Changing the subject again
Amy Poehler has a thing I didn’t know about, called Smart Girls. As part of that, she has this highly appealing video in which two women – who say they are each other’s fiancées – explain about female bodies, starting with menstruation. I wish I could be besties with both of them. Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, they’re called.
Good, right? Great idea?
Most commenters on the Facebook post about it think so, but there’s an exception.
Hey Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. I think you are doing a great job empowering cisgender girls–but that’s about where it stops. All kids with vaginas, breasts, or any of the parts that you refer to as “the female bod,” deserve to be empowered and well educated about their bodies.
Bodies are not as simple as “female” and “male” and neither is gender. And it is harmful to teach children (especially girls) that they are a sum of their genitals. (i.e. that a certain genital configuration=female. that is outdated and hurtful)
This post equates womanhood with vagina– and that is very hurtful to trans girls. It is also hurtful to intersex kids, trans boys, and nonbinary trans kids. Body parts and gender are both spectrums.
I think you do a great amount of work, but I really think you could make a stronger effort to include (rather than isolate and exclude) all kinds of underprivileged genders–girls, trans kids, and intersex kids. These kids deserve to learn about their bodies too.
Same old shit – stop talking about girls, stop telling girls about their bodies.
H/t Jen
Fuck this. It’s sinister bullshit.
There are roughly three and a half billion female-bodied girls and women in the world. But heaven forbid anyone acknowledge their existence or do anything for them.
An aside: Cameron Esposito is one of the funniest comedians on earth. The first time I ran across her videos I was laughing so hard that I started doing that pained grab-your-stomach-and-desperately-gasp-for-air thing. Also, she would probably be the first to talk about (or probably joke about, in order to make it easier to talk about) the harm that strict gender roles and expectations cause, so picking on her about it is really just simply ignorant and rude.
Ah well I’ll have to watch those videos then.
I just followed both of them on the Twitter.
This is so distressing to me, because, as those of you who have had tween/teen girls (as well as those who have BEEN tween/teen girls) can attest, this in and of itself is pretty groundbreaking stuff. Honest, open, accessible dialogue about menstruation, delivered in a light, humorous, accessible fashion? Taking the shame out of a process that has been stigmatized as inherently shameful for freaking millennia? This approach could make the difference to the lives of millions of girls. Does it lose potency if it’s rebranded as ‘not just about girls’? I kind of think it does.
I don’t want anyone to feel marginalized. I want trans boys to be able to access accurate, non-shaming information about their bodies, but I do not see how repackaging this particular topic to specifically include trans boys doesn’t erase the majority of cis girls that it’s primarily going to benefit.
Challenge me, please. I want to understand how to make this work for everyone.
I can’t challenge you Jen because you’re right. And I don’t want to. Please detour right the fuck around this and keep praising honest conversation for girls like this. Without apology.
Taking the shame out of it and also the scariness. Yes the speculum hurts, but not that much.
And I can’t challenge you, because I agree. I think trans boys can perfectly well just know they have the relevant bodies and watch just as girls watch – all the more so since Esposito and Butcher are somewhat GNC.
Ach Josh got there first.
Yeah, trans men tend to
1) be perfectly aware their bodies are not male bodies. That may not be a source of happiness, but it’s reality. If they had male bodies,t hey wouldn’t be trans.
2) be politically still associated with if not the same as women, because they know how fucking important feminism is.
3) because of 1 & 2 be kind of flexible about speech regarding medical realities.
“These kids deserve to learn about their bodies too.”
Absolutely. My immediate reaction is to say, “So why don’t you write that book or do that show?”
Seriously. Why not? Why do women have to stop talking about themselves so they can talk about different problems? (Again.)
A later comment says:
In my more cynical moments, I find this kind of social media activism to be less about trans activism and more about tearing other people down. Satisfying, that is.
When I was growing up, we couldn’t talk about our bodies. It was hushed tones, and find out things the hard way, when you’re sitting on the toilet thinking you’re about to die because you’re all covered with blood. If I’d had a daughter, believe me, I would have made sure she knew what was going to happen.
Now suddenly, just when we’re able to talk about it, we can’t talk about it again.
