No more boys and girls

Last night, I watched the programme 'No more boys and girls' on BBC 2 and commented on Twitter. Twitter was a furiously angry place on that hashtag but most people hadn't watched the programme.

I was unsure whether to watch. I thought there was going to be an intersexuality agenda. The clips made it look like they were going to make the kids cross dress, pump them full of hormones and surgically resect their genitals.  This was, however, a programme about equality. It was about how we stereotype boys and girls in a way that harms many of both.

The cross dressing part (on the clip) was a very small experiment with babies to show how adults encourage what they think of as girl babies to play with dolls and boy babies to play with construction toys. There was no child abuse involved.

It was a programme that challenged thought patterns (or would have done if people actually watched it). Set in a class of year 3 children in the Isle of White with a very brave male teacher. He was immediately called out for calling the boys 'mate' and the girls 'love'. He wasn't aware he was doing it. Twitter erupted. "That wouldn't happen in my DDs school, they're very supportive - And why aren't they wearing shoes?" Teacher bashing, a sport that our country could excel at, became the first knee-jerk response. I have a lot of admiration for this teacher, putting himself in the firing line like this and being open enough to accept his unconscious labelling of the children.

He had separate coat cupboards for boys and girls, which I'm sure was just a way to divide his class in two, so that they didn't all put their coats in the same cupboard. The programme voiceover suggested that telling the children they could put their coat in whichever cupboard they liked and letting them paint the cupboard doors was his idea and not really part of the programme's agenda. The cupboards were both the same to start with so it wasn't as if boys got the better cupboard.  I thought this bit was the most interesting, as it showed how complicated this issue is.

The programme was more interested in the things that we tell each sex of child that negatively impacts their life.  (Such as girls lacking confidence and boys lacking emotional intelligence) There was some good science in the programme, debunking myths about male and female natural abilities. They said that these stereotypes hurt boys as well as girls. There were some heartbreaking moments when you saw how these stereotypes hurt the children.

There were two groups of furious people on Twitter. First, there were the people who felt threatened. These were mostly men. Men who were incandescent with rage at women who wanted equal rights. Men who were ready to kill someone for turning the boy who cried about not being as strong as the girls into a 'pussy'. They hate women and will use any hashtag to shout about it.

 There were also people like me, menopausal feminists, who are furious.  Well, to be honest, we are furious at everything.  But we have been fighting for equal rights for women for so long that the whole transgender/intersexuality debate seems to have confused the issues.  These women have grown up children and programmes like this can feed into their guilt that letting their little girls play with Barbie dolls somehow stifled their chances in life.  We grew up at a time when girls who didn't identify with typical female things were still allowed to be called girls (or tom-boy girls) and boys who didn't like male pursuits were called sensitive boys.  No one suggested that they were born into the wrong body.

I got a little confused with the Twitter debate.  Someone said, "This is so stupid. If gender is a construct and we're all the same then why even bother with gender equality." I think that we're are not all the same.  I don't think all women are the same.  Gender is how, as a society, we socialise people of different biological sex.  We don't have equality and that's why we need to bother with it.  Women are still losing out in the workplace (There are more people called John in the top jobs than there are women). We should be asking the question if we are socialising the genders the way we want.  Do we want a polarised society with each side at war with the other? Do we want to be able to determine the biological sex of a person by their wrapping? Do we want men who can't understand or express feelings that aren't anger?  Do we want women who think they have to be stupid? Do we want children who have no interest in the things gender stereotypes allow for them think they have to take drugs and have painful surgery to conform?

The first step should always be to understand and to be aware of what is actually going on and what we are doing.