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.”
I agree. Now, what does that have to do with this story?
The school and the teacher handled this poorly, but this isn’t a pervert. This is a person with a medical condition who chose to handle the revealing of the medical condition poorly. She genetically is female and has a right to live as a female, but this could (and should) have been handled with more sensitivity.
He’s still mentally ill.
I could “feel” like I’m a dog, but that don’t make it so.
It’s uncanny how prophetic South Park has been over the years.
She has two X chromosomes. She is genetically female. You could make the case that all the years of living as a male were the lie.
At that size, he/she would be Amanda Reckonwith.
Interesting choice of name....
A man...duh....
I had fond wishes along these lines for my High School biology teacher but I wanted to do the “surgery” myself.
Nothing in this case but this guy still has serious issues and should be away from kids
Mrs. Garrison: Hello doctor, looks like I need an abortion. [sits on the chair and puts his feet on the stirrups]
Doctor: ...an abortion?
Mrs. Garrison: Yeah, I’ve got one growing inside me. Now, are you gonna scramble its brains or just vacuum it out? [a nurse arrives and her jaw drops] ...If you want you can just scramble it and I’ll queef it out myself.
Doctor: Mmister Garrison-
Mrs. Garrison: [correcting him] Mrs. Garrison.
Doctor: Mmrs. Garrison, you can’t have an abortion.
Mrs. Garrison: Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do with my body! [gets up, goes to the nurse, and hugs her] A woman has a right to choose!
Doctor: No, I mean you’re physically unable to have an abortion, because you can’t get pregnant.
Mrs. Garrison: But I missed my period.
Doctor: You can’t have periods either. [Mrs. Garrison looks surprised] You had a sex change, Mr. Garrison, but you don’t have ovaries or a womb. You don’t produce eggs.
Mrs. Garrison: [sits down] You mean, I’ll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?
Doctor: N-that’s right.
Mrs. Garrison: But I paid five thousand dollars to be a woman. This would mean I I’m not really a woman. I... I’m just a... a I’m just a guy with a mutilated penis!
Doctor: Basically, yes.
Mrs. Garrison: ...Oh boy, do I feel like a jackass.
Golly in some schools a kid having a military style haircut is unacceptable because it is viewed as a distraction, but this? No distraction, no disruption to the childrens education. What’s the deal the freak couldn’t wait till summer vacation, not enough hoopla for the attention whore?
a 6’6” 300lb ‘woman” = glad there’s no photos -
And you have determined that how, exactly?
I have a chain saw. Tell him to drop by.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Swager was actually born genetically female but with ambiguous genitalia. The quack doctor decided to modify her into a male without checking her chromosomes.
Later, when she’s an adult, she found out she’s actually genetically female after years of hormone therapy that made her 6’6” and 300lb.
Read the story. This person has always been female and she’s trying to correct a medical mistake. This is not the typical sex change story.
That is so tragic. Frightening, really. Prayers for her.
I think some people on here are not reading the details, the person is genetically a female and was living as the wrong gender, sorry but this person is no pervert, if we had the technology we have now back then she would have been raised a woman, sorry but there no pervert I see here, nothing to see folks, move along.
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