How in fuck’s name is calling a “certain genital configuration” female teaching children that they are “a sum of their genitals” (whatever the fuck that means.)
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but jesus. If your talking points are this muddled, that’s a fucking clue that maybe your thinking is imprecise and your ideology is bollocks.
Non-gendered bollocks, of course.
@13: It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that _any_ recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or boys/men) and they do not feel the sort of dysphoria that would lead them to identify as trans.
In other words, there are in reality multiple senses in which someone can be a woman, of which the most common – sense 1 – is being a person born with a female body and not being trans; one much less common – sense 2 – is being a person born with a male body but being trans and identifying as a woman. Workable trans advocacy is based on advocating that senses 1 and 2 be treated as equivalent for most purposes, and that people who are women in senses 1 or 2 have equal human worth. Unworkable trans advocacy, e.g. the sort of thing that got Ophelia hounded off FtB for thinking, seems to rely on denying sense 1 entirely and insisting that all women are women because they identify as women. To me this seems like advocating for gay rights by claiming that everybody is straight.
This feeds over in several odd directions, one in particular being the claim that if a person is female in the identity sense, then their body is female, tout court, as being the body of a female person. This of course relies on ignoring that there’s a sense of male/female for bodies (bluntly, having tab A or slot B) which doesn’t have to map onto the sense of male/female for persons. This seems like a deliberately or unconsciously Orwellian move to disable the language – and it ignores the way languages work anyway. The word “head” has different senses as applied to a human body, a geographical feature (Beachy Head), a sexual act, a pint of beer, an organisation, or a steam engine, but this doesn’t cause any actual difficulties; yet the word “female” apparently cannot be permitted any such polysemy.
Wow, that’s burning stupid. Now, Samantha Vimes has already made a couple of points I had in mind, but I’d like to add a few along those lines.
First of all, the video in question is aimed at kids/teens. Even if one of the presumed kids/teens watching it has been identifying as trans from toddlerhood AND had very supportive parents AND perhaps even some hormone treatments, it’s HIGHLY unlikely they’ve had any gender reassignment surgery done yet. So, whatever they identify as, they still have either a basic male or a basic female body. Oh, and since they aren’t aliens and weren’t born yesterday (presumably this isn’t for newborns), they are well aware of what it is they’ve got between their legs, even if that’s not what they wish they had. It would be either extremely stupid or outright delusional for those kids to be so invested in the physical reality they wish they had rather than the one they do have. It is very important for everybody to understand what is supposed to be “normal”, health-wise, for the kind of body they have — because then they are able to know if how their particular body functions deviates from “normal”, so they can take themselves to a healthcare professional to get checked out. It may turn out that what they are experiencing is within a range of benign deviations from “normal”, i.e. that they have nothing to worry about, and they can go on about their lives with more detailed information about the body they have and it’s particular quirks, or it may turn out that something is seriously wrong and they need medical treatment. Whichever way you slice it, a video informing kids about how a female-type body is supposed to function is useful, at the very least in a narrowly pragmatic/medical sense.
Second: intersex conditions are both rare and VERY varied. Some of them don’t even fully manifest until you are older – like in your twenties. They also exist on a spectrum: some are immediately obvious at first glance, others concern very subtle aspects of hormonal production. Ever heard of Polycyctic Ovarian Syndrome? I happen to be intimately familiar with it because I have it, and it is sometimes placed at the very edge of the “intersex spectrum” – an entre range of conditions that a person can have that will make their body function in a way that is not entirely consistent with what’s expected for their biological sex. My point is, if your purpose is to educate the 98%-99% of kids who are NOT affected by one of tens or hundreds of conditions that MIGHT make their bodies sufficiently different from the “norm” for their biological sex, getting diverted into exploring all the possible variations and contingencies that may affect those other 1%-2% is (at best) going to confuse absolutely everyone. And again, back to point one, if one of the people in your audience happens to be intersex and happens to still be unaware of it, you might be handing them a clue that their body doesn’t function the way it’s supposed to and maybe they need to get that checked out. If, on the other hand, you happen to have a kid in your audience who is intersex and well aware of it, the worst that could happen is they’d find the video irrelevant to them (but, on the other hand, they might want to learn more about the physical reality that non-intersexed females face – because god forbid, kids could be curious about that sort of stuff).
