A similar thing happened to me in my Tai Chi Push Hands class. There was a certain guy in our class who would always critique his female classmates’ form, including mine. I told the teacher I didn’t want to push hands with this douche anymore, and once I did, nearly all the other women followed suit. He eventually…

She should have dropped it with the other mom and not scolded her while apologizing to her. She should have chilled out on the librarian. She hit the right note with the karate instructor. That’s why the situation worked out as well as it did.

I really hope that teacher’s “I’ll talk to the class” actually meant “Well, I can’t really get into telling you what I’m actually going to do because it would violate this kid’s confidentiality, so I’m going to give you a very generic answer that I hope will satisfy you and then go take this shit to the next level”.

My kid took Tae Kwon Do. When she was 7, a man in his 60's or so who was a black belt student walked up to her and told her that girls couldn’t hack it, and then did a series of mock-hits at her. She did great at martial arts and I still want to run him over with my car.

Studies do show that most bullies do not have low self esteem. They tend to have high self esteem. Some people are just dicks. Even kids.

I don’t plan to have kids and I would literally never have a gender-reveal party, but now I want do do both just so I can call it an “External sex organ reveal party” and have that on a banner.

UGGGGGGH! Sorry.

Aren’t they all done that way? I’ve heard of ones where instead of the envelope going to the bakery it goes to a friend who sets something up (colored balloons in a box and colored confetti in a balloon being the two I remember off hand) but I’ve never heard of a gender* reveal party where the parents weren’t finding…

Aaaaaagh! The weird gender norm brigade works my last damn nerve. Do these people not even think about how the kids feel? A friend was one of five kids, whose parents kept having more kids because “they really wanted a boy.” My friend was oldest, and even as a kid, I thought, ‘Wow! Way to really screw up your…

My moms obnoxiously christian friend had a sit down talk with me about watching RuPauls drag race “with your son in the room. You don’t want that life for him do you?” Okay first he was all of 16 months or something at the time so I’m not sure he really got the whole drag aspect. Second, if drag Race is how you become…

As a teacher, gotta disagree about the bathroom thing. Most kids that age have already developed their gender identity, and one thing they know is that boys don’t go into the girls’ toilets. That’s not a rule thing - it’s an identity thing. Boys don’t go into the girls’ toilets, because only girls go in there, and I’m…

One of my relatives had one of those. But the parents wanted to be surprised by the gender too, so they have the doctor write the baby’s gender on a piece of paper and stick it in a sealed envelope. They give the sealed envelope to a bakery, pre-order a cake for the party, tell the bakery to open the envelope and use…

But seriously. A 40-year-old man bullying a teenage girl. Clearly because he was feeling emasculated by being a grown man whose martial arts level is the same as yours. When actually he should have been encouraging you because that’s freakin’ awesome.

But then the parent’s anger towards a child whose backstory is known to you just means that instead of scolding them you use a different approach or involve school counselors to help her,no? The fact that she’s a sweet child but had this outburst means she’s not getting enough help processing her abuse.

I agree. I hate the “kids flirting” thing but I wouldn’t write a passive aggressive email about it. Instead I’d respond to said comment calmy and cheerfully “I didn’t realize three year olds could flirt! I would say the kid’s are just being friendly/having fun playing together.”. That says everything the long-winded…

As another teacher I would disagree that male and female negative behavior is treated the same except possibly in a special needs classroom. Many, many studies have been done showing that girls who are loud, disruptive, violent, etc. are shut down and disciplined much more quickly and stringently than boys doing the…

I liked reading this, because I know dem feels. My son is 4 and I already fight a ton of this shit for him, but I’m really gearing up for my daughter when she hits about his age, because she’s under 2 and already been hearing it to some degree for her entire life. I’m 98% on board with the basic argument here and 85%…

That karate anecdote really hit home for me. Karate was my life from ages 10-16, when I finally got my black belt. However, once thrown into class with the other black belts, most of whom were men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, I quit within six months. Why? Because they made inappropriate and sexist remarks about my…

And as a mixed raced child who had a white mother who took every single racial and sexist battle - and won them, I’ll say: the exhaustion is worth it.

When my son was in kindergarten, I consistently spoke up as the parent of a kid with autism, bringing those issues into conversations, and I worried that it would mark me as the Weird Mom, but after a couple of years I saw attitudes changing among the parents.