When it comes to the prospect of more training for school staff in matters affecting our mahu (transgender) students, the state Department of Education’s proposed guidelines on the issue should not be confused with on-the-ground training.
Guidelines and training are not the same thing. Both are required with equal force by law. Training in the schools is specifically required not only because of what guidelines the DOE may have, and not only because of what “activists” may be pressing, but because the Hawaii State Constitution and statutes require such training.
Beginning with the 1950 Statehood Constitution, the state Constitution has included a cluster of “Hawaiiana Clauses” that mandate the protection, preservation and teaching of Hawaiian culture, language, values and practices. One example of these clauses, part of Article 10 of the Constitution, reads:
”The State shall promote the study of Hawaiian culture, history and language.
“The State shall provide for a Hawaiian education program consisting of language, culture and history in the public schools. The use of community expertise shall be encouraged as a suitable and essential means in furtherance of the Hawaiian education program.”
All of these requirements are in addition to the Constitution’s broader mandates for the “equal protection of the laws” and equality “without regard to sex” (the Hawaii Equal Rights Amendment).
This is not a matter of personal preference or whim on the part of the DOE, advocates, politicians, individual schools or their personnel.
Because the mere presence of guidelines does not always translate into behavior in practice, it is therefore beyond dispute that “transgender training in the schools” is not only proper but required.
It is beyond dispute that individuals designated as mahu in “Hawaiian culture, history, and language” — by which today we include transgender, bisexual and other “in-between” persons who do not submit to the traditional male-female binary — are an integral and valued part of society and their extended ‘ohana holo‘oko‘a.
In addition, the science of these subjects is conclusive, and transgender individuals, as equal partici- pants in the Constitution’s “community expertise,” have provided ample evidence of this. This information may be disruptive in North Carolina and other states that are now embroiled in controversy and litigation, but it should not be disruptive in Hawaii. Good policy must include more training for school staff, as well as training for students (and their families) as part of sex and sexuality education in the common enterprise of general education.
The traditional Hawaiian story of Kalapana, with its reference to plural knowledges, expresses this idea nicely:
“O Chief, our little [local, personal] knowledge has been exhausted. If you want some new knowledge, it is right for you the chief to go there [to the place of knowledge], because the correct procedure of this work [education] lies in exhausting all the different knowledges (ka pau mai o na ‘ike a pau), lest you perhaps be defeated by your companion in a contest of wits.”
This most liberal view of education is needed in the pluralistic society of Hawaii. The “contest of wits” (ho‘opapa) that our young people will face in the 21st century is the most challenging of any generation, and the breadth of their learning must not be trammeled by the personal squeamishness of some administrators. The word mahu must be restored to its full frame of respect and diversity.
Your recent “Off the News” item said that the “national debate over equity to transgender people, most recently flaring with a North Carolina law, has come home” (“Transgender training in the schools?” May 5).
This gets it just backward. North Carolina does not enjoy the benefit of Hawaiian values. Those values are an antidote to the bigotry of North Carolina. Indeed, Hawaiian values need to “come home” to North Carolina.
After practicing law in Hawaii for 20 years, Robert J. Morris received his Ph.D. in comparative law at the Uni versity of Hong Kong, where he taught until retiring in 2011.
