The Equal Classroom

Life-Changing Thinking About Gender

Lucy Rycroft-Smith, Graham Andre, Lucy Rycroft-Smith, Graham Andre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138491021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351033923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How much thinking have you done about gender?

What does it feel like to be gay, trans or non-binary at school?

How unbiased, safe and inclusive are our teachers, our schools and our systems, and what can we do about it?

The time is ripe for a re-think, and the issues are pressing. Our pupils are grappling with challenges around gender and sexuality, and they need our well-informed support. Providing evidence, prompts and the space to explore the implications, restrictions and constructs of gender, this book is here to help every teacher reflect on issues around gender roles and expectations in their class.

In this challenging and potent book, experts, academics and campaigners join forces to contribute important perspectives to complement Rycroft-Smith's own accessible and often provocative explanations of many facets of gender and sexuality, including media, literature, toys, clothing, sexism, expectations, sexuality, gender roles, harassment and consent. Humour and anecdotes are thoughtfully intertwined with fascinating insights into biological and cultural perspectives and societal norms, highlighting why it's so vital to teach pupils about gender issues, as well as modelling consent, good quality relationships and tolerance to children at all ages and stages of their school career.

Providing clear, practical policy recommendations in an accessible and engaging way, The Equal Classroom is an essential read for any teacher or education professional who wants to ensure their school is a place where all pupils feel truly welcome and able to flourish, comfortable and safe in their emerging identities.

Car and beer or car AND beer – penis-fencing – men behaving badly – slaying – rudely placed – get out of my garden – gender as a shell game – AC/DC – girls line up first – masculinity needs realigning – gender category maintenance – is it relevant? – gender-free nephews – wearing a ‘man's’ suit - turban and heels – vegans have a bad name – lightfooting around – heteroyawn – what's in their pants – they acted dumb

Stats

A quarter of all secondary school teachers say they witness gender stereotyping and discrimination in their school on a daily basis, and a further quarter say they witness it on a weekly basis.¹

For their profiles, Facebook users at one time were able to choose from more than 50 terms for their gender, including transgender, cisgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer and agender (there is now, at time of writing, a free text box available to suit the user).²

The issues

I'm in that most god-awful of places, the greeting card shop. I'm with my daughter, choosing a card for a male loved one. We look around. Our options are:

• – Humour about boobs
• – Sexist joke
• – Picture of car or beer, or car AND beer
• – Picture of golf or football

She turns to me, rolling her eyes. This male loved one is a board games enthusiast, a gentle lover of cats, a quick-witted humourist who wouldn't dream of making a cheap sexist joke. The only sports he follows are broadcast on Twitch streams. He doesn't fit the small range of boxes we have in front of us. In fact, that's one reason we like him. We grin at each other and go home to make a card of our own.

In Dr. Adam Rutherford's The Book of Humans, they talk about a tremendous variety of sexual behaviours seen in the male of various species in nature – male child-rearing while females swan about wearing flamboyant ornamentation (pipe-fish); penis-fencing to find out who will become the egg-bearer (flatworms); hermaphroditism, wherein, without a female, the male's testes shrink down and the organism grows ovaries (clownfish); vigorous fellatio between males (bears). They also describe the way that men of the Marind-Anim people in New Guinea enjoy anal copulation with other men, believing that semen has magical properties that increase their masculinity.³ They conclude that, despite popular and narrow discourses, especially revolving around what is ‘natural’ and what decidedly isn't, there are many ways to ‘be’ male.

Grayson Perry, in their excellent book The Descent of Man, is worried that these stories we tell about being male are too boring, too narrow, too confining and that they are killing men, quite literally. They call masculinity ‘the lumbering beast within me which I have had to suppress and negotiate with my whole life’. What we need, they say, are more examples of men doing more different things than just ‘pulling’ women (ugh), driving cars and climbing mountains (with perhaps the occasional round of golf for a rest).⁴ I heartily agree. In nature, we see a tremendous range of behaviours, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, displayed by males, and our tired contemporary stories about what men do and like as humans often just don't reflect reality. Plenty of people, when questioned, rely on an argument that suggests certain behaviours are ‘natural’ for males and females, which very much falls apart under scrutiny. Yuval Noah Harari explains it well: ‘Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural …. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise’.⁵

I remember as a teenager and young adult watching the sitcom Men Behaving Badly – a pastiche of lager-drinking, female-chasing, messy, lazy chaps having an incompetently fun time – and thinking ‘is this all there is?’ That, for me wasn't ‘behaving badly’. It was exactly what I expected. I wanted to see men wearing outrageous evening gowns in the supermarket, learning to be experts at medieval tapestry, taking their children to see anti-religious musicals, splashing extravagant cash on luxury stair carpets, proclaiming the pointlessness of football through comic song, hand-rearing baby lambs … breaking the rules of masculinity. (Now there's a sitcom I'd watch.) Had the series RuPaul's Drag Race been around when I was young, I would have eagerly lapped it up, because it expertly does this with humour and flair – considers and dismantles ideas about masculinity that restrict and harm men. The point is not just to be fabulous, but to be actively proud of the new identities you have created and owned, to feel your oats, to be dusted, to let them have it the house down. You slay – metaphorically scything through the rules and restrictions about identity that actively work against your happiness. You show people new ways to be. You change history to herstory as well. It's a show that has totally challenged my thinking on masculinity and femininity.

