How to talk to an 11 year old about feminist issues?

[CoffeeTeaChocolate]

I am very new to this, and so sorry if I just am one of many posters asking for information .

I have tried to read up on the board and am quite horrified by everything that is going on.

I want to protect my daughter (11). I want her to confidently be able to argue for her right to safe female only spaces without coming across as “anti-anything” to her peers.

At the moment it seems that she has been blissfully protected. She goes to a girls only school and believes that girls are different and have different interests. It also seems that the only thing she has heard about girls vs. boys from school is from the sports teacher (DD is very sporty). This wonderful lady has told them to make sure to compare their results to other girls as boys will grow stronger and more muscular when going into puberty.

DD is very innocent and naive, so I don’t want to scare her. Anyone with an idea of where to start?

High fives your DD's sports teacher.

The "not scaring" thing is hard. Maybe make sure that a lot of what you do is about celebrating women who've achieved great things.

With my DS (very different issue - my focus is making sure I don't produce a sexist cockwomble at the end of the parenting process), I find he observes and absorbs far more than you think. So when I've been reading, e.g., the Alex Rider books to him (he has dyslexia so I'm still reading aloud to him at a similar age to your DD), he's the one that goes into rants about Horowitz sexually stereotyping and objectifying his female characters or reaching for racist stereotypes. He particularly finds Horowitz's treatment of Alex Rider's love interest a bit creepy coming from a man his mum's age writing about a teenage girl.

When he was a bit younger much of the groundwork I did was simply on boys and girls can both do whatever interests them, there aren't boys toys and girls toys, just good toys which encourage you to play in an imaginative way and crap toys (most of which are blatant marketing ploys to part you from your pocket money). And if you're seeing something where your female friends look like they're playing with something a bit "substandard" (Lego friends range, I'm looking at you) - think of the amount of social pressure put on them. E.g. the good bits of Lego friends (I think there was an animal hospital) could have been put in the Lego city range, together with a lot more female minifigures. There was no need to create a pink ghetto for the girl children to play with.

I also found that if he came home with sexist stereotypes (girls can't do X), a careful google image search to show lots of women doing exactly X and doing it very well was my friend.

There's also loads of brilliant books and films with girls as the main character doing adventurous things (again maybe for a younger age group - but perhaps moving onto more real-life based stories as he gets older - we've just discovered Elizabeth Wein's books about women pilots in WWII for example).

(I find DS's take on race gives me hope for the future - I suspect Horowitz's intention was simply to produce a diverse range of chararcters, and he has both goodies and baddies from BAME backgrounds, but DS is right - there's something "white gaze"-ish about the way Horowitz brings race into his descriptions. I get that it's a very difficult thing for a white writer to tackle - don't mention it at all and you're doing the "I just don't see colour" thing, mention race explicitly with the best of intentions and get it wrong even subtly and you get a lot of criticism. But it's interesting that something is setting off DS's spidey senses about "this is tokenism/stereotyping." I'm also aware that I myself might be "whitesplaining" this.)

Great news about the sports teacher, but I sometimes wonder how much longer will "Girls" schools only be accepting young human females.
In the US, girls are having to compete with transgirls.

Thank you so much. I am already trying to talk a lot about how different girls (and boys) can be and that there are no typical “girl” or “boy” interests. DD is very competitive and I mentioned the statistics (I have read here) about how female Olympic athletes compares to boys.

She also have a close Muslim friend who’s (observant) mum doesn’t shake my husband’s hand (or come close to him) and who only removes her scarf in her home (we have been there for early dinner several times, not with my husband, just her, her friend and us mums. Both dads work late). I might use her friend as an example why joint changing rooms have consequences if that would come up.

i might use her friend as an example why joint changing rooms have consequences

I agree the needs of girls such as your daughters friend need more emphasis and potentially will be lost- particularly with the current attempt to reframe the debate around ‘white c middle class women’. Girls like your child’s friend will be have no opportunity for participation in e.g sport etc if single sex changing rooms/toilets/ contact sport become, in reality, mixed sex.

However - we are in a culture where women are supposed to be ‘kind’ and the needs of girls are utterly ignored by schools, CPS etc - if they don’t like males in their changing rooms, they can just use different facilities etc.

Girls have rights to safety, dignity, privacy and boundaries - irrespective of background.

Their wants are paramount.

No further justification is needed.

No. Is a complete sentence.

I am so grateful for this board.

My daughter asked me this mornings why girls at a boarding school has a housemistress and boys a housemaster (Could be Mallory Towers related or similar, she reads a lot). She said that there weren’t that many differences between girls and boys.

I was able to very confidently state that there weren’t many differences at all in interests, people could dress however they wanted etc. However, some people have penises and some don’t. And for living spaces, just like toilets, changing rooms and sports, we are divided into people who have penises and people who don’t have them.

I wanted to keep it simple and didn’t want to get into details of gender, operations etc. She is so little (in my eyes). She seemed happy with my answer and laughed when I said that it was pretty easy to do the sorting.