[written with harikeerthan & Doctorsaheba in TheQuint - with some edits]

A few weeks back, NCERT released a groundbreaking booklet designed to sensitise teachers about their implicit gender-related biases: a hopeful step towards creating safer, gender-affirming spaces in schools around India.

Following a right-wing backlash against this document titled ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’, the National Commission for ‘Protection’ of Child Rights issued a letter to NCERT, suggesting it was ‘conspiring to traumatise school students in name of gender sensitisation’.

The outrage against the guide proves the need for schools to start the process of unlearning systemic and implicit gender biases to create safer spaces for all genders through gender and trans-affirming training guides.

The World Health Organization defines gender as "the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours, and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other."

On the other hand, 'sex' is understood as a designation – typically male, female or intersex – given at birth, based on a person’s external anatomy, chromosomes, gonads, and sex hormones.

Still, these are oversimplified explanations with a historic legacy of being misused in the context of intersex, trans, and gender-nonconforming people.

“The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change,” Simón(e) D Sun, a doctoral candidate in the Tsien Lab at New York University's Neuroscience Institute, writes in the Scientific American.

The mainstream science used to back arguments about the binary to uphold differences between ‘males’ and ‘females’, falls apart the more you dig into the details of how genes, gonads, and hormones can keep biological sex subject to change.

But as individuals, we actively or passively continue to impose a gender binary that represses everyone at different levels, regardless of their gender identity.

These ideas paint trans and intersex people’s bodies as controversies, perpetuating mainstream fear that doubles down as policing, hate crimes, and violence that disproportionately affecting femme folks at intersecting marginalised identities.

https://www.thequint.com/neon/gender/ncert-manual-trans-affirming-guide-step-towards-liberation-lgbtq-gender-inclusivity-schools#read-more