Choose your gender: Parents blast barmy council for telling kids as young as four to pick sex ’they identify with’

http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/7089891/Parents-blast-council-after-kids-told-to-choose-their-gender.html

Just as the Californian government is trying to discriminate against trans-folk, the local government of the city of Brighton and Hove in the UK is causing controversy by going to the opposite ends of the extreme.

The local council has written to the parents of new students about to start school for the first time asking for the preferred gender of the new entrants.

There are obviously anti-trans views put forward in the article. However, the main criticism isn't necessarily against expressing gender identity, it is that you are trying to assign a gender children who have yet to fully develop a gender identity, and probably don't yet have a concept of what gender is.

This isn't the first incident. Apparently they previously sent a survey to one school asking students gender identity with 25 different gender options listed. While I fully recognise gender isn't binary, I wasn't aware that the were so many recognised categories!

I'm interested to see what the reaction of the community here. Both to this article, and the actions of the council.

I actually partially agree with the views in the article. I think it commendable and correct that the school system should be open and supportive of gender identity. However, I do think they may have overstepped the mark here.

Only a small percentage of the population are effected by gender identity issues, so pro-actively asking everybody about this up front rather than dealing with the issue as it arises, is being counter productive. This falls into the category of being overly politically correct. I believe there is a growing resentment of what is seen to be positive discrimination in favour of small minorities.

Unfortunately local government in the UK seems to be the worst offenders of being overly politically correct. The town I live in is currently gridlocked due to numerous sets of roadworks to install and upgrade pedestrian crossings in places where there is very little foot traffic. They also ran a survey asking how to improve the roads for cyclists. This would be fine except we don't have many cyclists (I would estimate a low single figure percentage of total traffic), and they have just had to be bailed out by the national government in order to have enough money to fill the potholes.

I am all in favour of equal opportunities. However, I think the key part is treating everybody equally. If you start to positively discriminate in favour of certain groups of people, then all you do is potentially breed resentment in the rest of the populace towards that group, whether it is justified or not.