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A few weeks back, the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) released a groundbreaking booklet designed to sensitise teachers about their implicit gender-related biases: a hopeful step towards creating safer, gender-affirming spaces in schools around India.
Following a social media backlash against this document titled ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) issued a letter on 2 November, to NCERT, suggesting it was ‘conspiring to traumatise school students in name of gender sensitisation’.
The manual has been now removed from the website of NCERT.
To understand the debate, it is important to analyse gender and sex through a sociological lens.
The World Health Organization defines gender as "the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours, and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other."
On the other hand, 'sex' is understood as a designation – typically male, female or intersex – given at birth, based on a person’s external anatomy, chromosomes, gonads, and sex hormones.
Still, these are oversimplified explanations with a historic legacy of being misused in the context of intersex, trans, and gender-nonconforming people.
The mainstream science used to back arguments about the binary to uphold differences between ‘males’ and ‘females’, falls apart the more you dig into the details of how genes, gonads, and hormones can keep biological sex subject to change.
These ideas paint trans and intersex people’s bodies as controversies, perpetuating mainstream fear that doubles down as policing, hate crimes, and violence that disproportionately affects trans women and femme folks at intersecting marginalised identities.
Thus, children are taught, actively and passively, to perform characteristics that have been culturally associated with their sex assigned at birth and not born with a biological determination to act like a girl or a boy.
This starts in labour rooms where boys are dressed in blue and girls in pink (which was widely considered a masculine colour until the 20th century), and is carried forward in environments like schools, as the NCERT guide points out, which are systemically and socially conditioned to create and reinforce binary gender norms.
This institutional rigidity and harassment are particularly worse for trans and gender non-conforming children, who might find that their evolving sense of gender identity is not in alignment with their socially imposed sex and gender.
Therefore, rather than labelling someone’s identity as the problem, we need to address the environments that exacerbate the mental distress by imposing a binary worldview on trans and gender non-conforming children.
Children who are trans and gender non-conforming are at higher risk of bullying by peers and abuse by teachers. These unsafe environments often lead these children to drop out of the school system.
Our ongoing work in TransCare COVID-19 and other research project reveals stories of trans and gender non-conforming children, who are bullied in schools, lack parental support and leave schools often finding that sex work and begging are the only accessible options to sustain themselves.
Schools can play a crucial role in fighting and preventing the ongoing epidemic of violence against trans people, most of whom are trans women and femme folks at intersecting marginalised identities.
Guides that affirm trans people’s identities, and affirm that love is to be celebrated rather than feared on the basis of another person’s identity, can be a step towards ending the insecurities of cisgender heterosexual men who are often the perpetrators of hate crimes against trans women.
For example, the NCPCR notice mentions that “such an approach will expose children to unnecessary psychological trauma due to contradictory environments at home and in school”.
We find this incorrect because, firstly, Indian homes typically do not follow a gender-segregated toilets system, and studies have found that trans-inclusive bathrooms have been linked to decrease in sexual violence and reduced waiting times.
Secondly, NCPCR’s comment dismisses the often nerve-wrecking experience that using gender-segregated bathrooms impose on trans and gender-nonconforming people – Galop’s 2020 Transphobia Hate Crime Report found that nearly two thirds of respondents weren’t able to use public bathrooms because of transphobia.
As discussed before, it is the current strict enforcement of gender binaries which is contradictory. It uses ‘sex’ to separate children based on external anatomy labelled at birth, and restricts people based on their perceived gender rather than seeing them for their individual, lived experiences.
Further, the NCERT training material does not ask for a complete removal of gender segregation in schools. We understand this standpoint on two accounts.
Thus, we believe that the NCERT training material is in the right direction towards improving gender inclusion in schools both for inclusion of transgender children and for reducing gender bias and hierarchies.
The document has been developed based on extensive review of 65 reference documents along with a team of internal and external experts including transgender persons. It is in line with the politico-legal developments in India, including NALSA judgment, Trans Act, National Youth Policy, National Education Policy.
(If you or someone you know is feeling hopeless or is at risk of suicide, contact suicide Helplines India: http://www.aasra.info/helpline.html and here's a resource for queer inclusive mental health India: https://www.pinklistindia.com/mentalhealth)
(Dr Harikeerthan Raghuram (He/Him) is Project Coordinator at Sangath India. Ragi Gupta (They/Them) is Head, Creative Content Management at Pixstory. Dr Aqsa Shaikh (She/Her) is Associate Professor, Community Medicine, HIMSR. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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