Third: some kids are born with birth defects like missing limbs. Other kids might have an accident or disease that leaves them without a limb or two (or more). Is it offensive to let them see videos of other kids running, and jumping, and drawing, and building sand castles? What about videos explaining the anatomy and function of hands and feet and fingers and toes? Is saying that people have two hands and two feet exclusionary and offensive to people who were born without some or all of those, or lost them to accident or disease? Does making such a statement deny the humanity of people who are missing some or all of their limbs? Or, perhaps, as people, they are able to handle enough nuance to realize that while it is “normal” for people to have certain physical features, they, in particular, have bodies that are different, regardless of how they subjectively feel about these differences, or what they wish their biological reality was.
There’s really no reason to re-enact 1984 and spawn doublespeak to remove any connection between the word “woman” and the features and functions of a specifically (and averagely) female body to somehow avoid encroaching on some very fragile delusions that some very small group of people are PRESUMED to have (the real live trans people and intersex people of all stripes seem to have a variety of opinions and approaches both to physical sex and social and “identity” gender, so it’s outright condescending to project either delusion or extreme fragility on all of them, collectively).
Samantha Vimes @ #9:
Exactly.
Most trans people have no problem with women’s and girls’ issues being labelled “women’s and girls’ issues”.
~~~~~~~~~~
Oddly enough, the trans women I know in real life understand their differences, too, and would be baffled and hurt – they are fighting back against this nonsense in meatspace at least as hard as Ophelia is in cyberspace, with similar results (think physical threats, threatening communications to employers, etc.) – to think that they are being lumped in with the angry, vocal ‘trans activists’ (both trans and not-trans) who claim that there is no difference between them and women who grew up with female bodies.
Not that the ‘trans activists’ care – perhaps hurting their elders is, at least partly, the point.
This is a tiny country; the split that we have seen develop online this year has paralleled the one in real life. On the one hand we have trans men of all ages, siding with the middle-aged and older trans women who have done sterling work creating safe spaces and support groups, both for trans people and their families; helped to keep the ‘T’ in ‘LGBTQI+’, despite some local opposition, by showing how mutual support benefits the gay community too, thus helping to gain marriage equality in this country by popular vote – many people I spoke to wondered why ‘the gays’ even wanted to get married, but instantly understood the unfairness of forcing divorce on couples if one of the spouses were trans; and by being diplomatic and yet determined around politicians, helped get the legislation changed to make it easier for people to transition.
On the other hand we have trans women in their early-to-mid-twenties, and their non-trans male supporters of the same age.
They don’t negotiate, they demand.
They don’t want to be part of slow governmental processes, they want perfect legislation today.
They want support groups to be all about them and their concerns*.
They don’t want to help those icky, ugly trans women who are too poor, or too old, to have had access to puberty-blockers and early hormones, they want to pretend they don’t exist; worse: if the little princesses are forced to associate with old trans women, people might – shock, horror! – lump them in together!!!! when their really, truly-true cohort is the Kardashians and their ilk.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Which, conveniently, are things (like ‘forced prostitution of trans women of colour in the USA’ – an actual example raised recently) which cannot be dealt with by the older people in the group, thus enabling the youngsters to claim that those people – particularly the women – are not just irrelevant but ‘obstructionist and transphobic’.
[…] a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject […]
“Same old shit – stop talking about girls, stop telling girls about their bodies.”
Speaking for myself, I don’t think that comes close to paraphrasing what (very little) criticism I’d have for the video. Yeah, I always appreciate when speakers take semantic care to avoid constructs like “as a girl, your body will experience X, Y, and Z.” or “as a woman, I also experienced those.” However, I do concede a certain pragmatism; our language, such as it is, leaves most alternatives “If you have a uterus, you may experience X, Y, and Z. As someone who has a uterus, I also experienced those.” seem… cludgy, at best.
That said, I did find myself feeling mildly critical not of the content at all, but the framing; that criticism would be better paraphrased as, “stop telling [only] girls about [only] female bodies”.
