the 90s were kind of half-backwards and half-forward thinking in terms of gender identity. nowadays, this isn't an issue, but you were still expected to segregate along gender lines in the 90s. they at least gave you sort of a choice.
i went to one of the better high schools in ottawa. ontario, and most of canada, has a publicly funded catholic school system. it's actually a constitutional right, going back to what was called the "manitoba schools question", which lead to laurier's great compromise. this is middle school history in canada. canada had some slavery that was abolished earlier than the united states, but it was too cold here for plantations, so the slavery that existed was closer to indentured servitude. there has never been a large population of black people in canada. the school question was about catholics (irish, italians, francophones, spaniards (also very low total population, always. this area was never settled by spanish or portugese, only by british and french.)) and protestants (germans, brits, scandinavians). since then, we've had massive levels of immigration from non-christian countries, which has created an almost race-based school segregation that really needs to be abolished but is going to be very hard to get rid of because it's in the constitution and is intentionally hard to get rid of due to it being a legitimate rights issue 100-150 years ago, as the protestant brits started governing catholic french colonies.
in the 90s, the catholic system in ontario was 99% french, irish or italian. there were never more than 50 black kids in the whole school at any one time, and it was usually closer to 20. in later years, there started to be more christian arabs from egypt or syria. the "protestant" or public system was everybody else. the catholic schools were better funded and had better programs.
my mother's family was anglican and i didn't get baptised until i was four and only because the catholic school system started at age four while the public system started at age five. my parents sent me to preschool. so i would have otherwise skipped a year, which would have defeated the point. my father's parents were catholic, at least tentatively. my father's father was not a very good or nice person, from what i hear.
both of my parents were atheists and i was not raised to be religious. i did not accept the other sacraments of eucharist (i didn't want to be a vampire. really.) or confirmation (the latter being the catholic version of a bar mitzvah) when i was in middle school. i have never gone to a catholic church for service with my parents, ever.
my parents just realized that the catholic school system was better, so had me baptized to get me into the school. there's a richard dawkins video where he discusses this as a phenomenon in britain, although i don't recall the name of it.
well, that, and my mother was off-the-wall racist and didn't want me to go to school with "somalians". canada absorbed a large number of somalian refugees in the 90s. i have tended to criticize this decision, but on some level she had a point. i would probably be a very different person than i am now and received an inferior education as a young person if had gone to public school, and the person i am now would not respect the person i might have been very much.
it wasn't that bad, really. it's not like i was beaten by priests or something. so, i had to spend a few hours a week when i was a kid in a "religion" block during elementary school, which the school i went to treated as Colouring Book Class. i don't remember a single religious lesson at all of any sort. in middle and high school, the classes had themes that were like geography or sociology courses, or at least were if you're an atheist. grade 12 religion was about morality and wasn't particularly tied to catholic theology; i did a project on pesticide runoff in southern ontario as a moral issue, and i learned a fair amount about the intensity of agriculture in ontario and the amount of pollution it creates doing it. grade 11 was a "world religions" course that had sections on islam, buddhism, hinduism, judaism, protestantism etc and is really something every kid that age should be taught as it helps you learn a little about the people around you, for better or worse. i have more respect for buddhist and hindus than i do for muslims. we even had a field trip to the local hindu temple and the local jewish synagogue.
so, it's not like i got molested and beat up or anything, although i know some people did. some of the differences were a waste of time but some of them were useful.
it did, however, mean that i had the privilege of going to a high school with a large music department, a drama department, an esthetician department, an electronics department and several other departments that most public schools didn't have the funding for.
that gave me some options to avoid taking shop with. i did not want to walk into the room at all. ever.
i only had to take something like it thrice, in grade 7, in grade 9 (as a third of the course) and in grade 12. that was the total requirements.
in grade 7, they let me take home ec instead, which was helpful as i learned how to sew for the first time.
i flat out skipped school for the section in grade 9 and it didn't affect my grade due to the grading system which took two out of the three sections. the other two sections were computers (which were still exotic things in the 90s) and visual art.
in grade 12, i took a course on electronics instead. like, breadboards and boolean math and whatnot. we built some circuits. i learned how to solder.
so, i'm sorry, but i actually didn't ever go to this class in school. sorry.