'Trans experiences can transform everyone's perspective': Diversity lessons from the classroom

"At some point, normally, when I would explain to the boys how sensitivity and genitalia work, when it came to the vulva, there was always one of them who would say: 'Hey Teo, you've seen plenty, haven't you, because you fuck a lot, right?'" 

Teo Pardo is a high school biology teacher at Institut Sagrera Sant Andreu in Barcelona. 

Before qualifying as a teacher around five years ago, he spent over a decade visiting schools to give workshops on sexual education.  

"I told them: 'No, actually, it's not that I've seen a lot of them. I'm a trans man and I have one, so I know perfectly well how they work.'" 

Teo recounts to Catalan News how the boys in his workshops would react when he told them he was trans.

"Then, wow, there was silence. Suddenly, mouths open, elbowing each other, but then, and this was the most magical thing, suddenly they started to put their hands up. We started to hear voices that we hadn't heard before," Teo says. 

"They talked about their insecurities with their bodies from the moment I explained to them my experience with my body." 

These types of exchanges made Teo "think a lot about how, in the end, trans experiences, LGBTI experiences, can transform perspectives for everyone, not just for LGBTI people." 

"They allow us to talk about things that are very universal experiences," he says. 

Aware of discrimination 

Olga Sánchez is a primary school teacher at Institut Escola Sant Felip Neri. For around a decade this school in Barcelona's Old Town has been part of the Rainbow Schools project, promoting education on sexual and gender diversity. 

  

"I think that what we have achieved is not that big things have changed," Olga says, "but that our students, who have been working within this framework for many years, have a certain sensitivity or a more critical view towards information they find in books or information they receive externally." 

"They are more aware of actions or slogans, songs or content that could be discriminatory," she adds.   

But it has not been all plain sailing, as Olga explains when Catalan News asks if she received any pushback or resistance from parents. 

"There was one child's mother who didn't understand what we were trying to teach, and so she tried to convince me that what I was telling her was counterproductive because her daughter was very young, and I was going to talk to her about sex," Olga says. 

"I told her: 'I'm not going to talk about sex, I'm going to talk about people, how they express themselves, who they love, but I'm not going to talk about what sexual practices we should have.'"

Unlike Teo, who in his secondary school runs specific modules on sex education, with Olga in primary school, it's more about taking each and every opportunity to teach the young children about diversity.   

When she talks about the human body with her class of three-year-olds, for example.

"I wouldn't say: 'this is a woman's body' or 'this is a man's body,' but rather, 'there are bodies, some have certain things, others have others,'" Olga explains. 

"Inevitably, the children start saying to you: 'this is a boy,' 'this is a girl,' 'because I'm a boy and I have a penis,' and you say: 'well, but there are boys who don't have a penis.'" 

"It's not that you have to dedicate a specific amount of time to diversity each week, but rather that you have to take advantage of every occasion you can to advance this sense of diversity," she says. 

Allowing existing diversity to be seen 

A few years ago, Teo became pregnant. 

"Being in high school, of course my students saw it, and it was very interesting how they responded to it, extremely naturally," he tells Catalan News. 

"I think it's a very interesting experience for all of them because now, when it comes to pregnancy, everyone is very aware that there are some men, not many, but some men, especially trans men, that can get pregnant," Teo says. 

"I think in the end sometimes working on diversity isn't so much about making an effort to do a lot of workshops, but simply to allow the diversity that exists to be seen."