Too too too binary
Empowerment! Yet another institution for female people has found a new way to erase female people. Progress!
The alma mater of a long list of distinguished women, from Rosalind Franklin and Dame Kate Bingham to Emily Mortimer and Rachel Weisz, is to rename the role of head girl because it is too “binary”.
In other words a girls’ school finds the word “girl” too “binary.” So will it become a persons’ school now? If so it will wait a long long long time for Eton and Harrow to do the same.
The head girl of St Paul’s Girls’ School, one of the country’s leading private schools, will be known as head of school after calls from pupils to make the role more inclusive.
Inclusive of what? They’re at a girls’ school. I suppose they could make it more inclusive by turning it into a factory, but then it wouldn’t be a school any more.
A better way to make such schools more inclusive is to offer more and more full-ride scholarships.
The school confirmed that the change would take effect from the next academic year, prompting outrage from some staff who claimed that it sent a “damaging message that girls now have to be ashamed to be seen as girls”.
Oops! Those members of staff are even now on the train to re-education camp.
“Why do the girls have to change their name?” a source said. “They should be teaching young women to be proud of their sex, not ashamed of it. It’s very contradictory. How can you be a single-sex school that exists to empower girls to do well and at the same time support girls to identify out of being a girl?”
Easy question. You can’t.
About seven out of 778 pupils at the school identify as non-binary, requesting that the school refer to them as they or them. “It’s a damaging message for the majority in order to protect the minority” Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the campaign group Transgender Trend, said. She claimed that the push for inclusivity had gone so far that “only male people can be girls or women without fear of offending anyone, apparently.”
Also the school had a gender training session in April.
The webinar — Beyond the Binary: Understanding How to Be Inclusive for All Gender Identities — was hosted in April by Helen Semple, the deputy head, in her capacity as founder of the Schools Inclusion Alliance, a group that aims to “put inclusion at the heart of every school”. It featured as guest speaker Emma Cusdin, founder of Global Butterflies, who spoke about her own transition from male to female. “The LGBTQI world is an amazing rainbow of positivity and labels. We love labels. We love terminology, we love flags, we love parties,” Cusdin told staff.
“Young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify. At the last count, we stopped counting at 150 gender identities that people are self-identifying. We did a little quiz in terms of what are the 150. I know about 30, in terms of what the definitions are. Don’t be afraid to ask, ‘That’s a new term to me. What does it mean to you?’ ”
Of course “young people are finding amazing ways to self-identify” – they’re self-obsessed. Adolescence does that to a person. But obsessing over one’s personality and idenniny and special specialness is not a reason for the world at large to change its understanding of sex every ten minutes.
According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 3,115 students in Britain identified as neither male nor female in 2019-2020, compared with 185 in 2013-2014.
But it’s not a fad. Not at all. No no.
If my gender is plaid, what does that make me? Other than a plaid otter?
Oh, goody.
Let’s be “inclusive” by excluding 771 of 778 pupils.
WTF is this “we love labels” BS? Girls don’t need personalized, special rainbow “labels” to be worthy of respect. Then again, girls get “labeled” all sorts of horrible, demeaning, sexist things all the time. ‘We” DON’T “love labels.” Also, “labels” are not substance. Substance matters a lot more than any cutesy “label.” And then, WTF is this school doing, taking advice about what is good for girls from a self-hating man, who likely hates women too? What a mess! And, 150 self-declared “gender identities”? What sort of bogus nonsense is that? “Gender identity” isn’t even a coherent concept. The deputy head would have served the girls far better by resigning, than by poisoning the girls against themselves and one another. Ludicrous.
@Iknklast #1
If my gender is plaid, what does that make me? Other than a plaid otter?
Welsh?
Then he lied. He did not change from male to female. Maybe he had surgery and took wrong-sex hormones; maybe no more than a change in wardrobe and the acquisition of some accessories. Still male, though.
Apart from everything else, “head of school” sounds like, you know, the boss. More important than deputy head, anyway.
150 gender identities, and each with its unique set of pronouns? Because of course the purpose of pronouns is to make you stop and flip through your (increasingly complex) mental rolodex to make sure you get them right every time.
