[Tsuwabuki]

Originally Posted by MissMisa

And to address some earlier points: There SHOULD be an option for girls to wear trousers in school. How backwards and old fashioned it would be to be forced to were skirts in winter! Some girls are consious about their appearance, and it would be unfair to force them to wear a skirt if they don't want to. Skirts are culturally a female item of clothing, whereas trousers are now considered unisex. That's why it would be odd for males to have the option of wearing skirts.

Well, schools in England and the United States are dealing with quite a few issues about it. I don't care if it's odd or not, I only care how seriously we take our supposedly egalitarian values. I find the idea that any article of clothing should be allowed for one sex and not the other based solely on what they have in their pants "backwards and old fashioned." I am certainly not interested in forcing girls to wear skirts. I am only against boys not having it as an option. You're English, but the Irish and the Scots might have a thing or two to say about the manliness of a good kilt. There is no rational reason why a dress code, especially in a publicly funded school, should deny clothing to one person over another based on anatomy.

And if my gym class WASN'T seperated, I would have certainly NOT done it. In England, gym classes (It's called PE over here) are seperated at high school. Why? It's because that's when young people are developing and growing as teenagers. It's the time when they are body consious, and PE usually requires gym clothes, shorts, tshirt and so on. I would feel wholly uncomfortable to be with males at this time. To change the clothing would be impractical when doing sports, so they just seperated the two. If you wanted to do sports with the guys, it was fine, you just had to go to the after school classes.

We call it gym or PE interchangeably. I will even sometimes use both in the same sentence. But you'll notice I also use a fair bit of UK English, and always have. I blame the amount of British literature I read growing up...

The problem I have with separated gym classes (or segregated anything), and I am glad mine wasn't, is because it focuses too much on the differences inherent in the changes. By such separations we draw more attention to physical differences than we should, and we fail to emphasise the sameness of people, regardless of anatomy.

I do not believe, and will never believe, that there is some essentialist property inside of genitalia or chromosomes that makes the terms "boy" or "girl" anything besides socially constructed labels that keeps us from recognising the essentialist property that makes us human.

It's my belief, although there are far smarter people than me who have written on the topic, that your uncomfortableness around males while an adolescent stems from cultural baggage.

I can't say I am baggage free, but I've complained about it since elementary school. I've even effected some actual changes in some places. Such as unisex bathrooms on my university campus, and refusal to choose "gender" on certain legal forms. I recognised the hypocrisy as soon as I inquired why boy, girl for certain events and why not blue eyes, brown eyes, or brown hair, blonde hair? No one could give me a suitable answer. I knew then, at perhaps eight or nine, that the whole thing was hogwash. Given my own general affinity for "female-labeled" activities in addition to an affinity for some "male-labeled" activities, everything since adolescence has just confirmed my view.

Treat every one equally and as an individual. That's all I ask. Unfortunately, it is clear that for many people, I ask too much.

In class in England, you are usually sat 'girl, boy, girl, boy.' They claim it's to 'encourage people to mix,' but it's really so you aren't sat next to your friends, which for most people are usually of the same sex, and chat and disturb the class. I thought that this idea is pretty old fashioned, but I wasn't particularly bothered because the majority of my friends were male anyway.

As stated, in my schools, teachers broke up obvious groups, but there were no patterns that indicated X was different than Y leading to a pattern. And boy, girl, boy, girl is a pattern showing an "awareness" of sex that inherently draws attention to sex as if that aspect was very, very important. If there had been, I would remember, because I would have protested it.

A lot of my issues here revolve around situations that are mandatory, as opposed to chosen. A decision to enter a private organisation, or even a public one that not a requirement, might mean taking on sex related restrictions. While I would hope those restrictions would eventually fall, I would have the choice not to join that organisation, and if I do, then I am bound to follow those restrictions.

Public schools, where you go to the nearest one, and have no choice, fall under situations that are mandatory.