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

[Ekphrasis]

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09202lp

I heard PM in radio 4 discussing this research, it seems to hugely benefit girls in terms of their views on their own achievements and the achievements of women in general.

Will listen with interest.

What surprised me (as we have had this language banned in my place of work, with children) is that the teacher, pre experiment, called girls sweetie and petal, and boys buddy etc.

Absolutely JoNapot. I don't think anyone who conducted the research said we are now going to brain wash everyone the other way. A bit of looking for the bigger, wider picture in any capacity is going to be healthy.

I found my self ranting talking about starving children in Africa to my son Who decided his cereal was too soggy and wanted more, and then realised there's starving children in the U.K too. Check out my stereotyping!

It's never the research, it's the cack handed application of these bright ideas to a group.

This year I have been trying to unpick the sodding growth mindset bobbins that has been taught at school to my most susceptible child. In a bizarre twist it made him give up as he's "got the wrong mindset"..

Ok so all valid points taken on. I suppose perhaps I'm a bit disappointed that society is still a bit shit in simply accepting people no matter how you are raised or what you choose to wear. However, I will say that if men wore the type of skirts I wear they might have to be tucking all sorts away unless nudity is also an option with gender neutral
My dad was an engineer and it was compulsory that I understood things like how to run a car and fix it etc. Before I had a job that allowed me to never have to do it myself again, I was expected to change my tyres on my car. I remember spending hours replacing a front light in one of my cars in the freezing cold outside my parents house. I never felt a women could not do these things but I bloody love looking like a woman in a dress and would be so disappointed if that left society completely. Is the genuine gender neutral situation merely a cover for why can't everyone just mind their own business and get on with their own lives instead of judging others. I don't feel many men are damaged because they weren't allowed to wear a sparkly dress but why they were prevented does make no sense. My generation would never have been allowed to wear a tutu out as a man but then I never owned a princess dress either, perhaps mass produced cheap clothes has allowed this to be more in your face ie I'm pretty sure I own way more clothes for my dd than I ever had as a kid and the dress up costumes are everywhere including supermarkets so is just too easy to succumb to buying them so perhaps it's a new idea to be psychologically damaged by the clothes you wear instead of in the past when both genders would not have seen a princess/ballet costume unless they were more easily accessible?
There is also evidence that men and women's brains are wired differently at birth that naturally separates their future ability to learn certain subjects by gender. It doesn't mean you can't override how you were born but I went to one of the top art colleges in the uk and I can tell you now there's definitely (at least in every artistic experience I've had) a predisposed type of man that goes into the arts seriously. I had a whale of a time hanging out in gay clubs as a result despite being straight . Of course there were straight men there but by far the ratio of gay to straight was higher than I'd experienced anywhere else. All of them seemed happy to be gay and yet my generation would have stopped them wearing a dress as a 5yo. So I fail to see how gender neutral is going to make much of a difference other than to enforce a different set of rules. Ie girls should be careful about wearing dresses all the time. Parents should be careful not to put pink tutus on their daughter. Boys should own at least one dress or you've prevented them from wearing them.
Fwiw I wish men could wear makeup. I look positively rough without it and seeing lads have spots they can't cover when the girls are getting away with it left right and centre. If I was a bloke I'd be pushing for gender neutral just so I could go without looking like pizza for a few years at high school... but then I'll be told people shouldn't be wearing makeup blah blah. For every argument there's an argument.

It is one of the biggest thinking fails in the modern world to worry about the ability of the governments to brainwash us while happily allowing commercial companies to spend literally billions a year to do just that.

Why are their boys toys and girls toys? Because it makes money for toy companies.

Why are their boys baby grows and girls baby grows? Because it makes money for clothes companies.

Why are girls bombarded with unattainable images of beauty, dropping their self esteem and body image into the pits? Because it makes money for the cosmetics industry.

There is a HUGE amount of brainwashing to be found in modern life. Making all the books in a school gender neutral is a part of the solution, not the problem.

Morphene, that's a massive point imo.

I think the most useful thing to teach in school would be a broad warning against advertising.

I have noticed it's a huge part of any "accumulated wisdom" I am trying to pass on to my kids, whether the subject matter is what we eat and wear, how we spend our leisure, how we run our finances.

I am literally ecstatic that the ASA has widened its remit to include reducing stereotyping in advertising.

I almost have hope that this in conjunction with rolling out some serious additional teacher training in the area plus additional anti-racism anti sexism monitoring by ofsted might actually start to fix this systemic problem.

snerf I agree with many points- I think it's actually easier to be a girl doing boy things than a boy doing girl things.

Funnily enough I went to a top uk art school and actually found all the blokes were very normal, masculine types! I only remember one slightly camp guy. They all loved dressing up though, as we all did!

I don't think anyone on here is claiming that the average adult woman has as much physical strength (especially upper body) as the average adult man.

What I and many others object to is the way young children are indoctrinated to believe that young girls should be pretty, quiet, passive and modest, whilst young boys should be confident, competitive, "manly", and "strong". This has very real, very serious negative effects on BOTH sexes.

From a young age, boys and girls are very good at spotting who is a boy and who is a girl (from my experience with toddler dc anyway). It is entirely natural for my 3yo dd to identify with the female characters of a tv show/book more than the male characters, and this is not in itself a bad thing. However, it becomes problematic if all these female characters are passive and pretty, because she is going to absorb the message that all girls should be passive and pretty, and therefore (seeing as those female characters are the ones she is most likely to emulate) assume that she should be passive and pretty. Yeah, you will always (no matter how rigid the society) get a few individuals with personalities so strong that they can smash through any mould. But why make it so difficult for children to be who they really are? What is to be gained by limiting our children from such an early age?

