One Teacher Helps Kids Beat Gender Stereotyping

sure…i think i saw a video of it occurring later in the clip the 1:25 mark.  It went over very well…not!!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4a9CKgLprQ 

Sounds cute – I hope the little boys got their “Baby Alive” dolls. There’s been a little bit of progress in terms of letting female children choose their own interests, but gender stereotyping for boys is just as rigid and harsh as ever.

This makes me very happy. :)

I respect what she was trying to do, but at seven years old had any teacher tried to convince me to use a bathroom with urinals in it because I said I liked ice cream I’d have made sure my mother had them fired. I’m all for gender equality but I will not pretend to be ok with unisex bathrooms for anybody much less children. Gender neutral toys are great and dresses on little boys are just as adorable as they are on little girls, all that is fine.
 I’m just not ok with the idea of men publicly displaying their genitals in what is supposed to be a private and relatively clean place for women to defecate! Though transvestites or pre-op women who choose to use the facilities behind a firmly closed stall door are also fine. I may be old fashioned but I just prefer to not be subjected to random penises when I’m trying to do my toilet business!

This woman is a heroine. Anything that keeps a kid from feeling bad about how zhie chooses to perform (or not perform) gender is A-OK in my books. We really need to start approaching the idea from a more open, matter-of-fact angle all around. I mean, tell me what is a “masculine” or “feminine” personality trait and I’ll give you three examples that cross them, just from people I personally know. While I don’t think gender is totally constructed or pointless, it seems like all we do with it is use it as a club to beat the people who don’t fit in.

As for @dolph122000:disqus’s complaint, who says the kids lined up in “ice cream” all used the same bathroom? The teacher says she had them LINE UP according to things other than gender, not that they used the bathrooms in a unisex fashion. Though I really think that unisex bathrooms are a MUCH less important issue than people make them out to be. People deal with it all the time when bathroom facilities are limited, with minimum fuss, and kids would be a WHOLE lot less weird about it if us grown-ups were. North Americans in particular are seriously over-sensitive about body issues: I spent a couple years in France as a kid, and when I got back I remember being really nonplussed about all the girls waiting in line to change gym-strip in three stalls.

A more open and welcoming attitude, with a couple individual bathrooms for those who are really uncomfortable being around other people while seeing to bodily function, would probably solve a lot of problems.

i personally look at France as a backwards culture. How long did it take them?? ;) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7085759/France-makes-incest-a-crime.html 

Let me quote a line from the story.

”
 When the kids came out of the bathroom, they wanted to line up as most classrooms do, in boys’ and girls’ lines.”

They lined up after leaving the bathrooms. Not before, not going into whatever bathroom they wanted, but while waiting for the rest of the class to finish and return. Worst part, is I read this the day the story came out, and I remembered the line. Reading comprehension is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

I admire what this teacher is trying to do, but some of this struck me as really sideways. 

There is no indication in either this article or the original that ‘Allie’ thinks of herself as anything other than a girl.  The teacher assuming she is trans based on the fact that she wears hoodies and likes her ponytail lower on her skull is frankly every bit as absurd as kindergarteners being socialized to think that makes her a boy.  (I will grant that there may be more to this assumption than is in the text, but that’s the story that is presented).

Furthermore, while I understand what the teacher is trying to do with the ‘it’s okay to be neither’ idea, a biological girl who doesn’t wear pink and plays with Hot Wheels is not rejecting her gender.   I may in part be extra sensitive to this as a woman in science who was told on several occasions that studying science was rejecting my essential femininity since science was a ‘masculine’ discipline.    The problem in both of these cases, to me, is the presumption that toys, disciplines, and colors have gender.  I think that what the teacher is doing in encouraging kids to see how absurd that is, is a good thing – but I don’t agree with the way that rejecting current toy marketing is being presented as ‘gender nonconformity’. 

Actually, the teacher ASKED her mother what she preferred to be identified as.  Thats not assumption and it’s a fair question for someone what wants to be supportive regardless of gender to ask.

Why attack someone who is trying not to assume?  Gender is often framed in terms of one’s chosen social group and how one is perceived socially, for a pre-pubescent child what they wear and how they spend their free time will affect those two factors.

At the moment gender nonconformity does include crossing the boundaries of generally accepted social norms of all sorts … hopefully over time that will change, but for the moment changing one’s hair to be more ‘boyish’ and wearing certain clothes does cause many people to start asking questions.

But she asked because of the hoodie and the ponytail, at least according to the story.  I find it very problematic that clothes and hairstyle struck her as bizarre enough to prompt the question.  That’s a pretty big leap.

Fantastic! I say it may be imperfect, but it’s movement in the right direction, along with Princess Boys and little girls on YouTube who resent being marketed “pink princess” toys and not Legos. It’s about time we recognized that gender includes shades of gray along with the usual black and white.

So happy to see this in my lifetime.

The teacher asked because other students were referring to Allie as a boy, not because of assumptions on her part.

To add to JoAnna Luffman’s correction; the teacher asked the children to line up in single file before going into the bathroom and then when it was their turn each child chose which door they wanted to go through.

IIRC that is, as I’ve not reread it, just trying to remember from reading it last week..

Hello, this is the author here…..Just a point of clarification, I never assumed that Allie was trans, nor would I ever put a label like that on a child based on how he/she dresses or acts. Allie is 7 years old! As for bathrooms, the bathroom that I let Allie use was a single stall bathroom with it’s own door, like the one in your house. It was unisex…. like the one in your house. And furthermore, adult men do not use the student bathrooms in schools. 

Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback. I plan to continue working on gender issues in my classroom along with immigration, racism, and all kinds of other social justice topics.

dolph – if you take a look at any textbook for architecture or interior design students you’ll see that unisex bathrooms should always be designed in a way that grants everyone as much privacy as the gender specific kind. You’d have to seriously go out of your way to see something that you might not like. The random penises are safely covered by the time they’re anywhere near you… ;)

MsClaw – In what situation would the question not be problematic then?

Fantastic! I wish I had more teachers like you when I was growing up.