Schools are moving in the direction of gender neutrality by making the forms of address more gender-neutral

Rachana Ramesh

Neil Armstrong’s “One leap for man, one giant leap for mankind” has, in a way, forever excluded women from the first big space milestone humanity achieved collectively. ‘Mankind’, ‘early man’ and ‘man made’ are terms with encoded gender ideologies that have historically sidelined or dismissed women.

ined or dismissed women. Schools are moving to adopt gender neutrality in numerous ways. Some have chosen to modify rules around uniforms while others are making an effort to keep communication more gender-neutral. Looking at how gender biases are hidden away in our ambiguous language is an important tool to recalibrate learning from a very young level.

A school in Kerala has asked its students to address both male and female faculty members as just “teacher” instead. Doing away with gendered terms like “madam” and “sir.” The 72-year-old Senior Basic School in Olassery, Palakkad district is reportedly the first in Kerala to implement such a decision. The school has taken a personal endeavour to adopt genderneutral terms from a young age with 16 faculty members – nine women and seven men – teaching around 300 students from classes one to seven.

Last year, the decision by a lower primary school in Kerala to introduce gender-neutral uniforms for its students was reportedly supported by 90 percent of the students’ parents. According to parents, gender-neutral uniforms may indirectly teach the young in their formative years alone that it’s okay to not conform to regressive ideals dictating how men and women must live their lives. It provides the space for them to not feel confined to a particular gender identity. Such basic level changes made at schools will result in the sowing of the seed to provide young children with the comfort of not choosing a side and be able to explore their vulnerabilities without stereotypes hovering around their head.

Most languages, including English, need sex marking– as termed by Marilyn Fyre in 1983. This means that one needs to know the sex of a person to know with which pronouns to refer to them. This is an example of a scenario that is a symptom of the general tendency to make sex relevant even where it does not have to be. “In the discussion about gender-neutral pronouns, I offer the Persian language. There is only one pronoun “it” and no one has ever been confused about who’s who,” wrote Nasrin Naraghi on her Twitter account.

To paint a clearer picture, the same broken logic applies to titles. Mr Ramesh will continue to remain Mr Ramesh throughout his life, but Ms Kalpana becomes Mrs Kalpana as soon as she becomes a wife. Fye has also added to this note that the constant need to know the sex (and martial status) of the other person perpetuates the idea that the sex of a person is crucial in all walks of life. For her, this proved to be a key way in which language is used to perpetuate male dominance: by emphatically and tirelessly asserting the difference between a man and a woman.

Isabel Picornell quoted an article on her twitter – “the binary isn’t the end of the story, masculine isn’t the default, and people should be able to decouple action and concepts from gender” and said “excellent article.” Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, saw language as a type of social behaviour that linked thought and sound. His contemporaries gave ‘linguistic culture’ the same amount of importance as historic and scientific cultures have been in the making of society. This essentially means the centre of the matter is not so much about language affecting what we think about, but how we think about reality by breaking it down into categories and labelling them.

ategories and labelling them. But what comes first? Is it language or is it prejudice? Is gendered language a mirror to our cultural assumptions and biases about gender or do we shape our biases and behaviours based on the vocabulary we have? Think of it as money. The way you can convert money into anything and everything can be turned back into money, language can absorb social ideas and replug them, mirroring back social reality, as is.

It is important for schools to recognise problems with things we are conditioned to believe as normal despite the harm they pose to society. Along with the recognition, adoption of gender neutral ways -- may it be through language or linen, for the pupils of the future to learn and normalise is important.