Have you watched the program @Thephoneywar?

morphene, that was the over riding thing I got from 'the Affluenza virus' book. The way we are in the hands of the advertisers, for pretty much everything. They're the ones brainwashing us.

Being a teacher gender free loos for students would be a disaster. In my limited experience the loos are often used by girls as a safe place from boys particularly by shy girls.

re physical strength - bit tangential, but does anyone feel like the expectations of what weights etc women can manage often depends on what the heavy thing is, rather than how much it weighs?

Eg, when working in an environment where I would sometimes have to lug moderately heavy bits of metal up and down stairs, I would often get told that I shouldn't be doing that as it was too heavy for me. Now, I am not particularly strong (probably slightly below the average upper arm strength of women in general) and I know it is potentially dangerous to push yourself beyond your limits in this type of situation. But what I was carrying typically weighed less than a few plastic bags of groceries. Yet no one would suggest that women are too weak to do the shopping, because that's women's work, isn't it?
When I was pregnant, someone tried to stop me carrying a fairly small box of papers, yet no-one would stop a pregnant woman picking up her (much heavier) toddler.

I've watched half the programme with DS. As predicted, it's already gone on pause 15 times to dissect each and every point.

One of the points was the endearments that the teacher uses towards the children. Whilst we have agreed that the terms used are gendered, this agreement was only reached when the word sweetpea being applied to the boys, had them recoiling in horror. Neatly demonstrating that the connotations attached to words used for girls are far from neutral.

Girls may well feel the same about boys' endearments, like buddy, mate. But I don't think they would be as horrified. Just puzzled.

On the other hand, I think it's a shame that we can't use endearments. I can't really think of any that are comprehensibly neutral.

I could use love for both boys and girls, but a man couldn't.

No, I don't think there should really be biological sex free loos. Saying 'gender free loo' confuses the sex and gender thing again. We do need to acknowledge a difference between the sexes. Some girls start their periods at primary school.

datun, at my place of work we did say sweetie and darling for all (the women at least did) but we were given strict guidelines not to in a big language overhaul that included other things. And really I do think it was right. I think it was getting away from infantilising the children when we are trying to get them to be independent learners.

I call ds sweetie and darling mind you!

Ekphrasis

Ugh. I just took a look at those Twitter comments.

To be honest, I don't blame a lot of people. They see this all tied up with the 57 genders and the trans ideology and think it's all the same.

Personally, if I had my way, I would introduce a rule where every single parent-to-be had to spend a month on the mumsnet feminism boards.

Yes I use endearments all the time. But they're not gender neutral. And although some people say it's harmless, the boys' horror at being called the wrong one, shows it isn't.

But it's annoying me, that I can't think of one that both men and women can use towards both males and females.

squishysquirmy

Exactly. It's amazing how I can carry four desperately heavy shopping bags in each hand, with the plastic handles cutting into my skin. But get concerned offers of help if I'm carrying an aluminium ladder up the stairs to get into the loft!

@snef, you said "There is also evidence that men and women's brains are wired differently at birth that naturally separates their future ability to learn certain subjects by gender." That's not true, at all. Tell me what subjects my two children will struggle to learn, please, based on the fact that they are both boys?

thephoneywar

No one is disputing that there are differences and that women can physically do everything men can do. No idea where you get this from.

The point is that these differences do not per se mean that we should stereotype children into playing with certain toys, into liking certain things, into telling them they can't do something just because of their gender or expecting them to do something because of it.

Maybe it was just a funny coincidence but I have a female colleague who I was just talking to over lunch about what we played with as children. She randomly mentioned that her dad was an engineer and gave her all sorts of things normally reserved for boys, he even made a clock for her as a very little girl showing how a clock works (an idea called modulus in mathematics which can be very useful) and now she has an MSc in maths and works in a male dominated field.

You are right, telling children they are the same is wrong. But telling them that because of that they have to live up to certain stereotypes is equally wrong. I truly wonder how different it would be if girls were generally playing more with boys' toys.

A lot of complaints about sexism in primary schools are how feminised they are. How they are designed to favour girls over boys (majority female teachers, prioritise sitting still and working quietly over physical boisterousness) and that this leads inexorably to girls achieving better results than boys. Exactly.

There is also evidence that men and women's brains are wired differently at birth that naturally separates their future ability to learn certain subjects by gender

No sorry there isn't, there are a few dodgy reports that have been pulled apart in peer reviews. There is also a thread somewhere on here discussing the brain activity reports in-depth.

Also a scientist in Brazil(I think) is collecting and reviewing all new data on this, particularly the way they are summarised (so the bit that most people use for articles). The Scientist BTW is a transwoman who would be very happy to finally find actual evidence of male and female brains being wired differently from birth.

From reading some of her stuff and the the thread I mentioned above, there is no difference in male and female brains at birth, but it can start to show some differences by 18 months - 2 years. But as many psychology experiments over the years have shown, we do treat the sexes differently from Birth. So nurture?

It's what the programme was trying to address, with the whole voleteers with babies. So many unconsciously gave the boys spacial awareness toys and girls fluffy pink toys and dolls.

If you don't think much to his experiment, you could look up the original experiments done years ago. He was only recreating them.

I never used 'endearments' in the classroom to any child. I'm actually shocked at 'sweet pea'.

Absolutely but,

I truly wonder how different it would be if girls were generally playing more with boys' toys. - and vice versa.

There is also evidence that men and women's brains are wired differently at birth that naturally separates their future ability to learn certain subjects by gender

My dad used to call.me "sausage" - that's fairly gender neutral?

I call my DS and DD sausage, but now I'm wondering whether the phallic shape of a sausage means it's more suited to boys.