Single Sex Education and the Gender Non-Binary

[Galactic Turtle]

Hello humans!

I was just thinking about this the other day when a male-bodied, male-presenting, agender acquaintance of mine asked me, hypothetically, if someone like them would be "allowed" into my apartment since I had made the statement that I don't invite men outside of my family into my apartment (personal space) because it makes me uncomfortable even if they're amongst a group of women coming at the same time. Granted I rarely host company outside of letting people crash on my couch for a few nights so it has never been an issue. My gut answer, honestly speaking, was no because the way my brain processed the gender of this particular person was male so despite them identifying as agender that same discomfort I get around men is very much present with them. Call me less evolved if you'd like but, I don't know, I have this strange fear of men and I don't know where it came from. :(

So this instance got me thinking about single sex education. I went to an all girls private school from pre-k through 12th grade. I had never heard of trans anything until 10th grade and I didn't really understand what transgender meant until I was well into college and had never heard of agender/genderfluid until I stumbled upon AVEN this past December. In school during our one 45 minute life issues class on all things LGBT+, our teacher briefly mentioned "something about bathrooms" and "some girls not feeling comfortable using the girls bathroom." It wasn't explained much past that, not even the separation of sex and gender.

To this day, everyone in my class (to my knowledge) was cis but due to the brevity of discussion on the topic of gender combined with the glaringly obvious "accepting in theory but not in practice" nature of the school as it related to LGBT+ students (which during my time there consisted of one out of the closet bisexual girl who everyone thought was trying to be trendy), I do wonder what type of protocol my school as well as the all boys private school up the street from us would make when it came to students who weren't cisgender.

Is single sex (which in this case is more likely synonymous with single gender) education something that will eventually become a thing of the past? Does an all girls school inherently exclude people in the non gender-binary/transgender population just as it excludes boys? Should single sex education be based only on biological sex and ignore gender entirely? Do you think there are benefits to single sex education? Is it inherently damaging for a parent to place their non-cis child in a single sex school?

Just wondering if people had thoughts on this. ^_^

[binary suns]

tbh I never really understood the point of single sex education lol. but at current in life the things I wonder about it is, it must be because of sexuality, or body privacy, or both, and so it both ignores trans reality and also ignores homo reality.

[Queen of Wonderland]

I think that regardless of single sex or no, its pretty damaging, or at least problematic because it restricts your knowledge, to skip over education when it comes to LGBTQIA+ stuff, whether its about gender identity or sexuality. I'd imagine it probably would not be fun to spend school years just thinking your dysphoria or gender confusion just comes from insecurity or whatever other reason, rather than the real reason (not being cis). Plus, that poor bi girl! I've always thought being bi at that age must be pretty rough; there're always people who think you're just screwing around, which really can't make you feel too good about yourself, and at that age...

Anyways, I've never really seen the point of single sex education either; like Every Red Heart Shines said, even its to discourage romantic/sexual relationships during school or to preserve privacy, that's more just ignoring the reality of queer existance, and even nonbinary/non cis people, because who says all the AFAB people at your school are even girls? I think sex education and LGBTQIA+ education is pretty damn important, for straight people as well as people who are actually queer. It not only helps the actual queer kids understand their reality, and helps them figure things out about themselves, education is a key part of understanding people who are different from you. Without education, you just get schools like the one Galactic Turtle was at, with all the LGBTQIA+ kids having to stay in the closet or risk people not believing their reality. Which is not a great situation.

[Galactic Turtle]

Those are all really good points! Thanks. ^_^

While I do believe that the initial root cause of the creation of single sex schools was to "eliminate" the possibility of romantic/sexual relations or distractions during the school day, I found value in the structure of my education for other reasons.

It is said that boys learn differently than girls and that they mature at different rates. My cousin of the same age who attended the boys school for a certain amount of time had classes that were structured differently than my own. For the boys school, middle school also lasted from 6th-8th grade while at the girls school, middle school lasted from 5th-8th grade. By the time we had our first combined classes with the boys (language classes were combined in 8th grade followed by art/music classes in 9th grade then finally all classes were combined starting in 11th grade), it was like walking into a room of people who were a completely difference species. I can't even explain how jarring it was though my parents thought it was funny at the time because they saw my experience as one where boys were acting up in order to catch my attention so that I might become attracted to them (who knew having condoms thrown at you was the modern form of courtship?).

As a young girl who was more or less completely separated from boys for the first half of my life, I think my parents think that I was more inclined/less discouraged to pursue my early interest in math, science, engineering, robotics, and technical theater. By the time I entered 7th grade and our combined after school theater program began, the amount of boys and girls working on crew for our plays was equal yet by the time I graduated, I was the only girl on crew outside of the costume and makeup department. The fact that there were fewer girls involved in the professions I was interested never occurred to me until our class time with boys began to increase. I do fault the boys school for not getting the message of gender equality across to their students as much as the girls school did. Feminism was something the students at both schools just kind of agreed to not talk about while we were together.

While I am not sure how my school's sex/gender education compares to other schools, I do agree that it was extraordinarily if not exclusively heteronormative. The possibility of homosexuality didn't even come up until we were well into middle school and even then it was just a rumored "condition" that people somewhere out in the world had. My school didn't even have a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) club until 10th grade and 90% of the reason for that was because of the new popularity of the show Glee that featured LGBT+ characters (it was started by the bisexual girl that I mentioned in my original post and the GSA only existed in the girls school, not the boys one).

The one life issues class we had to talk about all things LGBT+ was half spent talking about AIDS. To put this further in perspective, we spent over a month on how to care for babies/toddlers (the boys did not), about two weeks on how girls and boys had safe sex with each other (which the boys did not), and the rest of that two year class was split between how to manage your period, etiquette lessons, self defense techniques to not get raped by men, and STDs. At the boys school they learned about carpentry and basic mechanical maintenance skills... and were given condoms... some of which were I guess the ones thrown at me. :P

Because I was aware of the unspoken attitude towards LGBT+ people at my school, the longer I went without being sexually or romantically attracted to the boys in my brother class, the more I thought I might be lesbian. For this reason I just tried to ignore the girls in my class entirely because if I didn't look at them then there was no way I could potentially become attracted to them. There was one girl who, in hindsight I think was perhaps an almost-squish, who was devastatingly beautiful, kind, and talented. She was the captain of the sports team I was on and was even the lead in our school's production of Grease (that year I was working the spotlight for the show and got a stupid awestruck feeling every time I got to put it on her). I think she thought I hated her because during lacrosse practice, despite us both being defense players, I'd pretty much never speak to her or look her in the eye. She's actually engaged to a boy who was in our brother class now but out of the 40-something girls in our class I now know that at least three were lesbian and out of the 30-something boys in my brother class I now know that at least nine were gay. Reunion next year should be interesting...