My older son will soon be starting his 4th grade unit on sex education, and several topics are presented in the format “all boys go to this room [to learn about things that only matter to boys]; and all girls go to that room [to learn about things that only matter to girls]”. While I think it’s GOOD that these kids are getting what information they do receive; I think it would be BETTER if all the kids got all this information (and better still if the information weren’t set in the paradigm of “those people are so different from you that they have learn in a different classroom”).
All kids need to learn this stuff – throughout childhood but especially as they approach puberty. No kid, no matter what gender identity they assume, should be remotely ignorant of how our reproductive systems work or what is necessary to keep them healthy and hygienic. Well before they’re in their teens, I feel both of my kids should know: what menstruation is, what tampons are and how they work, what a gynecological exam is, what a speculum is, what pap smears are, what a circumcision is, what smegma is, what erections are, what testicles and ovaries do, what orgasms are, what masturbation is, what ejaculation is, and so on.
Even ignoring the impact of this “segregation-of-education” on transgender kids; does it really advance feminist goals to present, e.g. menstruation, as a “girls-only” subject – a subject to be forever surrounded by a shroud of mystery to boys? Is there *any* information about female reproductive anatomy about which boys should be kept ignorant? How might one finish the sentence, “Boys should not know what tampon applicators are, or how they work, because ______”? Conversely, are there certain facts about penises or scrota that girls simply ought not be told?
I don’t think there’s any aspect of social justice or the feminism movement advanced by segregation or selective ignorance; much as I think unisex restrooms advance both trans rights and feminist principles; so too do I feel unisex sex-education (both in terms of formal education as well as in pop-culture) would be a common step to said goals.
Kevin, I agree that people should know–or at least have the opportunity to learn–how all bodies work, including bodies that are plumbed differently from their own, but I can’t co-sign an objection to this video based on the ‘girl-centric’ presentation because it ignores the cultural realities that brought us to this point. For the majority of recorded human history, female biology has been stigmatized, repressed, exploited as a means of torture and violence, subjugation and sustained inequality. This is not a distant, arcane phenomenon, but is the current state of affairs in much of the world.
Talking openly about the structure and function of ‘Girl Bods’ is something that the vast majority of people–even liberal ‘Western’ people–are NOT comfortable with, and that discomfort is directly attributable to the entrenched ways in which female bodies are culturally defined.
I fully support comprehensive sex-ed, but in addition to, not at the expense of, the creation of safe spaces and resources that allow growing girls to come to terms with the physical realities of their bodies.
Unless your kid’s education is significantly different from what I received twenty some years ago, they aren’t being divided up to separate what they learn. The information they learn will be mostly or fully the same. They’re being divided up because talking about sex is uncomfortable for children, and talking about it in front of the other sex is even more uncomfortable. Our society taboos certain contact between the sexes. Boys simply Do Not Go into the girls bathroom or locker, and vice versa, etc. These social taboos inhibit frank discussion of sex and sexuality in the presence of the opposite gender, particularly for children who’s understanding of those taboos is comparatively un-nuanced.
Segregation also permits a degree of personalization. Instead of “girls menstruate” addressed to a room at large, the conversation can be “you will menstruate.” This makes it more real. This is also where the conversation can diverge between rooms. Some girls may have questions about that.
Have you actually been told that the curriculum differs?
@Jen,
So, essentially, the encapsulation of the video’s information content in “Girl/Woman” language is not mere linguistic convenience, but also a direct “fuck you” to the misogyny which has characterized that informations’ suppression for time immemorial.
I’m good with that.
As to “safe spaces”; I think it’s a realistic standard of “safe spaces” that kids should not need to share any information about their genitals with their peers or teachers. If a “safe space” were set up for “girls to come to terms with their bodies”; should boys with vaginas be welcome to attend? Should girls with penises be kept out? Should official policy mandate that trans kids out themselves to their peers in order to gain access to these spaces – and can any school which forces LGBT kids to out themselves, in exchange for educational material available to everyone else, be considered “safe”?
Why LGBT kids?
@Anna Y
Yes, exactly. Delusion is one of the things being peddled by this sort of nonsense.
@Kevin Kirkpatrick, I agree with you about segregating the information kids receive (and when I was in school, we girls didn’t learn much about boys’ bodies. But things may have changed since then.)