Does anyone have knowledge of a group of MTF transitioners we could encourage to enrol at this school? I am thinking especially of those with deep voices and full beards. Probably around 35, but self-identified as thirteen.
lol
Oh, dear. I had the mixed fortune to be educated at the male version of this school (the school of Milton & Edward Thomas, who are two of my favourite poets, though certainly not because they were schoolfellows, so to speak), and did not enjoy my time there much. I wonder whether they will follow suit and call the head boy something else now? Or does this sort of thing apply only where girls are concerned?
James Croft was educated there too, if I remember correctly.
Just wait until 100% of the student body is male.
Have just looked up ‘James Croft’, whom I confess to never having heard of, and found one that fits the bill: a humanist now teaching at Harvard who seems to have gone to St Paul’s. In his time, from his account, the school seems to have been rather less religious than it was in mine. We had a sort of brief service every morning, to which you were required to go, unless you were Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist (there was one Thai boy there in my time). And you were expected to be confirmed in the faith, though I suppose you could have objected. But my parents, who were not greatly religious, thought that it was the done thing, and would improve my morals, as you might geld a cat. The chaplain, a totally humourless man called Hampton who liked beating boys, and I had loathed each other from our very first meeting after entry to the school. He provided some little booklets that consisted of Bible readings with infantile comments, which I refused to read after reading the first page of the first one. he interviewed all the boys prior to confirmation, and asked me whether I had been reading the booklets. I said, ‘I’m afraid not, sir. I found them very childish, but I have been reading ‘imitatio Christ’ by St Thomas a Kempis, instead.’ (I actually had been, a bit.) He was seething with rage, but could say nothing. We were confirmed in St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London, and in the process the burden of Christianity fell from my shoulders as did Christian’s burden in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (a book that I first read at the age of 8 or 9, and still admire for its prose and its story-telling qualities). I very soon stopped going to church at all after that, to the distress of the local rector, who was a good and kind man.
In any event, if trans-women consider themselves to actually be women, I fail to see what the objection would be to their being called ‘girls’.
“The New Pilgrims Progress” is more my speed…
Re #13
I suspect the main issue is girls who decide while they are at the school they are “actually” boys. There have been some “interesting” policies applied by women’s colleges and men’s clubs, who will admit only people who are of one sex (or declared “gender”), but allow them to stay if they change their minds.
#13, I think a lot of that is wrapped up in the non-binary. They don’t consider themselves girls or boys, but something special and different that no one quite understands. You could use girls and boys, I suppose, as long as you used the “correct” one to correspond with the fantasy of trans-identified students, but there is no way to use girl or boy without invalidating the special non-gender gender of the non-binary (who help reinforce the binary, because otherwise how would they be special? Unlike us boring ‘folx’ who are so comfortable with the stereotypes of our gender that we present in perfect harmony with what is expected?)
Tim @ 12 yes that’s the one I meant. I used to argue with him regularly, because he took a rather annoying line on the whole “is it ok to be an unapologetic atheist” question.
He’s not teaching at Harvard though, he’s outreach director at the Ethical Society of St. Louis. He has an EdD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was in his Harvard phase that I used to argue with him.
That’s so appropriative of you, Iknklast! We cisprivileged people don’t get to call ourselves “folx”! Only trans and genderspecial people are allowed to call themselves that. You can’t just appropriate someone else’s identity like that!
Ophelia#17 – Yes, the thing I did discover on the net was a sort of interview with him obviously from some time ago. After reading it, and coming across his ideas about humanism, which he seemed to regard as a sort of quasi-religion, I can quite see how he is eminently arguable with!
Yep! He’s basically a mensch though. I have a feeling I was a tad insistent about the arguing…
Before I knew who he was, I had some arguments with him on some “accommodation” adjacent topic on Facebook. I thought he was a decent guy, we just disagreed. This was probably nearly ten years ago.
Same here. I thought his buddy Chris Stedman was a good deal too censorious about the non-accommodationists, and exaggerated our sins for effect, but Croft didn’t play dirty.