I can tell you it wouldn't be up.

Proposal

Many people believe that if you are a boy, you must dress and act like a boy, and if you are a girl, you must dress and act like a girl. This week, we read a story about a boy named Brandon. He decided that he wanted to be a girl and started playing dress up and playing with dolls, basically doing everything that a little girl would do. His mother was confused on what to do with that. On one hand, she wanted her little boy to be happy, but on the other, it seemed strange that a little boy would think he was a girl. He was then diagnosed with “transgender.” As of right now, it is a mental illness.

A major question that has popped up is whether or not transgender should be removed from the mental disorder list. I think that the category of transgender should not be removed from the mental disorder list because in the story, we read about how Brandon’s mother thought that the Dad was being too rough, so she took him out of that situation. This could have caused Brandon to see his mother as a protective figure, versus his father, so he equated being protective with being a woman. This could have caused the imbalance within his brain.

The main reason that we shouldn’t take transgender off the mental illness list is because it would mean that they wouldn’t be able to receive treatment for it. They could need therapy for such a traumatic experience, or maybe Brandon had low testosterone levels and needed to take hormones to balance them out. Or perhaps, it could just be means to get attention?

We really don’t know what causes it, some people say that it starts in utero and some say that it could be related/linked to a traumatic experience they had as a child.