No more girls and boys; can our children go gender free? BBC 2 tonight

It is true after puberty that boys have increased upper body strength. But teenage girls and women can be strong too. Some of my family were brought up in farms, and the girls did heavy work as well. They were very strong, because they were using and building up their muscles. I was not very strong as I was not doing this.

Sorry for the outpouring!

That programme is incredibly revealing.

We talk about socialisation all the time. About the way it works, and the effect it has.

But actually seeing it in action, seeing the multiple layers settle and solidify is like having a glimpse back in time to the current lives of most women.

There is an overwhelming feeling of wanting to jump up and down and say stop! Stop now.

Hopefully, this recognition of enforced gender roles will get more widely acknowledged.

So many families are hitting the news now saying they think their child has been born in the wrong body because they like to play with toys of the opposite sex.

This programme, irrefutably, makes a complete mockery of that stance.

When I watched it I couldn't help thinking that this is the way that the well-known 'imposter syndrome' is born in women - you know that reaction in women who are doing really well in life/jobs etc. wondering how they managed to achieve X or Y, rationalising it as a fluke or luck or something other than their talents.

The crushing empathy we feel for those girls shows how just how barely under the surface this all is.

Thanks Datun. I've always struggled with the "strength" thing because even though up until puberty there is no difference, after there is a huge difference so it all felt pointless to even try.

My brother was a bit older than me so the two things combined made it seem doubly pointless. I became a very consciously uncompetitive person, self-deprecating, putting myself down before my brother or anyone else could. And that is what I suspect the girls here are doing.

But I guess I was buying into the hierarchical/masculine idea that being the best is the be-all and end all when really it should be about being the best you can be yourself because physical strength brings benefits beyond just winning.

Sorry for the outpouring!

I feel a bit of an idiot but it actually made me cry. It's weird that it could still have an effect on me but possibly it's because inside I still believe those things.

I don't think you're alone in that reaction IfyouseeRitaMoreno.

Several women have said the same.

The crushing empathy we feel for those girls shows how just how barely under the surface this all is.

I hope the programme gets the publicity it deserves. Future possibilities should not be a light that flickers and dies in a girl before she is even eight.

Boys too, obviously, but in a different way.

Watching this it feels like my childhood. All the excuses, the "oh it's not important why are you making a fuss?"

And the lack of confidence, the feeling that no matter how good you are, or hard you work you'll never be as strong or as logical as a boy.

I feel a bit of an idiot but it actually made me cry. It's weird that it could still have an effect on me but possibly it's because inside I still believe those things.

I watched the programme on iPlayer and have only just got to the end of the whole thread.

I really enjoyed the programme, and was impressed at how grahamandre really took the notes about his language on board with an attitude of noticing the problem and trying to fix it, and showing the children that adults can make mistakes and still have lots to learn - which was often missing from my own education - I expect most people would react more defensively and shrug off the problem with a 'haven't we got more important things to worry about'.

In my school in the 90s we had boys who stacked chairs, and girls who looked after the infant classes at lunchtime. I pestered to do chairs because it annoyed me so much, even though I thought being with the infants in the playground was a lot more fun. I watched with DH and he said that when he was little he thought doctors were men and nurses were women because they always were in picture books, and that when he was doing imaginative play with his lego, he often felt like he shouldn't really be doing it.

Hi Mr Andre! You seem like a really nice teacher and your pupils love you. Yes well done for volunteering to be filmed. It's a brave thing to do as you don't know how you're going to be portrayed when they edit hours and hours of film.

One question I have is an unusual one for me. I am usually interested in feminism for what it can do for girls. But in the programme what struck me most was the benefits that challenging patriarchal ideas may have for boys. I felt really sorry for the boy who just expected to score top in the strength test then had no words or emotions to cope with losing just misery and rage. Do you think the experiment helped the boys (and helped you to help them) to not be so pressured to be so mucho macho all the time? And also not to despise "girl things" (I'm thinking of the bit where they all ran off mock vomiting at the word sweetpea). I know it's much more accepted for girls to wear blue and play football - to have "male" aspirations- than boys to wear pink and do sewing. Because they are "girl things" and still a little bit despised and not aspirational.

