I know this is going to sound horrible to some people, but what 3rd grader identifies as nonbinary? IMHO sex and gender may as well be treated as the same thing until puberty, at least.
Woah, no one here said anything about bullying being good for the kid. The article doest even mention the reason for the bullying, but it claims that the school didn't do enough/anything to address it.
My surprise came from a 3rd grader self-identifying as "non-binary". I've never heard that term come from a child, only ever from adults and in academic settings.
It's not hard to guess the kid is weird, which is why they were bullied. It is an assumption, but I think it's a fair assumption.
I suspect the parents told them they were non-binary. When I was in third grade, I wanted to be a cat. Hell, if my parents told me I could be one, I might have thought I was a cat.
Instead, they told me to play with my transformers and stop being weird.
Honestly, my heart goes out to the kid. I had some very "weird" (read: abusive) parents growing up, and I suppose that was about the age I figured it out.
Mine would make up medical problems and constantly pull me out of class and lied to me about not having a middle name for years and years before we went to live with my older brother at 16 (little bro came too, he was 14).
Circa 2004ish I tried to reach out to my HS counselor about being bullied. She offered to do mediation between me and the bully, that made things much worse.
For some kids that's true. For a surprisingly large percentage though, gender identity can be known before they start school. Most will conform to their birth-assigned gender, so for those people, it isn't something they express clearly.
What social situations are kids put in that make them confront the question of their gender? Is it mostly like marketing and toys and stuff? Or more like family/social pressure to conform to "roles" (baseball v ballet)?
Just seems so odd for a kid to have to think about gender in general, I'm trying to imagine non-creepy situations where it would come up lol