Scholarship on education and gender may finally have produced a self-parody hilarious enough to get it laughed out of the classroom. That’s overly optimistic, I know. But even if it doesn’t prove true, it should.

As Jennifer Hartline reported here at The Stream on Sunday, an educational advisory council in Minnesota has approved a new Transgender Toolkit for public schools across the state. It’s in draft form, but if it’s approved, it could become policy for schools across the state.

Taking the Meaning Out of “Scholar”

One line says, “Teachers could address students as ‘students’ and ‘scholars’ to be inclusive as opposed to ‘boys and girls.’”

That’s bad news for kids. All kids. I’m serious. Think students have a hard time in school for being gender-different? It’s much worse for “scholars.” In fact, they don’t have to be true scholars — a term usually reserved for people with advanced degrees doing research and generating new knowledge in specialized fields. They just need to be gifted.

According to the Transgender Toolkit, 54 percent of gender non-conforming students were verbally harassed between first grade and twelfth grade, and 24 percent were physically attacked. That’s not good. But 46 percent of gifted children are bullied in sixth grade alone! I know it first-hand. I was a top student throughout school, and I was both verbally harassed and physically attacked for it.

It sounds to me like calling them “boys and girls” is a lot safer than calling them “scholars”!

But it would be silly to take that seriously. Just calling them all scholars wouldn’t get them all bullied like scholars. Kids would still know who gets the better grades, and they would bully them all the same. The term “scholar” wouldn’t mean anything in that case.

Which is part of the problem. The Toolkit would render the word meaningless, along with, of course, “boys” and “girls.” That’s what these gender-and-education scholars want to accomplish. Come to think of it, there’s more than one way they’re stripping all sense from the word “scholar.”

At What Cost Shall We Fix a Non-Problem?

But let’s be fair. They offer other reasons why it’s so damaging to call boys and girls “boys and girls.” Here’s another one: School is so hard on gender non-conforming kids, 17 percent of them drop out.

How many kids are we talking about, though? That 17 percent is 17 percent of what? Research suggests that somewhere between 2 and 5 out of 10,000 students will grow up to experience a serious, seemingly unshakable mismatch between their sex and their internal sense of gender. More children will have questions about their sex and gender along the way, but will find those questions simply go away as they get older.

So the number of truly transgender kids is very, very small, especially by the time they’re old enough to choose between graduating and leaving school. To ease the dropout rate in that extremely small group, this Toolkit would suggest confusing every other student throughout their entire school career. I wonder what effect that might have on non-trans students’ dropout rates.

By now, though, you really should be wondering what that figure is, for comparison with trans students’ 17 percent. It’s not hard to find. Official reports list Minnesota’s overall on-time graduation rate at just under 82 percent.

Scholars, do the math.