In Norway, children under the age of sixteen can now change their legal gender. Anniken Sørlie investigates how the legislation affects the way children and youth perceive their own identity.
When researchers examined bullying in twenty schools, they were told that the main problem was drama created by the girls. Their findings told a very different story, however.
When words like ‘gay’, ‘fag’, and ‘lesbo’ are used as insults it is mostly among friends. But that does not make them harmless, according to the Norwegian researcher Hilde Slåtten.
Girls who perform well, have high ambitions, and eventually get psychological problems are often characterised as too good. However, the good girl syndrome is neither a clinical diagnosis nor an established academic term. What is it with the good girls?
Reform, the Norwegian resource centre for men, has launched a new website – gendertest.no – to help preschool workers analyse gender in children’s literature. Do the books promote gender equality? Or do they reinforce destructive gender stereotypes?
In the public debate Norwegian schools are criticized for being feminized. But according to Professor Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, it is not the schools that are poorly suited to boys – it is the girls who are better suited to the demands of modern working life.
A dedicated football player, a disciplined martial arts practitioner or a respected weightlifter? According to a recent Norwegian study, young girls are most concerned with their appearance as they become teenagers, but boys must do something to become young men. Their choice of activity is also a choice of masculine identity.
Norwegian textbooks juxtapose a positive, liberal Norwegian sexuality with a negative non-Norwegian, often Muslim, sexuality. And nobody agrees on what racism entails or how the topic can be taught in the classroom.
