Today during French class a little (okay big) incident occurred. I'll go into more details on a separate thread, but basically we got onto the topic of gender identity. My teacher stated that she will automatically use he or she as a pronoun when describing someone BASED ON THEIR PHYSICAL BODY. I asked if she didn't know their gender, if she would use they/them/their, and she said that it's 'grammatically incorrect'. There was a lot of other bs in the conversation but she also didn't know what any nonbinary sexualities or genders were. Actually, she didn't know what non binary meant. I did research and found out the last time my school had a professional development day on GSMs was 2 years ago. Half of my teachers weren't here two years ago. Im pissed at this teacher for a lot of her comments, but I just want to educate this teacher because I felt beyond uncomfortable. I've been looking up videos/websites to explain gender identity but I couldn't find any on assuming pronouns. So does anyone know of any? Also if you are in the education system how and how often are staff taught about GSM's?
Well I don't think it ever got mentioned in the four years I worked in a primary school, but then nor did sexuality either...perhaps they think ours are too little to know about it... Most people don't know what non-binary genders are incidentally, unless they have a reason to, because it just doesn't come up outside of LGBT specific conversations very often! Also, just as a warning, because while I think teaching anyone a little tolerance is a good thing, I don't imagine your teacher is going to be exactly thrilled when you come back at her with 'So I found this website you should really look at after your outburst the other day'...I'm not saying don't do it, just be careful HOW you do it, or you could land yourself in a lot of bother!
