A significant role in girls’ access to education
Ensuring no child is excluded on the basis of gender is a priority identified in UNICEF’s new Education Strategy. To reach this goal, a commitment to strong intersectoral work is paramount. To understand what this means in practice, this blog outlines how Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) plays a significant role in girls’ access to education and could help unlock the future for millions of girls around the world.
WASH is fundamental for girls’ education
Every child – including every girl – has the right to a quality education, enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child 30 years ago…
For girls, appropriate WASH facilities are a particularly important part of ensuring their safe and healthy participation in school. WASH facilities have both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors for girls’ education. Girls can struggle to attend and stay in school if they do not have safe, single-sex and hygienic facilities, which are essential for menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Although there is still little evidence, reports have recognised that ‘the introduction of appropriate water and sanitation facilities has been associated with improved girls’ attendance.’ In addition, WaterAid notes that ‘girls are particularly at risk of sexual violence when using unsafe facilities at school.’ Indeed, girls in the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camp in Bangladesh have reported feeling fearful in accessing latrines, and UNHCR notes that ‘young girls/children and women who walk long distances to water points are at risk of sexual violence.’
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In 2015, the world committed to achieving gender parity in education and to build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all with Sustainable Development Goal 4. Approaching this via WASH might seem like a circuitous route. But, in fact, supporting access to safe, hygienic WASH facilities in fragile states is an important step in the road to achieving education for all girls.
Huh. Girls. Who knew?
“Single sex?” What a remarkable innovation that would be in women’s safety, not only in Bangladesh.
Seeing the forbidden words feels almost illicit, like it’s an act of rebellion. I suppose it is, but damn me if that’s not depressing
This is good, but they’re still perpetuating the gender/sex confusion. The Taliban don’t prohibit girls from going to school based on “gender”; if they did, all the girls would have to do is claim to be trans, and they’d be let in. The prohibition is on the basis of sex.
WaM: I disagree. What perpetuates the confusion is the denial of synonymy when words actually are and always have been synonymous. What perpetuates the confusion is the insistence that there is some ill-defined thing called “gender”. The Taliban absolutely do prohibit girls from going to school based on their gender, because their gender is female.
NiV,
As a linguist, I disagree that the two terms are and have always synonymous. From the perspective of linguistics, where the word originated, gender is a way of classifying nouns within a language, often, though not always, with some basis on real-world sex, although it’s applied to concepts (tables, intelligence, etc.) that have no sex.
Feminists appropriated the word to refer to all the nonessential baggage that goes along with sex in humans–norms of dress, behavior, and so on–that have typically been used to oppress women. Gender, in this view, is all the shit we should be fighting to free ourselves from.
Both paternalistic traditionalists and TRAs want to blur this distinction, the former by saying if you’re a woman, you should conform to gender norms, the latter by saying that if you conform to gender norms for women, you’re a woman. They’re two sides of the same oppressive coin.
WaM,
I’m fairly certain that the male-or-female sense of “gender” is attested from the early 15th century. And while “sex” in English dates to the 14th, it’s not until the 15th that we see it used to mean the actual state of being male or female. That is, it was initially used in a collective sense, as in, “The female sex is that which produces large, immobile gametes.”
You likely have better access to resources to check than I, however.
I’m also well aware of when and why feminists began using “gender” as a term of art. There are three points here I would make. First, feminists did not invent this usage, but took it from psychology and John Money. Second, when Money and his ilk coined the sense, gender was in use as the polite, often literary, way to refer to males and females collectively and the state of being male or female. Third, to export a term of art from its proper context positively begs for trouble, because the specialized usage conflicts with common usage.
In order to benefit from blurring the distinction between two senses, those two senses must exist. If there is but one sense, there is no boundary to transgress. By using gender to refer to something related to but distinct from sex, that monster Money and later those well intentioned feminists created the very line that TRAs blur.
Amputating this gangrenous usage cuts the figurative legs out from under trans rhetoric, for their arguments and ideology supervene on gender-as-social-phenomenon. When the synonymy of sex and gender is affirmed, the utter batshit insanity and absurdity (in the logical sense) of their claims becomes starkly apparent. “Joe has male sex and female gender,” becomes, “Joe has male sex but female sex.”
My go-to source for the history of English is The Online Etymology Dictionary. It’s a remarkable project.
The short of it is: the grammatical sense of “gender” dates from the 14th C; the use of “gender” for “sex” from the early 15th C; “sex” itself from the late 14th C.
I don’t have time to respond to the rest of your comment right now, but I’d recommend my link as an entertaining and edifying rabbit hole.
“Rabbit hole” is definitely an apt description for etymonline, sort of like how tvtropes used to be, before it got all … creepy.