In case you missed it, the big news this week was a widely shared open letter written by Agatha Tan, a student from Hwa Chong Institute (HCI).

Her letter to her principal was in reaction to a relationship workshop organised by Focus on the Family (FotF). The workshop provided a booklet as a teaching aid, which Tan opined that it was sexist and her letter spoke about gender relations and stereotypes the booklet perpetuated.

Gender issues clearly resonate with some Singaporeans. But what is gender stereotyping? Is it natural? Is it harmful? Here's a cheat sheet on what gender stereotyping is all about:

What is Gender Stereotyping?

Gender stereotypes are rules that you assign to males and females on what to think and how to act. For example, you will probably stare at a man wearing a skirt walking on the street. This is because there is an unspoken rule that a skirt can only be worn by females. Or that men are not supposed to be as emotional as women.

This is gender stereotyping.

What is wrong with gender stereotypes?

Gender stereotypes are dangerous (like most other stereotypes, really) because it reduces the different genders into a set of rules that one has to conform to, so long as you identify as a particular gender. For example, men should be macho and women should be soft and kind.

It externalises something that should be kept internal. Stereotypes make public what should be private and personal. As Emma Watson said in her viral HeForShe speech, we should start to “perceive gender on a spectrum, not as two opposing sets of ideals”. It can get messy and chaotic, though.

Gender stereotypes are a way out of the chaos of gender; we label and push people into boxes, giving them a set of rules that they have to follow strictly. Not doing so will get you labeled as abnormal and you might solicit unwelcomed stares from the general public.

But who is the society to tell us how to feel and behave? Should a man be judged and measured based on how much muscle he has? And is a woman considered more womanly than another because she has longer hair and talks softly?

What is so dangerous about including gender stereotypes in a relationship-education publication for students, then?

These publications would force the impressionable students to internalize the stereotypes, confining them to a very narrow definition of what is "female" and what is "male". And what they have to do to be considered a "female" and a "male".

For instance, from Agatha's photos, there is one that lists the things females and males would say. The lists show "male" and "female" as distinct categories and mutually exclusive, deliberately upping the differences between male and female, when in truth, no such differences exist.

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Photos via[/caption]

As Watson said, gender is a spectrum and though "male" and "female" are on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are not mutually exclusive.

At the age of seventeen or eighteen, many students are still trying to negotiate their sexual identities and sexuality. By pushing such gender differences and stereotypes in their direction and forcing them to accept these stereotypes as "real" and "true", FotF is not doing the students any good.

In fact, they might even be harming the mental well-being of these impressionable teenagers. Teenagers who reject such gender stereotypes would be ostracized and excluded by their peers. Humans are social creatures. Being pressured to act a certain way even if one feels otherwise is unhealthy, this applies even to adults.

So, what can we do?

We can start by accepting that gender is fluid and that humans are complex creatures that can never be neatly labeled and placed into a box. There are teenagers (and people!) out there who are still lost and confused over their own gender and sexual identities.

By accepting the fluidity of gender, we can support them in their own negotiations and discoveries.

Only when we have fully accepted the fluidity of gender, could we be sure that no such rubbish booklets would be handed out to impressionable teenagers, harming their mental well-being.

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Top photo adapted from here and here

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