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

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.

Oh bum, multi-post.

Jesus H .... do people not know about real issues.

We had a questionnaire about how we felt regarding competition at sports day. Life is tough in the real world.

It seems there are, at the moment, only two possible solutions being offered by schools' policies in order to remain inclusive to children who identify as transgender when participating in competive sports:

1. No descrimination by sex, all children compete against each other.
2. Children are able to compete against the opposite sex if they identify as transgender.

In this situation, I think it is fairly clear (broadly speaking) that boys will likely be unaffected. Children who identify as transgender will be affirmed. Girls will be most likely to be affected.

The article below focusses on the stories of two young people, Mack and Andraya.
(extract)
"Mack. In three weeks, he'll defend his 6A 110-pound girls' wrestling state title. Mack, 19, is a transgender boy who wrestles girls because the Texas high school athletic association, the University Interscholastic League (UIL), determines gender strictly by birth certificate, a policy approved in 2016 by 586 of 620 superintendents. Mack's certificate reads "female."

The Texas policy contrasts Connecticut's, which allows transgender kids like Andraya Yearwood to compete with whom they identify. Andraya, 16, is a transgender girl who won the 2017 Class M outdoor state titles in the 100 and 200 meters as a freshman. As Mack preps for his tourney, Andraya also prepares for another title run, in indoor track. The two will compete the same weekend, 1,680 miles apart.

Mack, Andraya and transgender athletes like them are focal points in a fight over the future of sports. In events designed to be binary, how does a school, league or governing body deal with athletes who don't neatly check one of the boxes? All transgender athletes face barriers controversies over bathrooms and locker rooms, adoption of non-inclusive policies, overwhelming social pressures but they differ depending on the state where they live.

The debate is dominated by fear -- of the unknown, of the misunderstood, of shifting public opinion. Parents fear that Andraya and Mack, who is undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), have unfair advantages. Administrators fear that having athletes identify their own gender creates an entanglement of rules. Legislators fear that this distorts the very essence of sport."

www.espn.com/espnw/feature/23592317/how-two-transgender-athletes-fighting-compete-sports-love

They are very moving and compelling individual stories.

In both cases though the girls competing against both young people are affected.

Mack (who wishes to compete in male competitions) has been taking medication which in any other context would be seen as performance enhancing.
Andraya has the advantages of being physically male and in other contexts would not be eligible to compete against girls.

I'm torn to be honest due to different experiences depending on the sport. My DD does Brazilian Jujitsu and up until around 10 they often fight in mixed categories. It's based on weight so by default is fairly even. She steps on the mats and you can see her male opponents looking at this tiny little blonde girl and thinking it's going to be easy.. till she kicks their butts. Her club is so inclusive though and they celebrate openly their female members. Most of the boys on her own club have developed a very healthy respect for her because of this ethos.

She also plays rugby in a mixed team. She's one of only 2 girls. The ones who know her well from her primary school are great and don't distinguish but the ones who don't know her so well quite openly will pass the ball over her head to a boy. She's getting frustrated and I think she'll give up soon. I genuinely think here she'd be better off in a girls team but there aren't really any until secondary school age. Girls playing with boys need to be tougher and earn their place in a way that boys don't. If they persevere and can do that then the boys will accept them but how do we change that attitude?

The policy is, as I understand it, solely based on being inclusive for children who identify as transgender.

There's a massive need to challenge atitudes towards girls who want to participate in sports.

There's also an ongoing accepance that much needs to be done to encourage girls to participate in sports and also to promote the continued involvement as they get older.

I don't believe this particular policy is rooted in these principles.

The (perhaps unintentended) consequences may well be detrimental to girls.

but I have literally never heard the suggestion that girls are being put off at primary level to any widespread degree

It starts back then. Go to any upper infant/junior school playground where football's allowed... you won't see many girls playing, and until schools started allocating areas for football what tended to happen was a huge football mass around the centre of the playground with the girls squashed in around the periphery sitting chatting politely. That bit seems to have been addressed somewhat (my kids' school has a semi-enclosed mini football pitch and most schools have confined the roaming football huddle to one part of the playground) but there's still this silly "girls can't play football" malarky that seems to creep in toward the end of about Reception age off and on.

Again the kids' school use an external contractor to provide most of the PE lessons in the school (Reception don't get them in - mind you 99% of the PE lesson in that age tends to be getting changed!) and all the staff that work for the company they use, who do the PE in a LOT of the local primaries - are male. Sends a message - not necessarily a positive one. DD1 did have a session a few weeks ago aimed at getting girls interested in tennis skills... bit of parental ructions at the gates that the boys were "left out" over that one!

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

It doesn't have to even be down to the kids. What does it say that the only mixed games were things like rounders ajd vross country Otherwise girls were sent off to do net ball while boys did foot ball and rugby.

The fact you had to wear pe knickers. Talk about embarrassing.

Girls have been an after thought in school sports for decades...

We have common races in the sports day and then the other teams are girls and boys team past about year 3. I think this is more so they can compete with other schools though?

I remember one shock pe lesson where we got to do th. Well tag rugby. And half way through having ignored the girls the teacher came up with the rule that you couldn't score unless the ball went to a girl first. I mean seriously. Talk about making girls a charity case and making them the centre of ridicule

Inclusive sporting policies for people who are transgender do not seem to ever include impact assessments of the effect they may have on girls or women.

