Reimagining gender through policy development: the case of a ‘single-sex’ educational organisation

Abstract

In 2005, a feminist educational organisation in the USA for young women, ages 14 -21, adopted a policy in order to clarify their target constituency of girls and young women. The policy defined 'girls and young women' not as a designation associated with fixed biological sex, but instead as a self-determined identity label creating an explicit policy of inclusion to gender non-conforming students, including transgender youth, who self-identified as 'girls' or 'young women'. This article traces the series of influences that prompted the development of the policy, as well as the learning curves for this feminist educational all-girls' community, and the discussions that led to both the unanimous adoption of the policy and a subsequent larger cultural shift within the organisation. This analysis seeks to add to an understanding and exploration of policies that address the de facto exclusion of gender non-conforming, intersex, and transgender youth from gender-based educational settings.

Education and masculinities.

“…Boys who present as other than hegemonically masculine (Connell, 1995) are not the only to suffer at the hands of single-sex schooling situations: The very construction of masculinity as aligned to the body of a boy is ultimately limiting to any youth who troubles these norms of gender identity and expression. To address Jackson's concern, Douthirt Cohen's (2012) article outlined a new kind of sex reform: the inclusion of genderqueer or transgender youths who identify as female, feminine, or girl in a feminist educational organization in the United States. This gender recruitment policy underwent extensive deliberation to come into action, a requirement for policy reform that Douthirt Cohen claimed gives stakeholders buy-in and allows them time to reimagine how single-sex educational settings can be reorganized to include those youths who do not fit the gender binary.…”