Girls’ schools are for girls – The Spectator Australia
When I was at University, I took old-fashioned Women’s Studies. We used to study things like the ways women become disadvantaged in society, how girls were educated and socialised, and what society needed to do for girls to give them better opportunities to thrive.
Feminists used to look at the cultural messages girls were given about themselves and their future lives and how these could limit girls’ understanding of what they could do in life. We lobbied for a change in domesticated characterisations of women in media. As a result, television shows and advertisements from the 1970s look embarrassingly sexist to today’s eyes.
As a feminist, I tried not to limit my daughters to clothes, toys, and interests considered typical of girls. I then sent them to single-sex private schools because it was known that girls do better in single-sex schools. You will hear women apologise for affording this luxury to their female children. There was a time, not long ago, when some families sent the boys to private schools but didn’t bother to waste the money on their girls. You won’t hear me apologising for the money I spent sending my girls to a private school. I am a true believer.
In grade five, my daughter became interested in orchestral percussion. She was quite talented and went on tour to play other schools. After one such tour, she came home and asked me if I knew that drums were ‘supposed to be a boy thing’.
My daughter went on to explain that the school she played with on tour was not a private school but a state school. I remember the emphasis on ‘state’ because I thought she was going to make a snobby remark.
She said:
‘I thought all the drummers were boys because it was a boys’ school, but it’s a state school, so they have girls but none of the girls play the drums – none of them – and when I asked the boys why no girls played the drums, they told me that drums are a boy thing.’
I remember my daughter searching my face for signs of recognition of what she was saying, of shock at this thing she had discovered. I will never forget the confusion I had about how I would begin to tell her.
I thought about this conversation when I heard about the human rights complaint levelled against a Brisbane private girls’ school for not allowing a ‘trans girl’. My first thought was that it may be my daughter’s alma mater and I thought to myself ‘well, there goes girls’ education’… It turns out to be so much worse.
There is another Queensland girls’ school that specialises in assisting the most vulnerable of girls. This school is not a seat of privilege; it is a place for girls who have real problems – a place where girls with serious challenges can learn in a single-sex specialist environment. I have had people contact me who are connected to this school. It is an extremely well-respected institution and the girls there receive excellent targeted education.
Girls’ schools more generally are part of the protective and supporting infrastructure that women and girls have built and changed in Western societies through what we now call the ‘women’s revolution’.
The infrastructure for girls and women in our societies would have once limited a girl by imposing and reinforcing societal roles and a limited skill set that was needed for a woman’s role in society as a wife, mother, and domestic worker.
After the industrial revolution, as women became more involved in the economy, women’s public role transitioned from employment as seamstresses (like my grandmother), housemaids, and children’s teachers gradually to secretaries, typists, and retail workers, not that long ago.
When I was at school in the 70s, I remember a teacher asking the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. All the girls said ‘hairdresser’ or ‘airline hostess’. The way girls know, without being taught, that they have limited pathways in life is called ‘gender stereotyping’. Gender is the cultural meaning societies give to sex and it has long been a focus of feminists. Gender, we know, can limit the lives of girls, even when all other legal and education pathways have been opened up to them.
The much thrown around juvenile accusation that feminists ‘started all this gender nonsense’, is not without a basis in truth. Feminists did separate gender from sex to engage and critique gender stereotyping. But the takeover of the management of gender by the government in ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ has no logical relationship to the women’s revolution other than it being the water on the fire that feminists of my grandmother’s generation started.
The male child who is seeking entry into the Queensland girls’ school is doing so on the basis that they have taken on a ‘trans’ feminine identity. This just means the child has been told that the performance of female stereotypes makes them literally female. On the video posted by the terminally progressive News.com, we see the child say that they are transgender because the mother has ‘known since I was in kindergarten’. The mother then interjects to say, ‘Yeah, she likes – um – ballerina clothes and stuff.’
Old school gays and old school feminists are uniting in a middle-aged rage party about this issue for a very good reason. This same media snippet about ballerina clothes that will have feminists screaming that ‘tutu’s do not define girls!’ will have many gay men saying ‘ohh Christ above, that was me!’ as they vigorously cross their legs.
The minute a boy child enters into the infrastructure designed to support female bodies, the infrastructure and the female children become repurposed to affirm the stereotypes the boy child performs – the stereotypes many of us try to isolate our daughters from. At the same time, the boy child is locked into a pathway modelled around the ‘affirmation’ of ‘gender care’ that almost always leads to medical and surgical intervention.
The reason I sent my daughters to girls’ school was that within a girls’ school, girls learn that every one of worth within that school has the same type of body as them. They learn that people with that type of body are important and valuable. In a girls’ school, girls have access to the best music, maths, science, and drama teachers that a school can attract.
When periods and sex are discussed in a girls’ school, it is only ever in the presence of girls and only ever from a female perspective. There are no boys at a girls’ school to gaze at the girls’ bodies, to peek under the toilet stalls, or to initiate them into the ‘itty bitty titty committee’.
Once a boy enters a girls’ single-sex environment, for the comfort of the boy child, the girl child must learn that her body has nothing to do with her historical oppression – oppression that her grannies have only just dragged her out of, relatively speaking. The girl child must learn the periods she will soon need to manage have nothing to do with her being female or the history of women and women’s historical consignment to the domestic sphere.
The entry of boy children into a girls’ school teaches girls that they are not important enough for their society to provide appropriate boundaries and protections for people with their type of body. It tells girls that the feelings and desires of boys will always override the needs of girls.
The girl child of the gender ideology age will learn that powerful historical women like Joan of Arc were not even women, because the stereotypes that changed her trans friend from a boy to a girl could not have lived in Joan of Arc. A girl child will learn that without the right stereotypes, a girl is not even a girl, and will never be a real woman.
Progressives are demanding access to the protection and support infrastructure for women and girls. Whatever you think of girls’ schools, they are not there to affirm the identities of boys who believe themselves to be girls.
Girls are not made of sugar and spice and all things nice, they are juvenile human females. They carry all the large gametes of the earth and will grow to birth all of the children in the next generation. Have some respect. We shouldn’t have to justify why we want to keep what already belongs to us. There should be no males in female designated infrastructure in this country. We’ll be having those toilets back too, thanks very much.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She blogs at ediewyatt.com and substack.
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