Rewind to when I was in high school. I was fairly opened-minded, but if someone told me that gender was a social construct I would probably look at them with a blank face. I would internally respond with questions like "What does that even mean?" or "Aren’t gender and sex the same?" Fast forward to senior-university-student me and, thanks to all of my gender-studies-related courses, I am now the person letting others know that gender is in fact a social construct. There is such a thing as gender norms/stereotypes and that transgender people are alive and well.

I understand all these things now because of those classes, but high school me was never exposed to any of that knowledge. In today’s society where couples are raising gender non-conforming children and toddlers are being documented about realizing they’re transgender, maybe it’s time to educate teenagers on all-things gender studies. If someone grows up in a household that preaches about how boys can only play with action figures and girls can only play with dolls, and then they have no exposure to any different kind of opinion other than Facebook articles they choose to skip over, how can we really blame them for being unaware of these gender possibilities?

We need to start educating teens on the differences between sex and gender, how accustomed we’ve become to gender norms and all of the other fun stuff that I’ve learned in my college classes. Teaching kids this may not end up having them agree, due to whatever reasons, but if they are able to understand then it could make life a little easier for those experiencing the life of someone not cis. Then maybe when you inform a high school student that gender is a social construct, instead of looking at you like you have five heads, they’ll chime in with the knowledge they’ve absorbed from their latest fourth-period gender studies class.