Primary school scraps boys and girls-only races from its sports day because they exclude transgender children

[caperberries]

Is there a thread about this yet?

Link from the Daily Mail:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5794361/Primary-school-Inverness-scraps-boys-girls-races.html

Nobody would contemplate separate races for white children and black children, so why should there be separate races for boys and girls?

Exactly thebewilderness, this really is something that needs to be addressed with the adults first and foremost if girls are being disadvantaged. Because it isn't their biology that's disadvantaging them, it's their elders, sadly.

The programme a pp mentioned upthread was really good for this. It educated teachers in how they were inadvertently reinforcing gender stereotypes in their young students; and most of it truly was inadvertant. They were given ways to redress the effects of that and shown how to promote certain "boyish" skills and activities particularly with the girls.

I can completely imagine some useful guidance being issued to teachers involved in PE, sports coaches and volunteers which promoted a girl-centred approach, to equalise the accessibility and rewards of sport for girls in a young mixed-sex setting.

MrG there is absolutely NO reason why a boy should win over a girl in almost any primary age group, except as a result of social conditioning.

What needs to change here is the conditioning. Not the separation of the sexes.

And when do you decide puberty happens? At what point do you say, ok now we have to separate them? And then what?

The amount of people using a certain logic, that if carried through implies there should be no women's sport at all, to justify trans identified boys competing against girls is huge.

I think juniors is a good time to start. It's a natural transition anyway from one part of the school to another or even a different school.

Would catch the early onsetters too.

I agree giles
Apparently our local junior school have started saying they have a lower and upper school...that seems to be fair enough demarcation

Black women have asked repeatedly that transgender advocates not conflate them with transgender identified males.
They have gotten as much respect from the transgender advocates as the Intersex people who have made the same request, nay, demand.
I reported that post, GF. I hope they ban you.

What??

What did i miss??

All of our understanding of sport and athletics derives from male-created games and competition

Yep

I was saying this just the other day to my dad and husband....but then i got lost when they asked me what a woman based sport would look like and i pretty much only had shooting

Sorry, that was due to my lack of imagination and being told for years what 'sport' looks like

Not that there would not be any 'female' sport

materialist not got time to read the full study right now, but it would be interesting to know how/if they managed to isolate pure physical difference from social conditioning.

We've all heard the stereotypes about little boys liking to run around, be active and boisterous etc, whilst little girls enjoy calmer activities. Which inevitably will lead to the former being physically fitter/ stronger.

I bet if you studied a mixed group of dc who had escaped the stereotype the results would be different at that age. I'm thinking perhaps farm kids, pony clubbers where regardless of what other influences are in play both sexes do the same physical activity on a daily basis.

I haven't read the full thread but I'm torn between two positions.

I did mixed sex sports races at primary school and I was tge fastest in my year even on the last year, equivalent to Y6. It was most satisfying.

However, I support single sex PE and school sports from earlier ages. Research by organisations like Women in Sport, reveals that girls start to 'dropout' and lose their confidence in Years 3/4 due to the dominance of the boys, bias from teachers and parents etc...

I'd rather there was sex segregated PE and sport from Y3 but with some options for mixed sex competitions - inhouse- for those who want it.

Agree with the general point that sports were made by men for men to find out which men was best at the things men are good at.

There may well be areas where we would win but it's not been set up like that. Things around being lighter, smaller, nippier, core strength, stamina. I believe that ultra marathon has seen women win, and stuff like free climbing I think women are really getting ahead which makes sense. Clearly we're never going to beat men in weight lifting for example. But then - weight lifting is all about upper body - we have more strength elsewhere. And when you compare it not on end figures but on %body mass - so why is a woman lifting twice her body weight not seen as more impressive than a man lifting 1.5x his for example? This is because it's not how we view it - not because lifting more in numbers is objectively more impressive by every measure.

So for weight lifting if you mixed it but did it by % of body mass or something, maybe it would be closer? And had less focus (somehow) on arms not sure how that would work.

Anyway yes it's interesting as it's so hard to even imagine what sport would look like if it had been invented by women for women to compete in the things women are good at, all those millennia ago

Biathlon is a great example (sorry I am from the continent). In Germany female biathletes are generally more popular and famous than their male counterparts - because they are more successful.

One point to note is that with Biathlon, you don't actually notice that women go slower and for a shorter distance. That might play a role.

Sorry but i dont see how the response to boys beliitling girls in mixed sports ahould be to seperate them it should be to educate boys that such behaviour is not acceptable un sports or in adult life.

Perhaps if you have little experience of watching boys and girls play sport together and separately, you might not realise how different a picture each scenario looks.

I agree boys’ attitudes and conduct in sport needs challenging and changing, also to benefit other boys who do not act in the manner that has become acceptable in male sports. But such changes could and should be tackled within single-sex activity.

If you have daughters and you are keen for them to participate in sports, you go through many years viewing the system through a filter of girls’ experiences and it is dispiriting having to keep fighting to keep your DDs and their friends playing sports long into their teens. There are many issues, but one of them is that not enough girls start off playing sports, and girls’ early experience of mixed PE/sports puts them off.

Once in Secondary school, if you have DDs that you manage to keep playing a sport in or out of school, watching their games is an uplifting experience. They support each other, compliment each other (even their off-pitch enemies) engage with each other, comfort each other, swear rarely, lose graciously and display a strength and confidence in their bodies that you don’t see when they are surrounded by boys. Why not let the younger girls also have that all-female experience and let more of them learn to love playing a sport (not just those who have doggedly determined parents!)