This is not just for men, of course. This is for everyone.

What does it mean to be male? What does it mean to be female?

Can you conceive of an identity that is both or neither?

‘There is no real “‘essence” of gender, rather, it is the various acts of gender which perpetuate the notion of gender: without the acts there would be no gender …. The categories “male”/“female” are illusory constructions’.⁶

You might be happy with the gender identity boundaries present in our society – seeing them as guidelines only – or they might happen to fit your preferences. Congratulations! I am happy for you and respect your choices. But what about those that ‘fail’ to fit?

Picture this: One morning, you wake up to a commotion. It's early. You're confused. People seem to be walking through your garden – hordes of people, wandering through, looking through your windows and throwing rubbish in your garden and picking raspberries off your bushes. They harvest your crops and pluck your flowers and picnic on your lawn. What has happened?

If you are someone who is challenging a boundary, you almost certainly are regarded as aggressive and confrontational. But what if your very existence is challenging that boundary and what if that boundary has been rudely placed right through your home? What would you do? Would you up and leave?

Of course not! You stay. You defend. You stand up and challenge. ‘Please walk around my house, not through it’, you say. You put up signs. You file lawsuits, prepare paperwork and keep going until something happens.

‘That X is so angry’, hisses everyone under their breath. ‘Of course I am!’ you think, indignantly.

Welcome to challenging gender boundaries 101.

‘Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man isn't. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there’,⁷ says Naomi Alderman in her dystopian feminist story The Power. Women are so often defined as not-men; more rarely, the reverse also happens.

In our world, gender is defined by alternative, complementary, yin and yang, AC/DC. We continue to see man/woman binaries all over the place, despite good evidence that they are not reflective of real life. How can we crack that misconception open so that tall or fat or strong or hairy women, and blonde or curvy or short or delicate men, feel okay too?

What's this got to do with schools?

‘Schools are uniquely poised to open the minds of students of all ages about gender diversity. Instead of reinforcing accepted cultural training of gender, schools can teach children to think for themselves about gender’.⁸ So schools and, of course, the people within them (because ‘schools’ are nothing but collections of people doing work together) have an important choice to make: be part of the solution or part of the problem.

Gender stereotyping in schools reinforces particular ideas about what is expected and acceptable behaviour from women and men, such as that women are weak and emotional, while men are strong and brave. ‘A significant portion of teachers report that sexism is an everyday occurrence in the classroom, and that small, seemingly insignificant events together create an environment in which pupils of both sexes come to see each other as different’.⁹

In the BBC TV series No More Boys and Girls that featured teacher Graham Andre's classroom, Dr. Javid begins by stating, ‘children as young as seven think that boys and girls are fundamentally different’. One of the pupils says, ‘men are better at being in charge’; another says that ‘men are more successful’. Girls are ‘pretty’. The series follows a class of 7-year-olds through a project to make their class more gender-neutral, with the desired effect of supporting young people to become adults with more developed ideas about equality and the better opportunities that could bring them. In case you missed it, this isn't a small thing. ‘Every child deserves the same opportunities in life’, he says. ‘But unless we stop treating our boys and girls differently, that isn't going to happen’.¹⁰

‘Hasn't society got bigger problems?’ some might ask at this point.

Examining masculinity can seem like a luxury problem, a pastime for the wealthy, well-educated, peaceful society, but I would argue the opposite: the poorer, the more undeveloped, the more uneducated a society is, the more masculinity needs realigning with the modern world, because masculinity is probably holding back that society. (Perry in The Descent of Man ¹¹)

So where the heck do we start?

What needs to change

In schools, we do work of ‘gender category maintenance’¹² from the very start. Ask children at various ages to count or spell, and they will reply with varying degrees of competence; ask them to classify their own gender, and they will most likely ace that test. The gender binary is so simple and straightforward that even a young child can understand it. That's its strength, right? Neat, easy, simple. I have seen a variety of practices in schools, from unthinking gender stereotyping about dressing up (boys, here are some lovely fireman's outfits; girls, we have fairy wings for you) to the almost daily practice of splitting up boys and girls into groups (th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Gender identities: social and cultural
• 2 Expert view: teaching gender
• 3 Gender identities: brains and biology
• 4 Expert view: gender from an early age
• 5 Gendered expectations
• 6 Toys
• 7 Expert view: let toys be toys
• 8 Sexism and sexual harassment
• 9 Clothing and uniform
• 10 Expert view: gendered clothing
• 11 Language and the media
• 12 Trans people, trans issues
• 13 Expert view: trans pupils and the early years
• 14 Sexuality and sexualities
• 15 Relationships and PSHE education
• 16 Sports and physical education
• 17 Sex, touch and consent
• 18 Books, games and literature
• 19 Expert view: gender in classroom texts
• 20 Conclusion
• Index