But a video on the internet is available to all. I don’t see a problem addressing it to girls (or addressing a similar informational video to boys); the primary audience for information about _____’s bodies is still going to be _____; they have most pressing need for the information.
Safe spaces don’t have to be physical spaces. They don’t even have to be interactive spaces. The video in the OP contains information about the care and keeping of biologically female reproductive organs, and presents information in nonjudgmental, frank and humorous ways that to me connote ‘safe space’. There’s nothing prohibitive about trans boys taking any useful info they can glean from that presentation, regardless of the fact that it’s not explicitly directed at them.
Write about menstruation – make it all about men.
Don’t you know men have periods too? What about the men? What about the men?
Men. Menmenmenmenmen. Let’s talk about men. More men! And fewer women!
@Patrick,
I’m thinking schools policy ought to be driven more by “actual harm” than “fear of violating social taboos”. Especially bearing in mind that some sub-cultures will consider any conversation about human reproduction beyond “Wait til you’re married” to be “taboo”.
As to “girls menstruate” vs “you will menstruate”; sorry, I don’t follow your logic at all.
“Katie, you will menstruate! And Beth, you will menstruate! And Jenny, Shantee, and Becky – yes, you, and you, and you, will menstruate!”
vs.
“Everyone in here will menstruate”
vs
“Every girl in here will menstruate”
vs
“Girls menstruate”
Are you saying there’s some point on that continuum where a girl in class will be more or less likely to understand that she’s going to menstruate?
I do get the whole “safe space” argument; but school policy ought to recognize that most kids will have questions which they are uncomfortable to ask in *any* peer group. It’d be utterly naive to think, “only having girls around will guarantee that all the girls will be comfortable to ask personal questions about their bodies” – I’d expect any teacher of this material to establish some form of anonymous question submission and/or comments (not to mention 1-on-1 availability of any faculty member the student might feel comfortable approaching). And, once such an approach is established; I’m back to square one: what information might be shared in such a context which “only girls” or “only boys” should know?
@Ophelia – sorry for the confusing appearance of LGBT there, I had originally typed a couple sentences exploring whether sexual-orientation-specific curricula ought to be taught (i.e. de-emphasizing risks of pregnancy; omitting instructions of condom-use for lesbians) and, if so, would it good policy to segregate gay/lesbian students from straight students… it was too much a stretch for the point I was trying to make, so off to backspaced-away-land it went – I overlooked flipping the term “LGBT” to “transgender”.
That said – to your mind, is there a meaningful distinction between a policy that forced trans students to out themselves vs, say, a policy forcing the same of gay or lesbian students? Do students have some “right to know” about the genitals of all of their peers that trumps other students’ rights to bodily privacy?
Kevin it seems to me you’re phrasing this as the (cis) students wanting to keep trans kids out, but isn’t it in fact an issue of what’s useful for the trans kids? A trans boy presumably needs the info about girls’ bodies and would go to that class; a trans girl to the boys’.
Or maybe a trans kid needs a different class specific to that kid’s body.
You seem to be picturing students or teachers barring the door, but why?
I’m not sure how to respond to your post. You’ve managed to 180 nearly everything I wrote, almost to the point where I’m not sure I trust you enough to continue this conversation.
The fear of social taboo in question isn’t the fear that the faculty will violate a social taboo. Its a concern that children have been taught that the sexual aspects of their bodies are shameful and secretive will have a hard time discussing those aspects of their bodies. It is a concern that embarrassment and shame will be barriers to the learning process. Our society typically allows for more openness about these things in single gender settings- obvious example, segregation of locker rooms by sex. The hope is that by children will be a little less embarrassed and more open to both listen and discuss these issues if they are more comfortable. I think this is probably an accurate conclusion about the ways in which the typical American child thinks about sex and sexuality.
As for personalizing it, I don’t think that the problem is that girls will not realize that the teacher is talking about their body. And I don’t think you honestly thought I thought that, which makes me wonder why you wrote it. I think we all recognize that there is a difference between a distant and clinical presentation of factual material, and a more personal discussion. There is a presentation difference and a difference in speaker/listener dynamic between “At or about age 12, the females undergo…” and “soon you’ll be going through…” You may not find that to be an important difference, but it does exist, and it is one of the reasons that is sometimes used to argue for sex segregated sex ed, particularly at young ages.
