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Paper short abstract:

An analysis of MEXT official documents concerning primary schools and fieldwork research (interviews with primary schools teachers) will present the effectiveness of LGBT-inclusive measures at schools.

Paper long abstract:

Concerns for school-based homophobia is increasing in Japan, yet there is a tendency to focus on individual incidents of homophobic bullying rather than the cultural and institutional factors supporting them. This topic is now mostly related to high school and university period. However, since the 2010 decade, the Japanese Ministry of Education published for the first time some notes and survey about the measures to include LGBT pupils at primary school and also junior high schools. Those documents were issued in April 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016 and the latest in 2017.

Through the analysis of these official documents, we will show that far from being LGBT friendly, the Ministry of Education trying to focus only about medical assistance for transgender students. There is clearly a disjunction between transsexuality, perceived only as a medical anomaly, and the sexist and heteronormative school settings, symbolized by the 1999 MEXT Guideline of Sex education never revised due to the gender free bashing in the 2000s. This disjunction is by no means a coincidence: it allows the conservative part of the body politic to keep its ideals of feminine and masculine roles fixed, while recognizing the presence of transsexuals in Japan.

This analysis of the MEXT official documents will be confronted with fieldwork data, through participative observation of primary schools and more specifically, to gender-equality research group of Y city and sex education research group of M city, in 2014 and 2019. These data will show the role of teachers and school directors when the MEXT edit notes and surveys but do not change the compulsory textbooks, which rejects any questioning of gender norms, especially with sex education program.