Braverman says some schools are encouraging gender dysphoria by an “unquestioning approach”.

Difficult. Because accepting Trans dress in a classroom means accepting any and all expressions of it, including paraphilia. It would be interesting if there was a study on this. The internet says AGP can't be cured and is nothing to be ashamed of...hmmm that sounds suspect.

I'd hate to be a law maker on this in a school.

Fetishising them would go out the window pretty quickly

I disagree, I don't want my teenage daughter sharing a classroom with someone dressed like this paraphiliac

Stella Creasey's bunion here. I just want to say I have XX chromosomes. But Stella doesn't care , she just walks all over me.

I think boys might find skirts get very boring if they have to look tidy, tuck their shirt in and sit through a day of classes like everyone else. Fetishising them would go out the window pretty quickly and you’d be at people wearing clothes like they should and moaning about maths next period. I have a male relative who wears skirts sometimes. He just looks like he’s wearing clothes, and that’s how everyone treats him.

I don’t think it’s derailing as it simplifies the arguments - no one should waste time on arguing the gender of school uniform items, they should squarely focus on safety and fairness (eg the schools girls cross country record)

That's actually very incorrect 🤷🏻‍♀️

If you check any hot weather cultures you'll see men wearing dresses and skirts 😉 it's a very good piece of clothing to keep fresh in the heat. It's just our culture that has made trousers male and skirts female. And it's very stupid. You can totally have feminine trousers and masculine skirts. Don't forget that women have battled for a very long time to be able to wear trousers.

My apologies OP - I gather I've managed to derail your thread by taking it in a direction that was unexpected and unintended, and possibly unhelpful. I just wanted to say that I really wasn't being disingenuous, and I honestly had no idea that raising the issue of gender neutral uniform was as controversial as it appears to be.

I've lived in the UK and indeed worked at a school in London, and I (perhaps erroneously) concluded that the Aus and UK schools were similar enough that I could comment. But that was a while ago now, and there are evidently other cultural issues or nuances that I'm not understanding.

I'd be quite interested in exploring those differences further at some time but this is obviously not the right thread for that, so I'll bow out now. Thanks all for the interesting discussion

Very good point actually @Peregrina

It also just seems to me to be an obvious tool to employ in guarding against social transition at schools. If the uniform isn't segregated, then noone is wearing the uniform of the opposite sex, they're just wearing the uniform they chose to put on that morning. It seems to me that it could take the heat out of that issue, so time and resources can be used to deal with the more fundamental things, like maintaining single sex spaces and sports etc.

And so for me, the obvious thing is to remove any need for an argument about it by removing the limitation on who can wear skirts.

The last wedding I went to the groom was in a kilt.

I think normalising men in skirts/kilts/equivalent is the only way to remove the fetishisation aspect, because skirts are then no longer taboo/girly/etc

But as I said, I've spent some of my adult life in the UK but the bulk in Aus, so perhaps am really missing something

Gah sorry fat fingers

My older child's school has skirts, ostensibly for girls, but some of the boys wear them occasionally because I think the school has decided that isn't a battle that's worth fighting.

I really don't know. That's what I mean - I really might be being terribly naive and missing something. My youngest child's school has a gender neutral uniform - no skirts at all, just shorts and trousers. But that's a junior school. My older child's school has skirts for girks,

Do you not have schoolgirl porn in Australia @Bundlephobia?

👏

There's some people being incredibly naive here.

I don't imagine anyone here would say that boys shouldn't be allowed to have long hair, or wear pink t-shirts on the weekends. Or that girls shouldn't wear a bomber jacket or cut their hair short.

What is different about skirts and/or school uniforms that means they should stay segregated? I'm asking quite genuinely, as it honestly never occurred to me that anyone on here would want to maintain sex segregation for clothing. I grew up in Aus and attended school there, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something.

Of course that's the world we live in at the moment. The point is to try to change that.

And no of course there is nothing inherently female about skirts. But we are talking about British school children.

Let's not pretend we don't live in a world where schoolgirl clothing is fetishised shall we?

If you don't think teenage boys will do that, you haven't seen the videos of Lila Perry

Sorry my first line was in response to @Clymene 's statement that skirts are girls' clothing. Typed too slow so others posted first!

In which culture? All of them? No.

There is absolutely nothing fundamental to skirts that means they are appropriate for females only. Maintaining that absurd fiction contributes to maintaining gender stereotypes, which contribute to an environment where school-girl-in-uniform can be a cross-dressing fetish. Why on earth would we not want to try to expand EVERYBODY'S clothing options rather than maintaining sex or gender 'rules' for clothing?

If I wear my partner's joggers it's fine. Is it fine if he wears mine? Why not? What if it's a swimming robe? What about if it's a kilt? Or a dhoti, or boubou? Where do you draw the line and it becomes not ok?

The alternative, which I support, is to have a uniform that covers a range of clothing styles, which anyone can wear. Eg, the school uniform choice for bottoms could be either a kilt or trousers. For anyone. A boy in a kilt is not a boy in a 'girl' uniform, and a girl in trousers is not a girl in a 'boy' uniform. They are just kids in the school uniform, and irrespective of who chooses to identify as what, there is no uniform issue to deal with.

This thing is, you know what teenage school kids are like with their uniform, a boy wearing a kilt will adjust the length so he ends up looking like Britney Spears in the Hit Me Baby One More Time video.

It's a hard no from me.

@Bundlephobia has it - you have all the usual uniform options without assigning a gender to it. If the boys parents want to buy them a uniform skirt that’s fine as long as every one wears the uniform with suitable respect. Not sure many parents will be supporting buying their boys a skirt ie extra uniform items if the boys want it just to take the piss, that stuff isn’t cheap.

I don't think you can have unisex school uniform. Like it or not, skirts are girls clothing.

Bullying, and weaponising pronouns, is an entirely different issue to the school uniform. Removing the school uniform issue from the equation (by having a standard set of uniform choices for all) would mean less energy has be spent on dealing with the uniform question, and more energy can be focussed on dealing with the bullying issues.

That's really not what we're saying @Bootsytree

What I mean, and I think what @Ponderingwindow means, is there shouldn't be a 'girl' uniform and a 'boy' unform. The school uniform should not be segregated by sex OR gender.

It should not be 'boys wear trousers' and 'girls wear skirts'. Having that sort of rule is the only reason we are having arguments about whether trans-identifying children can or should wear a 'boy' uniform or a 'girl' uniform.

The alternative, which I support, is to have a uniform that covers a range of clothing styles, which anyone can wear. Eg, the school uniform choice for bottoms could be either a kilt or trousers. For anyone. A boy in a kilt is not a boy in a 'girl' uniform, and a girl in trousers is not a girl in a 'boy' uniform. They are just kids in the school uniform, and irrespective of who chooses to identify as what, there is no uniform issue to deal with.

Have we been invaded by TRA's overnight?

I can't believe there are posters encouraging teenage boys to display their paraphilic disorders in front of girls at school.