School for Girls has asked staff to not use the word “girls”
No “girls” at Altrincham Girls….
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls has asked staff to not use the word “girls” when talking to pupils because they don’t want transgender pupils to be “misgendered”. But say there are no plans to drop the “Girls” from the school’s name.
The plan was announced in a letter to parents from Principal Stephanie Gill. She said …” We have moved to using gender neutral language in all our communications with students and parents. We are working to break ingrained habits in the way we speak to and about students, particularly referring to them collectively as ‘girls’.”
[takes deep breath]
How can you possibly be a principal of a girls’ school while you are working to train your students (who are girls) to break ingrained habits such as talking about girls?
How, in fact, can you have even basic rights-respecting attitudes to girls and women and yourself if you are busy trying to get rid of the word and category “girls”?
Why would a woman whose career it is to teach and administer the teaching of girls decide that she and her school need to remove the word “girls” from their language?
What the hell do they think they’re doing?
Ok, I know, they think they’re being sensitive toward trans people (aka, for some reason, trans “folx”). But how can they possibly think that sensitivity to trans people requires them to erase the words for this whole massive subordinated group of people?
Should we stop talking about workers in order to be sensitive to rich people?
Should we stop talking about black people in order to be sensitive to white people who “feel black” inside?
Should we stop talking about immigrants in order to be sensitive to people who like tamales?
Look, if humans ever get to the point where women are not seen as inferior by anyone anywhere then maybe it would make sense to talk more about people and less about women and men (although the whole childbirth thing not to mention the whole procreation thing hinders getting rid of sexual differentiation entirely), but guess what, we are not there yet. We’re not in sight of there yet. We’re so far from there that it’s pathetic and ludicrous.
I wonder how Altrincham Girls School is talking about #MeToo.
“Vovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”
Loss of words, I’m at.
Manual service providers, perhaps?
Melanin rich people?
Of course it is a School for Girls that issued this policy. It would never be a School for Boys or a men-only college that would make such a language edict. One only hears about young women transitioning but still wanting to stay at schools for girls or women. Where are the trans-women demanding an end to misgendering at Wabash College or the Haverford School?
(Related: it appears that only one of the four remaining men’s colleges in the US accepts trans students, but they state they will continue to use gendered language.)
But… it’s a girls’ school, so, I mean… Wouldn’t all the students there think of themselves as girls, regardless of their presentation or anatomy? Are there people at this school who think of themselves as something other than girls? Why?
I have been immersing myself in radical feminist sites lately and seeing just how incoherent trans theory has become. It’s shocking and disheartening.
Oh but some of them might be gender-nonconforming or non-binary or pangender or [choose one from a long and ever-lengthening list].
But then if they are those things and not girls, why are they at that school?
Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Complaints is on the 47th floor, give them my regards.
Mount Holyoke, and I expect other women’s colleges, has permitted students to stay at the school even when the students decide they are trans sometime during their years there. I suspect the OP school is dealing with the same situation, a girl in third year deciding she’s a boy, and similar. Their admission policy might be different from their continuation policy.
Sackbut: that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
Says Mount Holyoke:
So you can apply to Holyoke even if you’re a man?
Smith doesn’t accept applications from people identifying as men.
Oh, sodding hell. That’s altogether too close to home. As in “a couple of miles down the road” too close.
Doesn’t seem that big a deal but that might be because I’m not a girl (if ‘girl’ is to have any meaning whatsoever) or trans.
The oddity is the head’s apparent belief that pupils who have decided to attend an institute called a ” Girls School” will be traumatized by being addressed in it as ‘Girls’.
Holyoke has had male students for decades.
Its particularly outrageous that the school would engage in this ridiculous language-policing while leaving the forbidden ‘g-word’ on the signage and stationery. The thoughts and speech of the staff and students are cheaper than a few reams of letterhead.
How many actual, real life, trans students has the school EVER had? And how many, if any, of them have bought into this woman-erasing cult?
I still find it strange that at Mt. Holyoke, it’s not the case that “a transman is a man, period.” They declare a difference between transmen and non-trans men.
Yes, Ben, but those transmen were once women, so can never be fully men, right? But a transwoman was AMAB, and therefore is a better woman than women can ever hope to be, because men are better at EVERYTHING, including being women!
Or perhaps it’s just that AMAB people are better at shouting when they don’t get enough deference.
See, for instance, India Willoughby on Celebrity Big Brother.