Throughout her life, Amy E. Ryken has been asked a version of the same question over and over: Are you a boy or a girl? Ms. Ryken, who worked as a schoolteacher for nearly 15 years and is now an associate professor of education at the University of Puget Sound, wanted to use questions she got from schoolchildren to help undergraduates who are training to be teachers deal with issues of gender identity in the classroom. So she’s published a short, spiral-bound book called Are You a Boy or a Girl? Conversations About Gender in Elementary Classrooms. In the book, she writes about how she was a tomboy growing up, how she is often called “Sir” in stores, and how she is still sometimes asked to leave the women’s restroom by people who think she’s a man.
Q. Why did you feel the need to publish this book, and what are you trying to accomplish?
A. With the accountability climate public-school teachers now work under, what is going on inside kids becomes eclipsed by all the rhetoric around test scores. Kids’ questions are just getting shut off. I see my own undergraduates, when a kid will raise their hand and ask: ‘Do you go to church? What do you know about drugs?’ And my student teachers will often say, “We don’t talk about that at school.” But what I want to show them is that there are often ways to address children’s questions about these things, including gender, and still deal with the curriculum demands. We can help students think about who they are and who they are becoming in addition to teaching them the curriculum.
Q. Why are issues of gender, specifically, important to handle in a public-school classroom?
A. Kids are doing all kinds of developmental work underneath the surface. They’re asking, ‘Who am I? Who are people around me? Who can I be in this world?’ What I notice in elementary classrooms is that gender is very prevalent and reinforced by students and teachers. When teachers address students, they say “boys and girls,” and they line up in lines that way. I have been asked this question about whether I am a girl or a boy so often by young children that it personally got me thinking, what are kids learning about gender from our society if I’m asked this question so consistently?
Q. Why do you think you are asked that question—and do you consider yourself transgendered?
A. I identify as a woman. But I’m 5-foot-11, I hardly have any hips, butt, or boobs, and all my life I got the message that this is not what girls look like. I grew up wearing overalls. I was athletic. I wear pants suits and have short hair.
Q. Aren’t there risks for teachers who talk about gender identity with public-school children?
A. My undergraduates will say, “What will parents think if a kid goes home and says: We were talking about if boys could wear ballerina tutus, I might lose my job.” What I’ve found, though, is my students breathe a sign of relief when we talk about my conversations with schoolchildren. It gives them a way to talk about sensitive issues. There is a danger to silencing the conversation. In every classroom in every single part of America there are kids who look around and don’t necessarily fit some perceived norms. Those kids are getting messages all the time just like I did—you don’t fit, you don’t fit, you don’t fit. I have had multiple e-mail messages from parents of gender-neutral children after a newspaper article on my book came out, parents who said, I have not met a teacher who makes my child feel comfortable with who they are. Thank you for opening up this conversation.
