• I am not telling everyone to go out and eliminate gender from their classrooms.  Many people still believe that at early ages, gender divisions are a good and necessary thing to instill in their students/kids.  What I will say is that, if one is going to do so, they should also be careful of instilling gender stereotypes that can hold kids back.

• Gender is fluid.  It isn’t sex.  Sex is our biological designation — the parts we have.  We are not, or shouldn’t be, defined by our sex organs and hormones.  Gender is made up of the social and psychological aspects attached to a sex — or, sometimes, not necessarily matching with one’s sex.  Gender expression is how we act this out.

Some people prefer to take steps to remove the blatant gender push in the classroom because you may have situations in which students don’t feel like they fit into the group you expect to put them in, or because they may feel like one but exhibit traits of the other.  A little girl may be completely comfortable with being a girl, but wear boys’ clothes and hang around with the boys.  A child that you look at as biologically male may insist that she feels like and is a girl, and be upset and confused when someone sorts her into the boy’s line.  And at the age where students start really thinking about things like gender, what happens if you have a student that doesn’t feel like they fit either? 

These are situations that someone might consider generally rare — but what we do in the classroom helps form the foundations for students’ experiences later on in life.  So, for those students who don’t necessarily fit into the typical idea of whatever their gender may be (or whose gender and sex don’t match, at the time you have them or in the future), being sorted by gender is a way of saying “These are your peers that you have some unbreakable similarity to,” and when someone isn’t like “all the other girls” or “all the other boys,” it makes a marked impression on them when they stick out.

This is also something that can vary wildly from culture to culture.  In some communities gender is rigid, in some its not.  Many people are accustomed to a two-gender binary, whereas in some cultures — including some Native cultures here in the US — there can be as many as seven distinct genders or gender roles that are considered “acceptable” within a society.

I’m not telling you to tear the little skirt and no-skirt figures off the boys’ and girls’ bathroom signs (as much as those are aggravating for a whole host of reasons).  I’m just giving you something to think about that you’re free to reject, explore, or ask more questions about later.