I think much needs to change in primary school PE and since the addition of the sports premium there are examples of fantastic schools being innovative and engaging all of their children to help them become interested in physical activity. My DDs primary school was not one of those and instead gave control of PE to a boorish male sports coach educated to further education level, who favoured the already sporty and did very little for the keen but less able children of both sexes. However, for my keen but less able DD2, it was the sporty boys’ negative influence that did more damage than the sporty girls.

That's what I'm really hoping for ifonly

I've seen dd play cricket and the team really were supportive of eachother and encouraged eachother.

I'm truly hoping that come September she will thrive playing in an all girl pe session.

But part of me is worried if the damage has been done and there will be lots of girls who aren't interested or are standing around talking rather than playing....

Will find out soon enough I guess

Ifonlyus, absolutely agree. DD plays more sports outside school/to a higher level than most boys in her class. She's stubborn like that. If she wasn't, she'd have given up by now, like many of the girls in her class. They don't enjoy PE, and haven't for years, because they have been ridiculed, excluded and made to feel it's not worth trying. 'Girls can't play...'

This starts when they're little, e.g. my DD's primary school. It had 3 pitches. All 3 were used for football at playtime and lunchtime. Girls were not allowed to play (by the boys, even P1 & 2 age). If they tried to join in, the boys either shouted at them or just played around them.

I raised this with school on multiple occasions, suggested they could have 1 pitch for different sports (netball/basketball/volleyball), still leaving 2 pitches. School's answer was that if they did that, the boys who couldn't play football would then just be causing trouble in the main playground (where the girls mostly played peacably). Having most of the boys playing football on the pitches was easier for the school to manage.

I hate primary school sports day - but I have two kids who are not athletically gifted (DD1's a fantastic dancer and good at gymnastics, and DD2 is enthusiastic at karate - but neither's talents lie in running from one end of a field to another very quickly indeed) and for whom sports day is going to involve coming dead last in any race they're allowed to do. I think schools need to do a lot more with sports day in terms of finding roles for kids who struggle with it to be involved - even if it's as a helper, or marshall, or handing out stickers - in general to stop switching kids off sports. Poor DD1 ended the morning in tears in reception last year because of how far last she came.

In a way they'd done it well in terms of adding in "fun" races that were less adversarial - like space hopper races, dressing up race and beanbags on heads and the like... but then they'd picked all the "sporty" boys to do those races and the only race that ALL the kids were made to do/allowed to do was the straight running one at the end - the fast track to highlighting the weaker kids and turning them all off sports forever. I'm still pissed off about it now and how it affected DD1 - completely knocked her confidence totally and she went from being a kid who'd be involved in PE lessons to one who would be edging around the sidelines trying to avoid having a go.

Think the usual reason they do boy and girl races in infants tends to be as a quick and easy way of splitting the numbers participating roughly into two to be honest - 30 kids going at once would be chaos, roughly 15 is manageable.

I think school sport as a whole needs a real shakeup. As for the girls football thing - we campaigned for years to get football added at all to PE at our all girls' school to no avail - not a girls' sport apparently - despite a classmate playing for the local ladies team at a fairly high level. The boys in the Y4 class I tried to teach went through a brief period of trying the "girls can't play football" routine - unfortunately for them they tried it against a girl who was on the local premier team's development route whose response was along the lines of "you're just scared I'll beat you" - and she called them out on it... and absolutely decimated them on the pitch shutting them up completely (obviously the staff were coming down on the anti-girl nonsense as well)!

completely agree Bing
I took this up with dcs school (years ago now) and was told 'sports day is the only chance some children get to shine' which I appreciate, but no one is forced to take part in a maths competition in public with parents watching are they? when everyone can see just how crap at maths you are? I think they need a mix of fun activities that everyone can join in and some serious competetive stuff that sporty kids can opt into if they wish

They also didn't let the parents loose on the space hopper race either - which would have livened up the overly competitive mums and dads race no end!

materialist I can see the logic behind what you and others are saying, but before secondary age I just don't think it's practical. I bet at any small primary it would quickly become the boys sport viewed as the proper version and the girls viewed as the soft version. Which it absolutely will be, because those girls who are the physical match of the boys won't have the numbers to play at that level in 'boy' sports.

I don't feel comfortable with the message either. The idea of capitulating to boys not wanting the girls there, and reinforcing the idea they aren't equal really doesn't go down well.

Stem still has a long way to go, but we wouldn't be where we are if the original small handful of women had been sent off to do girly science because the boys at the top unis didn't like them at their lectures.

My view is that you have to infiltrate the area first in large numbers, then you can start splitting them up.

I do accept that if my dd had the negative experience of some here I wouldn't want to put that principle above her needs.

We had arguments when I was at school as to whether boys or girls were best at sport so we, the children, organised a 3 event competition.

The boys thrashed the girls at basketball. Hockey was closer but the boys edged it, but netball? Netball was a brilliant win for the girls. After that nobody was saying that boys were better at sport than girls.

I agree Thehog.

I really am sad to hear stories of discouraged girls; obviously it's a recognised issue that in their teenaged years girls are put off sport (when it's segregated anyway), but I have literally never heard the suggestion that girls are being put off at primary level to any widespread degree. All I can find on Google is about female teenagers being deterred; could it be that such anecdotes are actually fairly uncommon?

I remember primary school. I remember our sports lessons weren't split, but there is absolutely nothing I remember about any boys, not one single boy. Nothing about their conduct was remarkable or off-putting to me, or perhaps the teachers just minimised the impact. Or in extra-curricular sport.

I'm not that old; have things really changed so much? I do hope it's more a case of isolated incidents.