A primary school. Illustrative photo.Image: KEYSTONE
Parents of students at a Geneva primary school are objecting to a questionnaire asking them to answer about the gender and sex of their children, including those under 7 years old.
Parents from the Geneva Carl-Vogt primary school couldn’t believe their eyes. Last week, they received a multiple-choice questionnaire inviting them to respond on a voluntary basis to intimate questions relating to their child(ren) schooled in this establishment located on the left bank of the Rhône.
Here are the questions asked in this MCQ aimed, among others, at parents with children aged 5 or 6:
“What gender does your child identify with?
- Girl
- Boy
- Other. Please specify:…
- I prefer not to answer”
“What was the sex of your child at birth?
- Girl
- Boy
- Other. Please specify:…
- I prefer not to answer”
The questionnaire distributed to parents of Carl-Vogt primary school in Geneva.
This questionnaire is part of research carried out by the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Geneva (UNIGE). This is research on “the proactive functioning of working memory below and above 7 years of age”.
What does this cover? The director of Carl-Vogt primary school, Fabienne Gianinazzi, joined by watsondoesn’t know exactly.
“We regularly receive studies sent by Uni Mail, the university geographically close to our establishment. I myself was not aware of the content of this MCQ. What I know is that its distribution in our school, as perhaps in others, has been approved by the directorate of compulsory education, the DGEO.”
Fabienne Gianinazzi, director of Carl-Vogt primary school
“Intrusive and vicious”
This parent of a 5-year-old child attending Carl-Vogt primary school believes that “we are dealing here with an intrusive and vicious questionnaire”. Intrusive in that “it interferes in the privacy of the child, therefore, in that of the parents”. Vicious because “it pushes parents to question the child about aspects of his personality which belong to him, which there is no reason to disturb at that age and probably not later either, at least in a school setting.”
This parent, in this case a father, finds the question “What was the sex of your child at birth” particularly “out of place, the word is weak”, as if it went without saying that he could have changed it between his birth and his five years. This father adds:
“I do not deny that children are born with an indeterminate sex, and I completely respect this state of affairs and the difficulty posed by such a situation. But it is not this particularity which is questioned in the multiple choice questions which were sent to us. What this MCQ encourages us to do is to question our 5 or 6 year old children about their gender feelings in relation to their sex. This is a completely unwelcome initiative.”
This parent of a student indicates to watson that a WhatsApp group of dissatisfied parents was created following the distribution of this questionnaire.
“We are quite angry, I won’t hide it from you”
The father of a 5 year old student
We contacted by telephone the university professor responsible for the research project including the criticized MCQ. She did not wish to answer our questions.
This Monday afternoon, we sent questions relating to the multiple choice questions to the Department of Public Instruction (DIP) and its head, Anne Hiltpold. We are waiting for their answers. The liberal-radical state councilor intervened ten days ago to put an end to an initiative taken by the Geneva primary school of Lully, which consisted of transforming Mother’s and Father’s Day into a “people’s day”. that we like”.
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