Many LGBTQ+ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, some have turned to social media or YouTube.
In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors.
That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media.
“My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas.
Many LGBTQ+ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere.
As lawmakers in some states limit what can be taught about sex and gender, it will be that much more difficult for those students to come by inclusive material in classrooms.
New laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ+ content from classrooms.
My sex ed classes taught me that gay sex was a sin and condoms don’t prevent the spread of hiv among other things. None of this helped me. Even though I thought I was probably cishet in high school I knew it was bullshit and the only thing that helped me in my sex ed was teaching us to label detailed anatomical diagrams of reproductive biology, which was actually extremely helpful.
I shouldn’t have had to learn safe sex from the queer community. Nobody should have to learn from social media.
The thing about teenagers is that they’re people. Not person-lite, just full on people. And they deserve to know the realities of an important aspect of life the best we can teach it
It’s also why our history is important. The gays currently coming of age didn’t grow up with a big gap in their elders to make clear what aids is. I didn’t learn I could get hiv from lesbian sex until I read some scathing essays about the lesbian aids epidemic. Our history informs our survival
My sex ed classes growing up in the 90s was equally garbage, if it helps.
We went hard science, like what's in HIV.
But I didn't even learn anything about sex. And pretty much left college still uncertain if you had sex with a pregnant woman, the baby might grab your sausage.
My sex education class, and yes I really wish I was lying here:
They separated us by gender. A guy in his early 20s maybe late teens came in, hadn't seen him before. He gave a talk about how if we watched porn we would only be attracted to "a plastic bag" and not love our future wives while one of the super Catholic teachers we had nodded in agreement. Looking back I am pretty confident he was some college student in some religious school.
Not so fun fact, I have a sister who became a mom at age 19.
Sex education has always been about learning about puberty body changes, safe sex (namely not getting an STI/STD or having an unplanned pregnancy), and more recently the importance of consent. It has never been about expressing sexuality, sexual identity, or building relationships. I’m not sure I follow what is missing.
In order to learn about sex you're going to have to learn about either straight sex, gay sex, or both. Turns out both types of sex happen to exist. If you're going to learn about straight sex you should probably learn about gay sex too in case you're gay. If you're trans the topic of puberty and your changing body gets 10 times more complicated. You should probably learn about that in case you're trans. It would be helpful for queer kids and the things they experience to not be left out of sex ed, also so that kids who don't know there's some form of queer yet don't grow up thinking that they're broken.
Since both straight and gay sex exists, and because trans people exist too, learning about sex from those perspectives is important.
This kind of education is what could have stopped an entire country from thinking that AIDS is caused by being gay.
Excluding queer sexuality and gender from sex education is what we've been doing since forever, and surprise it's left queer kids unprepared for the things they will encounter, and the other kids with the kinds of assumptions that you express here.
We learned next to nothing on sex, straight or otherwise. It was just condoms, dental dams, periods/ovulation, wet dreams, how babies are made, and consent
They don’t teach straight sex other than basic reproduction. They are trying to prevent teen pregnancy, and that’s something you don’t have to worry about with gay sex.
You are mistaking this as being about "expressing"when it's about navigating it, and that certainly includes understanding healthy realtionship development between individuals that decide to engage in sexual activity.
The treatment sex ed as being risk assessment and harm reduction strategy is incomplete without some key points that also protect people having sex for recreational purposes specifically ones that LGBTQIA people tend to use as their primary forms of sexual engagement. Like if you don't have a segment on anal sex with information about how it makes some STIs more transmissible, how anal sex with female partners is more likely to cause injury, and yes some basic pointers on techniques for making it safer for the people who rely on it as their primary form of being sexually intimate then you do leave people open to :
Higher physical risk of injury when experimenting with sex.
being potentially pressured into something with unique models and techniques needed for truly effective STI reduction.
people believing that it's ultimately less of a big deal or life course altering because "you can't get pregnant" so treating those behaviours as less risky
Removing or omitting sex ed that does not mention other risky forms of sexual intimacy other than heterosexual reproductive sex means you are creating blindspots of safety for everyone as many forms of sex like anal have become culturally prized even in heterosexual relationships. The prudish idea of "we can't teach them techniques !" often stands of the way of fully comprehensive safety instruction leaving some demographics out in the cold as privileged people continue to treat those forms of sex as taboo and stigmatized.
Teaching minors how to have sex is just asking for it to get banned even more than it already is. You really think a public school lesson plan of “how to fuck someone in the ass” will be supported my even a bare majority?
About 15 years ago I remember my teacher calling anal sex "unnatural" and dodging questions entirely by refusing to answer more after someone brought this up.
Y'all had sex ed? My class just played kickball instead because the guest speaker bailed and the actual teachers didn't wanna teach us.
The most I got from school was: "hey, you have female reproductive organs! Here's the cheapest maxi-pad! You'll need it for when you start bleeding! That's a totally normal thing btw!"
The thing is, I have endometriosis and a heart condition. I didn't realize that the amount of blood loss I went through on a monthly basis was too much. Nobody ever told me that bleeding until you experience symptoms of bad blood loss isn't normal. I also kept all the abnormal pain to myself until I was 23.
Maybe there’s useful sex Ed these days, but all I remember are very dry boring biology videos about embarrassing subjects. I bet most of these lgbt kids also have reproductive organs and get embarrassed talking about them.
The complaint is that sex education only teaches about sex and not other topics like gender? Or are we back to arguing sex and gender are the same thing and sex education isn't about sex education anymore.