ACP: Schools should not affirm students' perceived sexual orientation

[buffalo]

ACP: Schools should not affirm students’ perceived sexual orientation

Gainesville, Fla., Apr 10, 2010 / 08:02 am (CNA).- In a recent letter sent to school superintendents throughout the country, the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) cautioned that it is “not a school’s role to ‘affirm’ a student’s perceived personal sexual orientation.” The ACP also said that “rigorous studies” show that children and adolescents who initially experience gender confusion or same sex attraction no longer do so by the age of 25.
On March 31, ACP president Dr. Tom Benton wrote to schools across the U.S., saying that he and his staff are “increasingly concerned” that “many cases and efforts to help students who exhibit same sex attractions and/or gender confusion are based on incomplete or inaccurate information.”
“Adolescence is a time of upheaval and impermanence,” Benton wrote. “Adolescents experience confusion about many things, including sexual orientation and gender identity, and they are particularly vulnerable to environmental influences.”

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[Elizabeth502]

This is such a long time coming.

(But it probably doesn’t belong in the “Catholic News” forum.)

Yes, “confirming” young people in flux is not a good idea. My gosh, they’re in flux about so much – not just about sexuality, but that is one of the many areas they can swing radically to and fro about. Non-interference --which of course includes non-affirmation by outsiders-- has actually been shown ultimately to produce (or confirm) eventual heterosexuality, btw. Both boys and girls who are allowed to form strong attachments with both/either genders in a nonsexual way later overwhelmingly end up settling comfortably with heterosexuality as the logical result.

I wish I had the references; I don’t. I do know that there are posters who have been raised in different cultures where there is openness about (nonsexual) very close relationships, and where homosexual “identity” becomes a non-issue in adulthood. (#1, for the reasons above; #2, because the concept of sexuality as narrowly “identity” is an American phenomenon and movement, in its genesis.)

Secondarily, the predominance of psychology as a field, and of professional psychological associations in the realm of pre-college public education, has artificially and self-consciously hurried the focus on identity, which in turn forces (prematurely) a consciousness about sexuality vis-a-vis that person’s “identity.”

Just a few decades ago, even teenagers rarely verbalized concepts of “identity.” It’s a pretty abstract concept. Yes, they thought about, and talked about “who they were,” what they were going to become, etc. They “defined” themselves, but more by action than by thought. In the natural process of events, young people who are not interfered with or provided adult constructs, focus more consciously about identity beginning at about age 18 and extending through age 25..

Time for schools to stop robbing children of the natural process of growing up.