“We're not just failing our young people by failing to provide them with the sex ed that they need,” says Cyrulnik-Dercher. It adds consent to the curriculum and requires classes to address the health needs of trans, intersex, and LGBQ individuals. The bill forbids public schools from pushing any particular religious ideology or doctrine, and from using shame-based or stigmatizing language. Colorado’s legislature has just passed a bill that if sex education is taught, it must be evidence-based, medically accurate, and inclusive. We fail to speak frankly about sex to our kids because we’re afraid it will give them permission to do it. In America, we conflate education with promotion. Right now, most of it is procreation centric, which then also covertly is heterocentric.” We need to be talking straight sex and gay sex and trans sex and non-gender sex. Few people that are having sex are actually doing it for procreative reasons. “You're able to make decisions about what you're going to do outside the classroom because of what you get in the classroom.”Īnd as Donaghue points out, “the bulk of sex ed curricula fail to even recognize that most sex is for pleasure.
While a good deal of any person’s practical sex education does come from real-life trial and error, why not offer every kid a solid foundation? “People are going to learn by their own life experiences, but let's set young people up for success,” says Cyrulnik-Dercher. When a student doesn’t learn something in a classroom context, and can’t go to his or her queer peers because there aren’t any, there’s no other way to learn but by doing. In my personal pre-internet case as a gay kid, being left out of the conversation led to what I can only call on-the-job training: I fumbled through a lot of my early same-sex sexual experiences because I had no idea what to do or expect. “Thinking that we can leave young people to their own devices and let them muddle their way through the confusing amount of information out there isn't right.” (The other states with No Homo Promo laws are Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.) Health classes in South Carolina still “ may not include a discussion of alternate sexual lifestyles, except in the context of instruction concerning sexually transmitted diseases.” Even if queer and trans-affirming curricula did exist, teachers in these states are expressly forbidden to teach them. Up until earlier this year, AIDS education in Arizona could not reveal even the concept of safe homosexual sex. Students in seven states are living under “No Homo Promo” laws, dictating that if sex education is provided, it must either cover LGBTQ people in a negative way, or not mention them at all.Īlabama law requires classes to emphasize “in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.” “American sex education centers the heterosexual lifestyle and operates from the idea that nothing else exists outside of that.” mandate sex education, though they don't all cover what the Centers for Disease Control consider essential to sex ed, which includes topics like decision-making skills to reduce sexual risks and the proper use of condoms. Though the world has changed since I was in sixth grade and poor Sister Helen had to tell us the facts of life-penis goes in here, baby comes out there, now don’t even think about any of this again until you’re married-American curricula have barely evolved.
As adults, we just have to speak to kids honestly and non-judgmentally about the full range and limitless possibilities of human sexuality. We can give all American students, of all genders and orientation, the information they need to make strong choices for their physical and emotional health. We educate American kids about their sexual health in a way that leaves students poorly informed, forces queer kids to fend for themselves, and earns us all a grade of incomplete.įor everyone’s sake, we need to change it-and we can. It’s mortifying and moralistic, usually delivered by a gym teacher who’s as sweaty as you are, and worst of all, there’s not enough of it. In the pantheon of adolescent horrors, sex education is up there with your eighth-grade yearbook picture.