I found that programme quite upsetting, how we've gone backwards in terms of sexual stereotypes.

When i was a kid, everyone knew there was no real difference between girls and boys until puberty. We didn't expect boys to be stronger than us or better at maths and I went to a catholic school run by nuns, so possibly some of the most conservative people on earth - yet the sex stereotypes being so assiduously promoted by the media now, seem to have really been absorbed by kids who are being educated by clearly more liberal decent people than some of the loons who were in charge of my primary education. So they must be getting them from the wider society, family, media, etc.

I nearly cried when Lexi cried about how well she'd done on the strength test, that realisation that she was better than she'd thought, that she'd been labouring under the idea that she was no good overwhelming her - it's awful that we are doing this to our girls.

And to Riley too - inculcating him with such fear of not measuring up to masculinity, that he goes into meltdown when he's publicly seen to be not "manning up" enough. It's bloody heartbreaking, the damage we are doing to boys like him and the damage they go on to do to women, as fearful men so invested in their toxic masculinity that they're unable to acknowledge or feel half their emotions.

I just hope there's some kind of long term change agenda coming out of this and it's not just a flash in the pan.

grahamandre

Thanks for participating. Several people have mentioned the transgender ideology in relation to your programme.

What you are doing, I believe, lifts the limits from boys and girls. But the trans ideology imposes limits
I.e., because a boy likes girls' things, he must be a girl. Instead of a boy who likes girls things.

Are you aware of this push to reinforce gender stereotypes? Do you get the difference?

I watched the programme with my son, who is 19. We both agreed that you seem incredibly invested in your pupils. And extremely fond of them!

As I've lazily skipped to the end, can anyone tell me if anyone mentioned this programme

Yes - just a shame there wasn't much discussion about it on a forum of teachers..

You might like to look at the TES forums. Some interesting discussion there.

community.tes.com/threads/why-is-there-this-obsession-to-gender-neutralise-everything.762351/

huge kudos to you for taking part

Oh yes - I would hate to be filmed teaching for anything.But it does make you reflect on your practise.

Especially the questioning issue. Who you ask, who answers, who doesn't answer etc etc.

I think it's easy not to notice your own ingrained behavior. I work in a context in which people write about gender all the time, so you would think they would be very aware, but I've noticed that in seminars, it's still the older males that dominate discussion and often younger females don't get to ask their questions.

When friends children call over, easy to say to the girls 'oh, what a pretty dress you have on' or 'your hair is cute like that' as something to say, rarely say that type of things to the boys.

What I'm trying to say is that it's easy to see gender-ingrained behaviour in others, very hard to totally extinguish it in yourself, even with awareness training/consciousness.

Unfortunately these are not things taught to us when going through teacher training and I think should be

I'm surprised. It was on my PGCE 17 years ago.

But yes - I hope that this does raise awareness. Unfortunately, society is still very much like this and I have no doubt that parental and societal influences will be featured next week

Indeed it has, despite my age (45) I have only been teaching for 5 years (I was a teaching assistant and nanny before this) and am constantly learning new things. Unfortunately these are not things taught to us when going through teacher training and I think should be.

Well, I hope it's opened your eyes to other issues in your class - such as messages that other pupils receive - BME pupils, disabled pupils, LGBT pupils etc.

I have worked in diverse schools and teachers there definitely look at the curriculum and the messages given out through the curriculum - hidden and "open".

Hi Orlantina I was aware and as a school we do a lot about promoting a growth mindset and an 'I can do' attitude but we just weren't gender specific enough with our messages. We were also unaware of how ingrained the views of the children with regards to their own abilities, confidence and future prospects were.