Horror upon discovering that the child failed to uphold the hamster’s gender identity, and sought to impose cisgender heterodominant hegemony.
Hertzliya, November 3 – Controversy has shaken this middle-class suburb north of Tel Aviv since late last week when a school sent a seven-year-old home for referring to the class pet with a masculine pronoun, in the absence of evidence that the animal had expressed preference for the use of that pronoun and not either the feminine, a neutral term, or some other possibility.
Parents expressed horror today and yesterday upon discovering that the child, whose identity has not been released, failed to uphold Zeke the hamster’s gender identity, and indeed failed to consider the creature might not have one, let alone that it might differ from the cisgender heterodominant hegemony the student sought to impose on it, however unwittingly.
“I’m still shaking,” acknowledged the parent of the offending child’s classmate. “What kind of parenting fails to instill the proper sensitivity by that age? In kindergarten, I can understand; my own children struggled with it even into early first grade. But at this point it’s inexcusable.”
“The school can’t escape blame for this,” asserted anther parent in the class WhatsApp group. “Any teacher or principal who hasn’t clamped down on the elements of the patriarchal white-supremacist rhetorical package is at best merely an accessory to systemic oppression, and at worst an offender of the worst kind. Himmler would be proud.”
Zeke had traveled without incident to the homes of various students for weekends since the start of the school year. Teacher Idit Solomon instituted a rotation for the animal’s housing and care as a way to help instill responsibility and empathy in her charges. The closest the class had come to anything close to a scandal of this magnitude occurred in late September when one student, who had identified as male, misidentified a backpack as belonging to him when it belonged to a different student who, although stereotypically male in appearance, had yet to identify as such explicitly. The first student’s donning of the backpack alarmed educators, administrators, and parents who saw the act as mocking the second student’s gender identity; they managed to avoid disciplinary action in that case only when the first student indicated he had mistaken one bag for another, and promptly retrieved his own.
Ministry of Education personnel noted that at this point they see no cause to interfere in the school’s handling of the incident. “Nothing systemic has occurred to warrant our involvement, at least not at this stage,” read a message from a ministry representative. “It takes a pattern of such problematic occurrences to justify our intrusion on a school’s autonomy. We will, however, make social workers available to those students and parents who feel traumatized by this horrendous act of violence.”
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