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Home » Fitness » Newsom dismisses health/fitness tests for 6M plus students in favor of non-binary PC – The Turlock Journal

There are almost 6.2 million public school students in California.

No one has an adequate count on how many of those students are non-binary, meaning they do not identify as either female or male. They may view themselves as part male and part female. And in some cases, they see themselves as female one day and male the next. Its a safe guess that the number of non-binary students in California could barely populate a city the size of Turlock.

It is worries about the psyches of primarily non-binary students that has prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to include in the proposed state budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 to suspend physical fitness testing for three years that the state requires in the 5th, 7th, and 9th grades. The suspension is designed to give experts time to devise standards that would assure non-binary students will not be body shamed or bullied as the result of taking the tests.

This is a bizarre decision on many levels.

First, the test as currently designed was done so to give youth a report card on not just their fitness and health. It includes determining an individual students body mass index (BMI) ranging from very lean to needs improvement unhealthy.

The idea is not just to determine where students were on a scale or health and fitness but to nudge students into improving just like grades do in an academic classroom.

Is the test really hurting students? No one knows because that determination was not made.

It makes no sense to walk away even temporarily from a test that may have a positive impact on millions of youth because it might undermine the self-esteem of 85,000 or so students.

It would have made more sense to simply allow students opt to not take the test for whatever reason they saw fit without revealing if they are non-binary or simply dont want to do it.

Then there is the issue is how you tailor test components such as determining BMI if the very definition of a non-binary individual is one who has a fluid gender identity or none at all? You can make weight, height, body fat, and other charts measuring physical components that go together to give you a picture of a persons health and fitness levels based on the general physical physiology parameters of a male versus female but how do you do that when non-binary doesnt as much eschew such boundaries as it rejects them?

There could literally be dozens upon dozens of composites needed to be created for testing parameters for various precise definitions of a non-binary student as opposed to simple male and female.

And while the schools should work to avoid body shaming and such, how can you do that when by the very fluid definition of being non-binary you may not know what the student literally identifies as from day to day? That also means testing as a 5th grader they may view their gender or lack of gender one way, define it differently as a 7th grader, and then see the concept of their gender in an entirely new light in the 9th grade. By definition you would not be comparing one persons progress as much as starting over each time with someone different.

Since we are getting into the thick weeds of victimology with a simple physical fitness test, lets talk about body shaming for a second by going down memory lane.

In my case, its seventh grade. It is also puberty time.

I was 5-foot-11 and 260 pounds. My mom might have called me husky, jerks both young and old called me fat, and I knew I was overweight.

I had plenty of classmates that werent. They almost all werent jerks. Among them was Lello Carnesecca. Every seventh grade class has a Lello Carnesecca. Blessed with his genes, a desire to play sports and early onset of puberty Lello as a seventh grader had an honest-to-goodness six pack, was athletic and shaved. He also was smart.

Lello could do laps around the playground in PE with ease. As for me it was short spurts of jogging and then walking. He could do push-ups like a Marine recruit near the end of basic training. Pull-ups were a snap for him. I still cant do a legitimate pull-up to this day.

Why isnt Newsom worried about the impacts that puberty might have on the potential for body shaming by those who identify as male or female who havent reached puberty as opposed to those that have?

I was not body shamed by any classmates after taking the test of the day the Presidents Fitness Test even though I was fat, a major klutz, and performed hideously on the test. There also happened to be another kid close to my size that wasnt a klutz and tested in the middle better than a lot of average or slender kids that for whatever reason they didnt make an effort or were fooling their selves that they were fit and healthy didnt score high.

My negative experiences with being bullied because of my weight had nothing to do with the test and very rarely from kids my own age. Instead it was adults, such as spectators during my one and only season as a Little League player, that re-affirmed their status as adults for ridiculing me for what I obvious already knew since there were plenty of mirrors at home.

It is tough to get comfortable with your own body for many and not just those who feel they are in the wrong skin when it comes to gender.

In many ways Im still not.

And while Im not like everyone I see purely through my eyes and not a rundown on their vitals, endurance, dexterity and strength, I am pleased with where my health and fitness are headed.

The anxiety for me as a middle schooler had nothing to do with what anyone would say or what grade I would get but the fact I was pretty sure it was going to confirm to me what I already knew. I needed to do something to get better at the fitness thing since worrying about your health isnt exactly on the radar screen of a typical 7th grader.

In looking back, that test rated me not on a scale that reflected who I was which was a borderline severely overweight 12 year-old but with a norm for my age and height was part of the pieces to a puzzle I needed to put together in my head.

That puzzle, when I finished it by the end of the school year, made it possible for me to start my 8th grade year weighting 70 pounds less.

What Newsom is doing without realizing it is taking away a tool that may actually have similar positive impacts on young Californians on the advice obviously of advisors that is rooted in politically correct assumptions that tip the scales against the overwhelming majority of students who are binary.

Besides if a person can actually grasp that they are not binary as a 7th grader and run with it they certainly have the moxie and intelligence to put a physical fitness test in perspective.

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Newsom dismisses health/fitness tests for 6M plus students in favor of non-binary PC - The Turlock Journal

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Home » Fitness » Newsom dismisses health/fitness tests for 6M plus students in favor of non-binary PC – The Turlock Journal