This is highlighted in the thread below about recent policy in Scotland:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3268545-Twitter-thread-no-impact-assessments-carried-out-for-school-guidance-in-Scotland

OP writes:
"Government funded school guidance has been issued across Scotland, endorsed by Children's Commissioner, charities, LA's etc which discards the need for single sex spaces/sports t.co/ye3ekBGSEi

No Equality Impact Assessments were carried out, neither by the organisations who compiled the guidance nor the Local Authorities who have distributed it amongst their schools."

link to thread twitter.com/Scottish_Women/status/1003600851070607360?s=19

It doesn't have to even be down to the kids. What does it say that the only mixed games were things like rounders ajd vross country Otherwise girls were sent off to do net ball while boys did foot ball and rugby.*

We did everything together at primary; football, touch rugby, unihockey (indoors), gym, rounders, athletics...

The fact you had to wear pe knickers. Talk about embarrassing.

In primary school? To be fair if you forgot your PE kit in our primary school you did it in your vest and pants. But that was for boys and girls. I'm sure that was young primary school though.

You seriously never had to wear those awful thick navy or knickers?

That was of course a perk saved specifically for the girls ..

Yeah, but only once I got to secondary!

I think the one thing I had was that apart from one girl include beat everyone in swimming.

Other than that pe at school is humiliation for girls from day one and nothing is really done about it

I don't know, I really didn't experience any aspect of humiliation at primary school. Obviously the women I speak to these days do tend to be the ones who kept up sport what with being a sportswoman myself, but even the ones I meet through coaching our "back to sport" sessions, it was during secondary that they gave it up.

And seeing as we've mostly been talking about 7/8 years old and younger on this thread, I think the humiliation aspect or the body related embarrassment is less of an issue at that sort of age, don't you think? Like I say, we literally did PE in our underwear in early primary school; that's probably not even a thing any more. Are young kids really so different these days?

I don't think they are any different to how they have always been. I think its the rest of us who grew up never quite fitting in with what was expected of us have just grown up and realised why we felt the way we did. It was just accepted back then that that's how it was. Now we no longer accept it and are openly frustrated at how it's been allowed to carry on.

With the added burden if no lo her being definable because women now has to mean man aswell so girls have gone from being an afterthought to how being an afterthought and thrown under a bus.

And I do think that this is all very much proof of the fact that sometimes treating people equally is the most discriminatory thing to do. And this "experiment" of trying to probe everyone is the same is harmful.

I don't know, I think young kids are just young kids really; the only difference in them at that age (pre 8/9 ish) is how we treat them.

It's that that needs to change.

BingTheButterflySlayer Same as in my area. PE 'teaching' is outcourced to coaches who come out of the local college with a BTEC in Sports and Exercise. They used to run out of school clubs and holiday camps but have now been employed as cheap PE teachers. They are all male. If they are using this level of education for PE teachers, where is the push to get more females to study that BTEC.

The one at our school didn't even teach netball - even though boys can now play netball up to age 11 - because he didn't like it. The after school sports clubs were all run on a try-out basis. If you weren't already good enough, there weren't any school sports clubs you could go to to improve. When I complained the usually robust female headteacher simpered and would not have a bad word said about the darling young man. Like I say, I am trying to undo the damage that was caused to my DD2's sense of self-belief where sports is concerned. I have her in a lovely netball club where the emphasis is on fun and friendship but she still lacks confidence in school PE and Games and it is an uphill struggle to keep her participating.

There are lots of reasons why a gender gap develops between girls and boys with regard physical activity and enjoyment of sport but in my opinion, lumping the girls in with the boys and expecting them to be more robust and get on with it is not a solution that has worked so far.

I think sexual stereotyping in children has got worse. Particularly if your children go to a school which has a lower social demographic. Most of the boys at DDs' primary school displayed yobbish behaviour in the playground - as did their dads. Football used to be a sport some boys played and in my DDs' school, and amongst friends' sons, it is a sport all the boys play to the exclusion of everything else. Mums expected their daughters to be doing activities where they could look nice like dance and gymnastics. I don't remember it being such an issue when I was at school. However, I grew up in an era where all the neighbourhood kids played out together and of course, girls would get the chance to be physically better than some boys because the children would be all different ages and sizes. PE was segregated from the primary years though - except for swimming and rounders.

Women in Sport.org do a lot of reasearch into women and girls and sport. Here's one report [https://www.womeninsport.org/research-advice-service/research-and-insight/tipping-point-confidence-attitudes-7-8-year-olds-girls/ The Tipping Point – Confidence and Attitudes in 7 and 8 year old Girls] There are lots more reports on their site. RatRolyPoly if you're a coach you should find it interesting.

www.womeninsport.org/research-advice-service/research-and-insight/tipping-point-confidence-attitudes-7-8-year-olds-girls/]

Thanks ifonly, your post was really interesting and I'll read that link later. I'm not a trained coach (although I will get qualified when I start playing less I think), but I frequently get commandeered to help out. Mostly from an "inspiring the girls" perspective actually, so it's good to know what I'm up against!

I really do think girls are receiving sexist messages far earlier than in my day. One expt asked mothers about how confident their pre sch child would on climbing task. Girls were rated as less confident than the boys. In the actual expt there was no difference at all.

Heard at check out the other day. Young women said her friend from uni had just had a baby. She'd been told it would be a boy but it was a girl. Now they had to redecorate the nursery! Poor little devils are being stereotyped in the womb now.