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No 'him' or 'her'; preschool fights gender bias

Renae

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STOCKHOLM – At the "Egalia" preschool, staff avoid using words like "him" or "her" and address the 33 kids as "friends" rather than girls and boys.
From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don't fall into gender stereotypes.
"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."
The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden's efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.
No 'him' or 'her'; preschool fights gender bias - Yahoo! News

Gender Bias?

I'm about as pro-trans rights, as they come around here, but this... is just ****ing mental this is.
 
Eh. Why? Most of them will turn out exactly as they would have otherwise, just a degree less extremely stereotypical and more tolerant of people who don't fit the binary of their sex. And a few, who would have been trans or queer no matter what school they went to, will only be different in the sense that they will bypass a lot of the shame that they may have otherwise gone through.

I don't necessarily think it needs to be done this strictly, but I can't see anything wrong with it.
 
This is Sweden. They have every right to try whatever the hell they want to try. Will it work? Who knows.
 
I don't think it's right to experiment on kids.
Shouldn't be taken so lightly, when it could effect self identity development.

It is just gender roles. It's not even that big a deal. So a couple girls might grow up to want to be construction workers and a couple boys might grow up to be homemakers. There is not a whole lot of serious negatives likely to come from this.
 
Next they'll start refering to each child as "it," shave all their heads and put them in identical gender-neutral pant-suits.
 
It is just gender roles. It's not even that big a deal. So a couple girls might grow up to want to be construction workers and a couple boys might grow up to be homemakers. There is not a whole lot of serious negatives likely to come from this.

Gender is a biological thing.

I don't think it is as light as you think.
Experimenting on children is wrong, as well.
 
Gender is a biological thing.

I don't think it is as light as you think.
Experimenting on children is wrong, as well.

Gender is biological. Gender roles are learned.
 
No 'him' or 'her'; preschool fights gender bias - Yahoo! News

Gender Bias?

I'm about as pro-trans rights, as they come around here, but this... is just ****ing mental this is.

It's just silly because people don't CHOOSE what gender they are.

You can't just up and one decide decide to be male - or female . . . so much for teachers being smart, hunh?

Where things become issues is when parents/teachers (etc) discourage play and fun activities based on gender roles . . . but you don't have to *not* call a girl a 'girl' in order to do this - you can simply let the boys play with the dolls and girls play with the trucks.
 
It's just silly because people don't CHOOSE what gender they are.

You can't just up and one decide decide to be male - or female . . . so much for teachers being smart, hunh?

Where things become issues is when parents/teachers (etc) discourage play and fun activities based on gender roles . . . but you don't have to *not* call a girl a 'girl' in order to do this - you can simply let the boys play with the dolls and girls play with the trucks.

It's like them inadvertently saying that people with GID can change, which isn't true.
 
I doubt it will work the way they expect. Language is a powerful thing and proliferates independently regardless of top-down impositions. Even if the distinction between male and female is suppressed by an authority figure it is such a clear biological distinction that language will always be able to accomodate the difference between the two sexes. Every known language does, and that's not going to change unless the biological reality does.

Hell, the human drive to categorize and assign gender even applies to sexless inanimate objects in many languages.
 
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Public and private schools have been experimenting, trying out theories and new educational methods on kids since the dawn of mandatory education. I fail to see how this is any better or worse than what's been done already. :shrug:
 
Every effort to improve the educational experience is ultimately an experiment on the children involved.

Parenting is an experiment on the children involved -- because no matter all the advice you get from a trusted source, or all the books you read by reputable authors, most of the day-to-day stuff comes down to trial-and-error. In other words, experimentation.

Aside from that, trying to socially engineer these kids with respect to gender roles is no different than schools that teach kids to believe in God. In both cases, the educators are using their positions as authority figures and the fact that the kids constitute a captive audience to instill their beliefs in the young minds entrusted to them.

This kind of angle gets sensationalized only because America is a nation of people who by and large are, at heart, puritans.
 
Public and private schools have been experimenting, trying out theories and new educational methods on kids since the dawn of mandatory education. I fail to see how this is any better or worse than what's been done already. :shrug:

This isn't about educating kids though.
It's imparting a social identity theory with no basis in fact.

It would be like forcing kids with GID to behave exactly like their seen gender and not their felt gender.
 
Not entirely true.
Some gender roles are learned, while others are biological.

What Redress was saying is that gender roles are entirely learned. Gender is not.

Most people will identify with the gender of their sex, no matter what their upbringing. Most people with a penis will say "I am a man." Even in the earlier part of the 20th century when *gasp!* boys wore dresses until they were 6 or 7.

