Posted on 03/27/2015 11:16:47 AM PDT by wagglebee
CHINO, CA, March 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Southern California’s Chino High School is facing outrage from parents and students alike after school administrators decided to keep secret a teacher’s plan to undergo a sex change in the middle of the school year.
The teacher in question, 32-year-old Michael Swager, showed up at work dressed and made up as a woman the morning of March 16, after eight years of teaching chemistry at the school as a man. The teacher informed students that the 6’6”, 300 lb. man they once knew as “Michael” was now a woman, and told them they should call him “Amanda.”
School administrators had known for two years that Swager was planning to make the transition from male to female, but chose not to warn students or parents ahead of time.
“Chino High School is aware of the teacher’s decision,” the school said in a statement. “It is a personal and private matter for the teacher.”
Swager’s case is complicated in that the teacher was raised as a boy after being born with ambiguous genitalia, as well as a condition called Kallmann Syndrome, which blocks sufferers from going through puberty without chemical assistance.
Because genetic testing was not widely available in the early 1980s, Swager’s parents were forced to choose for themselves whether to raise their child as a boy or a girl. In the end, they decided the baby was a boy, and named him Michael, giving him hormone injections in his early teens to simulate male puberty.
All the while, however, Swager felt as if “he” was really a “she.” In high school and college, Swager avoided the hormone treatments and began dressing as a female. Later genetic testing would reveal that Swager did indeed possess two X chromosomes, not the X and Y combination that makes someone genetically male.
“My parents chose the wrong sex,” Swager told the Chino Champion newspaper. “I look at myself in the mirror and I go, ‘I see a female body.’”
Upon learning the truth, Swager began taking female hormones to try and undo the effects of the male hormones she had been given as a young teen. Outside of work, she lived as a female, dressing in feminine clothing and dating men. But at work, she still presented herself as Michael – a man, albeit an androgynous one.
Swager said she originally planned to make her transition public after summer break in order to give her students and colleagues time to adjust. But then her private life and work life began to collide. After she changed her name to “Amanda Swager” on Facebook, a group of teens saw the page and confronted her about it at school. Meanwhile, another group of students spotted her at the movies with her boyfriend during spring break and took video with their smartphones. Swager decided it was time to come out, or risk being outed by the teens. She notified school staff of her intention to take her situation public in a letter issued Thursday, March 12. School officials kept mum, and Swager surprised the student body by showing up the following Monday wearing women’s clothing and calling herself Amanda.
The decision to keep Swager’s plans quiet upset both parents and students at the school, who said they would have liked more time to prepare for the change rather than leaving Michael Swager behind on Friday and coming back to Amanda Swager on Monday, without warning or explanation.
"In the end it's his choice. It's his life, but they should have at least said something about it so we could have known,” one student, Viviana Vasquez, told NBC-LA.
"On a Friday he was a man, on Monday he was woman," a parent told the network, speaking anonymously. One dad, Rusty, said he thought the abrupt transition would be disruptive to the learning process, as children struggle to understand what has happened to the popular teacher. “They’re going to want to know why did the teacher did what he did.”
But Swager dismissed such concerns as intrusive. “What’s there to notify you about?” Swager asked via CBS Los Angeles. “If I was pregnant and had a miscarriage, I wouldn’t notify you that I had a miscarriage. It’s a personal issue.”
Those guys are geniuses. I cannot think of a better way to spend a restful afternoon.
SOUTHPARK-A-THON......
Insanity reigns. Forcing the topic of sexuality and some people’s obsession with sexuality and gender confusion and developmental traumas and grotesque narcissism into our schools is criminal and immoral on so many levels, one doesn’t even know where to begin articulating how awful this is for these students and their parents. The whole thing is sickening for all involved except except for one person for a short period of time - the pervert. Whose rights are being trampled? Thousands of students and their parents and everyone who has to read about administrators of a school system that goes along with this. The administrator who heard about this, should have suspended the teacher before he had the chance to show up at the school in drag. Teachers are role models and dressing up like a clown should be relegated to Halloween.
Actually, there is plenty to see here, and it is disgusting.
This is one of the worst displays of ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance I have ever seen on Free Republic.
I think people are reading it just fine. Why couldn’t this person have waited until summer vacation and applied for a lateral transfer to another school? Just show up one day in drag? It smacks of attention whore all the way.
I agree. This is a case where there has been an genuine, verifiable medical condition. One that, unfortunately, has been exacerbated by the wrong course of treatment when he/she was younger.
Even if the person is genetically female, just showing up as the opposite sex one Monday morning is just as bad for the students as if the person were really genetically male.
The overriding issue here is that the school system has made it clear that if ANY person undergoes gender reassignment the school system won't notify the parents.
Let's say that a male teacher "decides" he's a woman and puts on a dress, should he be allowed in the girl's locker room?
This guy is 6’6 and 300 pounds. He has lived his whole life as one thing, now he switched? There is a lot of issues, mental included, that should keep him away from kids for a while.
Lots of issues bundled with that
I could maybe see the logic in what your saying maybe it would be best if she waited or transferred, however I was mostly referring to the folks who say she is a pervert, I do see it in this one, so as much as she was inconsiderate maybe, I cannot give her flak over something that was not her fault.
A-man-da-kinda
anaconda
How long before he brings the former appendage to class in a jar¿?
I agree with you that the school system handled this very poorly. Plus, the teacher considering it “a private issue” is difficult to accept.
I think the law in some ststed is yes
I agree.
And you think that leaving the school on Friday as a man and unlocking the doors on Monday as a woman will not be a major distraction from learning? You think it won’t bother anyone?
The least Amanda, and the school, could have don is wait until next September. Very poor judgment and only demonstrates that the kids are an afterthought to the wants and needs of themselves.
This was exactly my point. Tragic medical condition, but handled very poorly by both school and teacher to the detriment of the kids. It’s unfortunate that the teacher got caught up in her situation and only thought about the negative ramifications to her (i.e., being “outed” by the kids who saw her at the movies) and didn’t think through the ramifications to the rest of the kids. The school is culpable here. They should have been thinking more clearly, even when the teacher wasn’t. I don’t fault the teacher for her choice, just how she chose to implement it.
6’6” and 300 pounds? Eh, just stay a dude.
I mean, I’m a guy, but if I had some weird intersex condition where I was genetically male, but outwardly female... short, full of curves, no whiskers, and basically ‘look’ completely female... hell, just hand over the damned bobbie pins and fingernail polish. I’d live my life how I looked, rather than try to chemically or surgically mutilate myself into some weird, androgynous freak. Yeah, when I’d get home, I might plop myself on the couch, light up a stogie, and watch “Combat” reruns, and cater to my inner (and celebate) dude-ism. But that would be it.
When I was in school, teachers were known by their last names only, as in "Mr. Smith" or "Mrs. Jones".
The respect that students have for their teachers is a very important part of the process, and if a teacher turns the classroom into a circus act, his or her effectiveness as a teacher is compromised.
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