In a posts In Dagsavisen on 22 November, Niko Hoff Almenning shares his reaction to KrF’s move to remove gender identity from the school’s curriculum. Almenning claims that KrF representatives, by claiming that there are two genders, reject the existence of transgender, non-binary and intersex people.
It is important to keep the tongue straight in the mouth. Of course, the statement that there are two genders does not deny the existence of any. The problem, however, is that a new understanding of gender, through the concept of gender identity, has crept into the school’s teaching materials in various ways.
Last week at the latest, my own second-grade boy clicked on a film clip that is available on Cappelen Damm’s digital learning arena “The School”, where gender change is taken up as the biggest matter of course in the world.
In the same week, I led my students in the fifth grade through the student survey, where they had to tick off whether they are a boy, a girl or something else.
Both as a father and a teacher, I react to the fact that individual people’s subjective experiences are made the subject of a general, objective understanding of gender.
Finding out who you are and who you want to be will always be an essential part of the journey through childhood.
Of course we have to talk about identity in school. Finding out who you are and who you want to be will always be an essential part of the journey through childhood.
But it would be very unnatural if the school classified individual students as children of God, based on their experience of being one. Despite the fact that for some students it is an important part of their identity.
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The point is that we must distinguish between subjective identity and objective reality. This has been the main problem with the introduction of the concept of gender identity in the school system.
The concepts of gender and gender identity have been mixed together. It contributes to the fact that claims that there are two sexes are clearly equated with rejecting the existence of certain people.
The concepts of gender and gender identity have been mixed together.
Gender identity has become a term that almost sanctifies one’s subjective experience of gender, especially in cases where this experience is characterized by doubt, dysphoria and a lack of stability.
The more general category identity is no longer of importance, because supposedly it is one’s inner experience of gender that really defines who one is.
What is it that actually makes gender so important, compared to other markers of identity?
Is it perhaps because gender is something biologically elementary? Is it perhaps because gender is the very basis of our existence, through the sexual fertilization in the mother’s womb?
We must teach students to respect those who think differently. At the same time, we must teach students to distinguish between subjective experiences and objective facts.
We must take care of all the students in the Norwegian school. Both those who are secure in their own gender, and those who have challenges related to gender. We must do our best to take care all that somehow stands out or feels different.
We must teach students to be generous, and to respect those who think differently. In the midst of this, we must at the same time teach students to distinguish between subjective experiences and objective facts.
That gender is binary is difficult to scientifically argue against. Non-binary is therefore referred to in Great Norwegian Lexicon as persons who do not wishes to call oneself neither male nor female.
Statements that there are two genders do not deny the existence of either.
It is nothing but theirs experience which is the basis for this classification. However, a school with integrity must be able to distinguish between inner experiences and biological realities.
This has proven to be difficult as long as the concept of gender identity has been allowed to set the agenda for gender education.
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