Yes. Online dictionaries are out to get you and your way of life. They are the nut cases, not you.
I've practiced employment law for more than 20 years, which included lots of stuff regarding the meaning of "sex" and "gender" as they appear in various statutes, regulations, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly referred to as the "DSM"), which address mental health. I've had to go through several updated versions of the DSM because they issue new ones periodically.
There is absolutely zero doubt that there has been a deliberate, if not necessarily coordinated, campaign to redefine those words so as to be more compliant with the interests of the GLBT interests groups. Same has been done to Wikipedia. You can check the various versions of the DSM, dictionaries, etc., and see the changes. Go check a written dictionary published 20 years ago and compare it with what you may find online to see how the definitions have changed. Actually had to do that for a case where someone who was trans was trying to get that covered based on discrimination against "gender", and won by showing what the meaning of the word was at the time the statute was passed, versus the meaning the plaintiff was trying to give it currently.
Truth of the matter is gender identity issues were first recognized as a psychological condition in the 1950s. It's a real condition. The parents who are doing the gender neutral thing are basing it on actual scientifically proven concerns, I just think it causes more problems for the kid than it cures, personally.
Funny you should mentioned that. Yes, "
Gender Identify Disorder" has been recognized for a long time by mental health professionals, and was defined in the DSM's. I still have the DSM III-R that was the bible when I started practicing. And you could find Gender Identity Disorder going back all the way to the original DSM (1952), up to the DSM III-R (1987), DSM IV (1994), and DSM IV-TR (2000).
But a funny thing happened with the DSM-V (2013). The condition was now referred to as
Gender Identity Dysphoria, instead of "Disorder." Why? Well, because advcoates didn't like the term "disorder". And it's not just right-wing paranoia saying that's why the change was made:
For years advocates have lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to change or remove categories labeling transgender people in a psychiatric manual, arguing that terms like “Gender Identity Disorder” characterize all trans people as mentally ill. Based on the standards to be set by the DSM-V, individuals will be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria for displaying “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.”
“All psychiatric diagnoses occur within a cultural context,” said Jack Drescher, a member of the APA subcommittee working on the revision. “We know there is a whole community of people out there who are not seeking medical attention and live between the two binary categories. We wanted to send the message that the therapist’s job isn’t to pathologize.”
http://www.advocate.com/politics/tr...ces-gender-identity-disorder-gender-dysphoria
And if you read the article, the political/interest group factors driving that language change is very clear. The tap-dance gets more humorous when you did a bit deeper and find that the real problem they're having is trying to get it considered some sort of
defect for purposes of getting insurance (or the
taxpayers via Medicare/Medicaid) to pay for reassignment surgery/hormone treatments, while at the same time not wanting to be considered as having something "wrong" with them. Essentially, the shrinks and GLBT lobby are trying to come up with something that will force the rest of us to pay for those treatments.
Again, this isn't a huge change for a school. I would just pick groupings of students according to ability level or some other factor. It is a sall adjustment compared to other adjustments schools make all the time for things like emotional disturbances in a kid, a physical disability in a kid, autism, etc.
And again, you keep viewing this solely from the perspective of what is easiest for teachers/schools, whereas parents may care much more about the content of what is actually being taught/imparted to students. And frankly, I'm not too keen on having what was considered a "disorder" until two years ago being taught as just another equally valid "choice".