By contrast… you continue to assert that there will be different curriculum taught to boys versus to girls… does THAT exist?
Anna– yep, I also have polycystic ovarian syndrome. It was untreated for pretty much two decades, so I spent my teens and young adulthood with masculine levels of testosterone but also high estrogen and pretty much no progestin. I started shaving my face when I was 14. Being on the pill has made me less likely to bulk muscle, I think, and definitely my temper is milder and my body hair has faded. Those are the only changes I’ve noticed.
Thanks, tiggerthewing– good points. I agree that the trans women I know are not like the activists who seem to want to control all discourse, preferring instead to be accepted for who they are without dictating to others. And I think you are correct about some class issues and what-not creating privileges that activists don’t want to check.
Kevin, I agree with you, it would be much better for the schools to create an age-appropriate presentation for *all* the students. It’s a win-win if they do.
Patrick, as a child, I sure as hell prefered the clinical speech of the classroom to anything that would be personally directed. OMG, like WHY would you think I would care about birth control! I don’t DO sex! But.. failure rates… that’s interesting to know. Huh, that’s a well organized informational chart. What I’m saying is personalization of something a child isn’t ready to personalize can lead to them mentally shutting it out Presenting it more abstractly as information that will eventually be useful, just as algebra will one day be useful, can reach the more emotionally volatile.
@Lady Mondegreen,
Yeah, I’m mostly of the mindset, in some contexts; the “girl/woman = those with vagina/uterus” vernacular is going to do more to personalize the message than ostracize those who don’t fit that mold. Furthermore – I do think that in a society that deals such a crappy hand to girls/women in general; there’s much to be said for staking out messages and spaces specifically welcoming of and empowering to girls. I do think it would’ve taken nothing away from the “SheSaid” video to include just a token “inclusive nod” toward transgender boys; but I’ll leave it as: in terms of looking out for my kids, I really appreciate when those nods are there, but think it serves no greater good to complain of their absence in every single context.
And an internet video is an entirely different context from school policy – so as much as the underlying subject matters overlap, I definitely wouldn’t say the same standards of explicit inclusiveness apply.
@Ophelia – to clarify, the point is that if a school segregates the spaces in which male-specific information is delivered vs female-specific information; in order to obtain the information he most needs, a trans boy would have little choice but to out himself by attending to the female-specific information space. As to exclusion; my line of reasoning was, “if a transgender girl did choose to sit in with her friends; and the argument for segregation was that other girls would be uncomfortable discussing their bodies in the presence of a non-vagina-having-person, then how would that rationale not extend to the transgender girl being locked out?”
Anyway, as I indicated to Lady Mondegreen; the context of “internet video” is utterly different from that of school policy. I’d initially brought up the latter due to similarity in subject; but can definitely concede that the reasons I object to it are far more pertinent than the objections I’d raise to the video being geared toward girls.
@Patrick,
“soon you’ll be going through…”
“If you’re a girl, soon you’ll be going through… and if you’re a boy, you’ll be going through…”
That’s the subtle difference I’m talking about – yes, of course, a good teacher finds ways to personalize the information they’re teaching; my point was that the existence of boys in the room would not serve as some intractable barrier to doing so… your presenting it as such is what I find so baffling.
I had meant to respond to the curriculum point: no, I do not know if the official curriculum varies in what is taught to boys vs girls (though I will say, I’d be shocked – in a good way – to learn that once segregated, boys were presented the same information on ovarian cancer, female birth control, feminine hygiene products, etc. as the girls). However, even *if* the official guidelines were identical, I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that emphasis and discussion in a segregated girl sex-ed classroom would far more comprehensively cover female anatomy than what a transgender boy might expect to learn in a segregated boy sex-ed classroom (and vice-versa).
Kevin:
Before the internet, that would have carried much more weight.
(These days, they would only need to look it up!)
Ophelia:
Kevin stated that his son is about to start learning this sort of material in segregated classrooms (this is still a reality in some parts of the U.S., at least, particularly in conservative regions). There’s two separate issues that arise, and his posts are trying to address both points at once, creating a bit of confusion. I’m going to try to break it down, and Kevin can correct me if I’m missing something.
