Hey, um, all my transgendered friends and whoever.

Over somewhere else, somebody randomly asked about transgender issues. She wants to start a discussion on transgenderism in a place where very few, if any, of the posters are trans. She read an article.

And these are all very nice people who go out of their way to be polite (it's one of the few nice forums on the internet, seriously), but I can just see the massive problems that will occur when a few more people comment there.

Now, I went to google, and I *always* go to google, but I don't want to end up sharing That One Site That Gets Everything Wrong, right? And I don't want to trust my own words, either. So if anybody has any good, concise websites I can link to, I'm sorry for imposing, go tell me. Otherwise, I'll just go through google, one by one.

Well, Ana got a note home about the prize(s) for 100% attendance

First off, stylistically this note is a mess. They have words in bold for emphasis. They have words in bold and italics for even more emphasis. They have words in bold and underlined for when they got bored with bold-and-italics. And sometimes, to really make a point, they put words in bold, italics, AND underlined! I should be grateful that somebody got through to them about overusing exclamation points. But I'm not!!!! They only have one at the end of sentences (yay!), but they still have far! too! many! of! them!

Now, there's two different awards for having 100% attendance (no lateness - reading is taught in the morning! By my estimation they have three different reading and writing lessons a day, so I'm not sold on the argument that missing one of them once is going to ruin their literacy for life.)

The first is an individual prize. Children with 100% perfect attendance (no lateness!) for a month get tokens! And they can pick out a prize!

Now, this is... not my thing? But whatever, they're committed to this little token economy of theirs. Except here's something that actually pisses me off. Every month, the class with the most perfect attendance gets a pizza party at the start of the month. (Because "this school is a serious institution of learning and students spend the entire day engaged in meaningful educational activities... except when they're spending the first day of the month engaged in throwing pizza at each other.)

Now, they give a sop to those of us rightfully concerned that prizes for attendance encourage children to come to school sick and infect us all. "Of course we understand that when a child has a fever they must stay home and be under the care of a doctor...." Except that children who are absent for a legitimate illness - something well beyond their control - are still penalized! So if a classmate is truly seriously ill, or if they lack a car and are *just* too close to the school to get bus service on a day of truly inclement weather, or if they have to go see their great-grandmother (conversation overheard on the way home. Friend's comment? "But she CAN'T see her, she'll miss the basketball game!" (the special prize for attendance next month). Message learned, apparently? 93 year old relatives aren't as important as cheap trinkets and basketball games and pizza), will the class have sympathy for them? Well, maybe. Theoretically, the school wants to encourage compassion and other aspects of character. But more likely they'll resent their classmate for making them lose the pizza party. (They'll also resent that one perfect kid who skews the average for the class next door. That kid will ALSO keep them from winning a pizza party.)

This problem could be alleviated by counting excused absences as being present, or by asking for high (and not totally perfect) attendance instead. Of course, that'd overlook what is probably the most crucial reason they want perfect attendance, something they curiously avoided mentioning.

They get paid based on how many kids are in class each day.

So really, it's not what's best for each individual kid, it's what's best for the school - full funds. And I don't blame them. It's not like their costs actually go down just because there's a flu epidemic in December, they still have to heat and light the building and pay the teachers the same. But it would be nice if they just admitted that upfront, you know?