Hi. I’ve been lurking here for a while but this is the first post that has hit enough of a nerve to make me put finger to keyboard!
I know there’s a body of research out there on single-sex schooling. Some findings may differ from my personal view. So to be clear, I’m talking here about my own experience. And the experience of many other friends.
I grew up in a working class Australian home in the sixties and seventies. I had a Mum, a brother and a Dad My family home and the wider world all belonged to men and boys. Casual vilification, objectification and abuse were common. Female domestic labour in the service of men was expected and given. Men’s voices shouted women down in public and private. Men made choices. Women and girls often had few or none.
Women and schoolgirls hated walking past the pub in my town because you knew that leering, shouting and comments would ensue. Not always sexualised either. Sometimes it was just plain gratuitous abuse. One afternoon I had “fat whore” screamed at me and a hot meat pie hurled from a car speeding by which spattered me with meat and gravy from head to toe. I was an 11 year old girl in shorts and bare feet running an errand to the shops 100 metres from my own house. I didn’t tell anyone. I felt shame.
I was a bright, ferocious tomboy who had always played with the boys, fought with boys and held my own with boys. Towards the end of primary school suddenly girls were the target of abuse from our peers.,Boob grabbing, dress lifting, name-calling, comparing girls looks and our developing bodies. Fat shaming of girls started around this time too.
I felt angry and oppressed even as a child and I chafed against the utter unfairness of bullshit like Mum and me washing up while the males simply left the table.
Luckily for me my local high school was an all girls school. From the moment I walked in there it became the most liberating experience of my life. It was a haven. I might have been oppressed and silenced st home, but at school no sex stereotypes applied.
The swots were girls, the physics and chemistry nerds were girls, the loud opinionated ones were girls. The quiet studious ones were girls. The class clowns were girls. The actors. The politicians. The delinquents. The hockey and tennis and athletics stars were all
girls.
In that environment I experienced what I already knew. That girls were people with a vast range of variations. There was no ‘girls’ behaviour. Yes, there were some girls who loved fashion and makeup and had pop star posters and applied layers of mascara in the loo, tanned their legs at lunch time and ran with hands flapping down by their hips. Because some girls were like that. There were also girls who gave each other home made tattoos with a compass and a biro durin tge lunch break.,And then there were the sports bruisers and the super rough girls who’d threaten to fight you after school.
So. The point of my preamble is this. What is it that these ‘transgirls’ are hoping to find in all-girl spaces? Are they imagining white robes, maidens playing harps, serenely bathing in scented pools and doing each other’s hair?
Why should girls schools be used as a haven of ‘femininity’ for boys who think they are girls? And why should this wonderfully empowering female space be compromised because some boys like the idea of being a girl? The minute they walk in the door, they bring with them their stereotypes, their assumptions about what it is to be a girl. And let’s face it, their parents’ stereotypes of girls and girls behaviour too. Plus there’s the small matter of their penis and their testosterone. What is the benefit to the ‘trans girl’ of being placed in an all girls school? Does this benefit outweigh the rights of the girls to experience a male free existence for maybe the only time in their lives?
I’m afraid at my school a trans girl would have been just as vulnerable to a kicking from the same stupid, violent, angry types that were likely to do this to them at the boys school, so I would argue that being with only girls may not be the haven they hope for. News flash- girls can be vicious little shits too.
But I digress. A male coming in means the dynamic in that space changes. See also brownies, guides, girls sports (and not just the elite ones).
I was not damaged by being educated among girls. I have always forged beautiful lasting friendships with people of both sexes, gay and straight, and I have sustained many successful heterosexual relationships in my life. I am also strong, independent, able to hold my own and not hardwired into deferring to men.
As others have said. Single sex schools are single SEX schools. Whether you agree with single sex schooling or not, if we’re going to have them then their reason for existing at all needs to be protected.
Why not let the boys schools, the teachers, administration and parents take the presence of a ‘M to F’ transitioning’ boy as an opportunity to reach out to young boys and growing men and teach them that it is ok to reject the norms of toxic masculinity and still be welcome and safe in male spaces?
Teach boys to accomodate less gender stereotypical boys so that these gender non-confirming kids need not be fearful of other men in places like toilets and change rooms.
Don’t shift the issue out of sight for girls to budge up for. Why not train these school boys to become more accepting, less scary men.
A girl is not simply someone who doesn’t make the grade as a boy. And girls schools have a unique role in developing young women that should be respected and preserved. Not compromised once again to meet the needs of males, no matter how much they wish to be girls (whatever they think that entails). I’m pretty sure it’s not what they think it is.