Next month I'm going to be participating in a two day workshop on gender expression and creativity in kids. There are about sixty people attending and most of us will take 15 minutes to share our work or perspective, and blissfully spend the rest of the time listening and learning.
I'm going to spend my 15 minutes talking about how sex education mostly fails to include kids who are actively exploring their gender identity, which I would argue was most of us, before we learned the hard way that anything other than acting "normal" will get us in a whole lot of trouble.
As I'm preparing for the talk I realized that some of the basics of talking about gender were missing from this site. So I thought I'd start to fill in some of those holes. Only once you start to talk, or write, about this stuff you realize that it's less about filling something in than it is about trying to pull things apart. We all have rich and complicated experiences of gender and of sex and of sexuality. An educator's task is less about telling you how to think then helping you clear the brush, so you can see (and feel) things in a different way. We're like gardeners in that way. When I look at a front yard over grown all I see is weeds. My friends who garden see worlds of beauty and possibility.
I'll be adding material for the next week or two, today starting with some basics about the difference between sex and gender.
Read More: What's the Difference Between Sex and Gender?
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