1: The material itself is being segregated. Boys and girls are given, essentially, a different curriculum. This general ignorance of the other sex’s physiology (particularly male ignorance of feminine physiology) has long had easily observed consequences, all of them bad.
2: Physically segregating the students by body type has the potential effect of ‘outing’ a trans student. “Okay, all the girls go to Room 5A, and all the boys go to Room 5B. Oh, but Suzie, since you have a penis, you go to room 5B with the boys, and Tommy, your vagina means you go to 5A.” Alternately, segregating them by presented gender means that Suzie gets none of the penis-specific information, and Tommy ends up as clueless about his vagina as an MRA.
Freemage, apparently, we crossed.
So.
Kevin appeals to those who wish to know, and must “out” themselves to do so.
You appeal to those who don’t particularly care, so that if they are to know, they must attend a particular class, else they will not bother.
(I think that your appeal has more merit)
PS Freemage, your extemporaneous example seems unrealistic to me:
This entails that the teacher already knows the trans status of Suzie and Tommy, so that if they are not yet “outed”, presumably that’s due to those who know (such as that teacher) having kept it confidential hitherto.
It’s been a few years, but I seem to recall that attendance at these classes required the signed permission of the parents. It would seem that if a trans child were afraid of being “outed” in the ways discussed here, then the parents could address that fear simply by withholding their permission and instructing their child themselves.
John Morales: It’s not uncommon for the staff at a school to be aware of a student’s trans status, even if they aren’t ‘out’ to their classmates. No, my example was not to be taken literally, but rather, point out the problem with classrooms being segregated by physical genitalia. If the teacher knows the child’s trans status, they would either be outing the kid, or sending them to a class that doesn’t cover material they need to know. If the teacher is not aware, then the kid would definitely would be getting shorted on the information they might need.
One possible option: Segregate the classes by the child’s presentation, but deliberately and aggressively make the curriculum fully comprehensive. Encourage the kids to ask questions about both (or technically, all) body types, and maybe even spend some time discussing questions that come up in the other group. The idea here, after all, is to create an environment where the kids feel more free to ask things.
Or you know, do what my schools did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and not segregate the class. Have a system for asking questions outside of class (including anonymously) in addition to questions asked in class.
My kid’s sex-ed classes were mostly gender-inclusive, except for one of the sessions in elementary school.
One of the deficiencies of the curriculum both in my days and now is that there hardly is anything about sexual acts other than PIV (whether between people of same or different sex).
Anat: Sure, that would be preferable, I agree. I think Kevin would, as well.
@ John Morales:
Please tell me that was sarcasm. I can’t quite tell.
@Anat & Freemage – 100% agree.
One of the most effective steps to make a classroom trans-friendly is also the simplest: don’t segregate kids by gender. That whole, “let’s make a fun game out of this lesson: girls vs boys!”: don’t do that. Make it a fun game of “A-K vs J-Z names” or “front half of the room vs back half” or “kids with red on their shirts vs those without”, or “1-2-1-2… okay, ones over here, twos over there”. Limitless options here, and yet, so many educators are quick to reach for “girls/boys” as the golden standard for dividing groups up (and, if challenged, enthusiastically throwing up the same tired defense that props up so, so many indefensible societal wrongs: “We have to do it this way, because… TRADITION!”).
Even leaving aside the trans-friendly aspect, it seems obvious how running such “friendly” competitions along the lines of “black kids vs white kids” would likely reinforce racist attitudes among the students. What makes us so quick to assume “girls vs boys” wouldn’t have the same reinforcing effect on sexism? That said, for all the damage it would do to race relations, it should be equally easy to see how a “black kids vs white kids” competition could have a particularly toxic ostracizing effect on a biracial student in the classroom. Is it such a stretch to empathize with trans kids subject to the same effect due to “Girls over here, boys over there” mandates, or, “girls use these restrooms, boys use those ones” (and sometimes, even worse, “… and trans kids use the restroom next to the nurse’s office”)?
Seconded. I’m not sure there is a *worse* source for kids to learn about human sexuality than unguided internet searches. A great TED talk comes to mind: http://blog.ted.com/cindy_gallop_ma/