I don't care who disagrees with me on this... It's a sad time when we even have to discuss this...

It can be very confusing for a child whose teacher was a woman.... leaves for a bit... and is now a man... come on.. how can anyone here defend the teacher? He/She knew there would be a reaction like this.

It's the parents' right to be upset...

Because the teacher has a right to his privacy, and was not hurting anybody in any way. He didn't pull off his pants and show it off to all the kids, he simply was living his life.

Just as you could not out a kid who was gay to all the parents of the students in his or her classes, you cannot out the teachers.

I'm all for personal freedom.
I'm not suggesting the teacher go to jail... I'm saying that the parents were justified with their actions.

In our previous discussions this "outing" wasn't something that can go unnoticed. Yes, the teacher should have his personal privacy. This is a much bigger issue than someone trying to live their life and keeping to themselves.

I had a music teaching in high school who became a very close and personal friend. Her husband died last year and she died just a few weeks ago, both from cancer. If we took summer off and we came back and she was now a man I would have felt a little betrayed. There is a trust relationship between teachers and students. Something this serious could have been discussed and a dialog could have been established. This would have been a much different new story (and yes, we would have seen it on Plime if it had happened that way). You don't just decide one day to change genders. In previous posts it was mentioned that this is something that happens over time and isn't taken lightly. A gender change affects more than just the one person and if that one person expects people to just "deal with it" when it is thrust upon them, they are going to be very sadly mistaken. As I said before, if this was a perfect world, this wouldn't be a story.

It was still his descision on whether on not to say, and he had every right not to. The school istelf could not do so legally, as they could be sued for it.
Whether the parents were offended or not or whether they dissagreed with the transition or not, there was no responsibility for them to be told.
And I'd like to add that many transsexuals prefer not to openly state that they are, even if other people know. Why? Because they don't identify as transsexuals. They identify as men or women.
This isn't an issue of the parents removing the kids from the class. The teacher himself did not bring this topic up, and was very likely expecting that reaction. It was the parents who demanded information that the school could not legally release and the teacher was not legally required to give.

If he had brought it up to the students, his ass would be fired right now and everyone knows it. It would also be completely inappropriate, whether he was bringing up being trans or talking about divorce or pregnancy or anything remotely like that... elementary school

C'mon, if the teacher from the story had alerted the kids about the sex reassignment, even before having the surgery, the same parents would probably be shrieking about how inappropriate it was to bring it up at all. The elephant in the room is that the parents were just plain "freaked out at the she-man," and probably are not as informed as they could be about the wide spectrum of sexual identification in humans.

The fact is, California has laws prohibiting discrimination based on a person's sex, which includes people who have changed their sex. And it has laws to protect the privacy of its employees. That's it. If a California resident changes their sex, the state will change their birth certificate, whether they were born here or not, and for all legal purposes, that person is now a man or woman. Period. Not a half-man, or an almost-woman, or a "well, let's talk about it first," but a man or a woman.

The end result is, yeah, the parents have the right to pull them from the class (if it's not required) and deny them an important part of their education in order to "protect" them from possible confusion, but I'm saying they're doing their kids a disservice in doing so.

All these people talking about how its so hard to describe transsexualism to elementary school age kids, why not just lie?
After all, there's probably some story you could tell your kids that could lessen the blow, much like answers to the "where do babies come from" question.