Ethics Club

Tuesday, the third of May.

The Topic: LGBTQ Rights and Sexism in schools.

• Many points are raised on the subject of coming out in school.

In my school, the year 7's, 8's and 9's all believe that it is ‘cool’ to use derogatory terms for gay people as everyday language. As a Year 10, I can clearly see how pointless and harmful this language is. Our resident Sixth-Formers told us that, in Sixth Form, the LGBTQ community is very open and accepted. It is not a massively big deal to come out, and apparently many girls and boys walk up to their friends, tell them who they are, and their friends say “ok” and go back to their conversations. This would never happen in my school until you got to Sixth Form, because (still) many people are not accepting the now widespread community.

• The Sixth-Formers, Barney and Alastair, say that the problem is sexism, and this sparks a whole new conversation.

According to them, many of the girls in Sixth Form are die-hard feminists, and a lot of the boys accidentally say small things, like “girls aren't strong enough to do this” or “engineering is a boys’ subject”. They don’t mean anything, but this ingrained sexism is proof of how our culture has evolved around thoughtless sexism.

My maths teacher, for instance, at the start of the year. She told us that she needed the box of textbooks bringing up from the maths corridor, and that could she please have two volunteers. The entire back row of girls put up their hands — and I know for a fact that they are very strong, stronger that most of the boys — and she ignored them. She peered around the room, searching for some boys to pick on, and when she couldn't find any, she turned to the back row of girls and snapped at them to put down their hands, there was no point in them volunteering, it was far too heavy for girls anyway. When one of them started to protest, she told them that girls were far too weak to carry a box of books and that she needed a nice, strong boy to carry them. The boy she picked took about fifteen minutes to get back with the box, because he could barely carry it. She had picked the weakest boy out of all of them. (Complete idiot, she is.) Then, to prove a point, the girl who had protested lifted the box with one arm and slammed it down on her desk. This girl then swanned back to her seat amid raucous applause.