Gender

Today’s post is a response to two other bloggers I frequent, (from the bungalow) and (Daddyknowsless). Daddy knows less posted an article about gender, in response to this article about a school in Sweden that does not use the personal pronouns, and from the bungalow started a conversation on his wall that I wanted to write about. (Click HERE for the article on the gender neutral preschool)

I’d like to disclose before you read any further, that I’m not an expert on gender and sexual categories. I have a lot to learn, and I invite you all to comment and share and correct me anywhere that I might have been confused. Join the conversation and share what you know, share what you feel, and share what you think. This is a welcoming and supportive environment for conversation, so take part, and know that I am not an expert on the subject (or any subject) and I may get things mixed up. Let me know if I do and I’ll do my best to provide accurate information.

So there’s a school in Sweden that is doing away with the personal pronouns “he” and “she” and is using a gender neutral Swedish term, “han”. Some of the responses I’ve heard about this are that raising children without gender is too PC, and strange and problematic and wrong.

Something that some people don’t understand is that gender and sex are different. As I understand it, sex is the biological of your body, where gender is the category you personally identify with on the male to female continuum. Gender is complicated because we tend to think of gender as a binary 'girl' or 'boy' and it is not actually binary.

We have expectations that boys are supposed to be masculine, and girls are supposed to be feminine, with a whole host of what that looks like, and we don't all fit into these expectations. Sometimes the expectation of gender is so far off what a person is really like, that they don’t fit in. Sometimes boys have a little bit of girl inside, and sometimes a little girl feels more like a boy inside. It is so common, and yet we don’t recognize it in our society as okay.

That’s the point of the school in Sweden; it is allowing children to be themselves without the need to behave in the socially created gender norms. So that a little boy who feels a bit like a girl inside can wear pink, and paint his nails, and be safe. Because kids should not be judged or shoved to the borders of society for not fitting into our stereotypes of what gender should be. Kids should be happy and loved and accepted. There are a massive number of people who don’t fit into “girl” or “boy”.

There is a huge population of gender queer, transgendered, feminine boys or masculine girls that our society does not acknowledge, or when they do acknowledge, it is with judgment, fear, and unkindness. And a huge number of these people, children, youth, and adults, commit suicide every year because they don’t fit in.

They are born girls, or boys, but they don't feel entirely like girls or boys. They feel like a girl in a boy body, or a boy in a girl body, or like a girl with a lot of boy inside, or a boy with a lot of girl, and they get teased, relentlessly for being different. But they’re BORN different, and they kill themselves. So many children, teens and adults take their own lives because they cannot be what they are told they should be, just because they don’t fit into the binary.

So, when I think about this school in Sweden who is doing away with personal pronouns in an attempt to allow people to just be themselves, without enforcing a false gender stereotype onto them, I think, “finally”. I wonder when the rest of the world will catch up with this school, and allow people to be themselves, without insisting that they meet our expectations about who we think they should be.