But the gender roles - the colors and toys and activities associated with that gender - are mostly learned. In some countries being a woman means having a foot-long neck. And that is just as arbitrary as the belief here that being a woman means wearing make-up.

Gender roles having nothing to do with innate gender. It's just a set of delineating qualities we arbitrarily assign. Not having a distinct gender role does not confuse ones internal gender.
 
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This isn't about educating kids though.
It's imparting a social identity theory with no basis in fact.

It would be like forcing kids with GID to behave exactly like their seen gender and not their felt gender.

It's a preschool. A preschool's main objective is to socialize kids, teach them to function in a group. This is an educational tool like any other at that young age and in that particular setting.
 
No 'him' or 'her'; preschool fights gender bias - Yahoo! News

Gender Bias?

I'm about as pro-trans rights, as they come around here, but this... is just ****ing mental this is.

Why is it mental? Do you honeslty bleieve that gender identity is completely biological and is not impacted by culture? That's plainly stupid.

I think, it should serve as an interesting study, will not do any harm to the children and would defer to the discretion of the parents.
 
What Redress was saying is that gender roles are entirely learned. Gender is not.

That's just not true.
Some gender roles are entirely evolutionary.

Most people will identify with the gender of their sex, no matter what their upbringing. Most people with a penis will say "I am a man." Even in the earlier part of the 20th century when *gasp!* boys wore dresses until they were 6 or 7.

But the gender roles - the colors and toys and activities associated with that gender - are mostly learned. In some countries being a woman means having a foot-long neck. And that is just as arbitrary as the belief here that being a woman means wearing make-up.

Gender roles having nothing to do with innate gender. It's just a set of diliniating qualities we arbitrarily assign. Not having a distinct gender role does not confuse ones internal gender.

One of the early ways to associate an internal gender is to express it through outward gender behaviors, from role models.
Felt (internal) gender and expressed (external) gender are linked, not separate.

This stuff is not arbitrary, it is a part of identity development.
 
Not entirely true.
Some gender roles are learned, while others are biological.

Technically correct but evades the point being made. Nurture for example is a gender role of mothers that is innate. However, most gender roles in society are learned.
 
It's a preschool. A preschool's main objective is to socialize kids, teach them to function in a group. This is an educational tool like any other at that young age and in that particular setting.

Functioning as a group ≠ teaching that there are no gender roles.

It's not a tool but a social experiment.
Tools have proven uses, this has nothing.
 
Technically correct but evades the point being made. Nurture for example is a gender role of mothers that is innate. However, most gender roles in society are learned.

Boys are driven to learn the gender roles from other men.
Those men have developed those gender roles from other men.

These men have physical attributes, that have evolved in them, that make it more likely for them to do "man" things better than some women can.
They are explicitly linked.

Trying to socialize out gender roles is dumb for a great many things.
 
Functioning as a group ≠ teaching that there are no gender roles.

It's not a tool but a social experiment.
Tools have proven uses, this has nothing.

Like I said, it's not any better nor worse than what has already been tried before at other progressive preschools. They obviously think it's worth a shot. Parents have the option to send their kid to another public preschool or pay for one that is better suited to their own views.
 
That's just not true.
Some gender roles are entirely evolutionary.

One of the early ways to associate an internal gender is to express it through outward gender behaviors, from role models.
Felt (internal) gender and expressed (external) gender are linked, not separate.

This stuff is not arbitrary, it is a part of identity development.

Some roles are evolutionary, but even they are taught. This doesn't mean they're necessarily illogical or should be done away with - all roles appeal to some aspect of innate psychology - but they are still taught. So much of social behavior is taught. Why do you think we and most other social mammals have such long childhoods?

But a lot of gender roles ARE illogical and should be done away with. A lot of them are oppressive, to both men and women. A lot of them are pointless. A lot of them are just blue team vs. pink team.

Studies on the raising of androgynous children haven't shown any impairment. If anything, such kids tend to be more confident. Their expression takes the form they want it to take, and only goes as far as they want it to go. As opposed to our habit of putting a football in a boy's hands when he's still an infant, or a barbie in a girl's hands at the same age. There are some profoundly negative things those streotypes can encourage if they are harshly enforced, which they often are.

Identity develops regardless. People born into extremely conservative homes still turn out gay or trans. People who grew up with gay parents still turn out straight and gender normative.

While I think this program may be a bit overkill, I don't know of anything suggesting it will cause harm. The extremes of the gender scale are unnatural to most people, and we try to force those extremes on most people. That is definitely negative.
 
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