Even the bare minimum, subminimum really, STD prevention and PIV stuff was a hard won victory against the KKKri$$tians, who just want no one to get any sex education at all.

Yeah, I was made to think that being intersex was a problem that needed to be fixed and something to be ashamed of because my body was deformed. Something went “wrong” with my development, that’s why I grew breasts and could only grow neck scraggles with a small patch of fur under my lip and my voice never cracked and ended up so much shorter than my dad. 🙄

I spent so long with a complex about the ways I wasn’t a real man that it took me a really long time to realize I’m actually a woman.

mine was like 3 decades ago. i remember like it was all cishetero normative, and even then focused just on the anatomical mechanisms… mostly the fact that the only absolutely safe thing you could do was nothing. consent not mentioned. hell, jorkin’ it wasn’t really discussed either, except to say that most women didn’t really do that, only guys. eye roll.

this was at age 14, in a big 200 seat auditorium, with a part time PE coach lamenting that this had to be taught due to some state wide requirement. also, not seemingly a type of guy whose partner would characterize as a sensitive and capable sexual partner.

needless to say, a lot of the people i went to school with would characterize their kids as accidental/didn’t mean to, and would only really, seriously investigate “family planning” after they had like 3 kids, didn’t want anymore, but still wanted to bust with their partner regularly. i remember one friend said to me that it was impossible [in a cishetero relationship] to prevent having kids because, quote, “shit happens”. guy was like 40 at the time, with two kids and on his third marriage! smdh

Having been sent out of a sex ed class I was teaching assistanting for sremoveding laughing quietly at the word “boobs”, the 2 problems are the tiny amount of time put aside for it and the fact that adults talking to kids about sex and relationships is super embarrassing for everyone involved. Having full time sex educators who are actually trained to deal with the embarrassment of the situation delivering a regular sex ed class would allow for more topics to be covered in wider detail, instead of just the bare minimum to stop anyone getting pregnant.

Edit: sremovedthorpe problem

I would feel betrayed by public school sex ed if I went to public school. I went to Catholic school. We had a half-assed explanation of cishet breeding anatomy in 7th grade. For some reason, high school health class was rolled into high school gym class, which you didn’t have to take if (like me) you were in band class instead, so I received no formal sex ed in high school. That’s arguably a good thing because, again, Catholic school.

I do remember there being some mandatory assembly in elementary school where they had some Christian abstinence-only young adult presenters going off about how oxytocin is supposedly like tape; it’s strong if you bond it to something once and gets weaker the more you remove it to attach it to something else.

The guy presenter likened finding a mate to picking fruit and asked the AMABs in the audience if they’d rather have the icky, easy to fetch apples from the ground or the pristine apples in the upper branches. I recall thinking I would cut down the tree so I can have all the apples.

When I was a teenager there was this public health organization that put out a little spiral-bound book. They may as well have called it “What your sex and drug education didn’t tell you.” I was consulting that thing well into my 20’s.

The thing that stuck with me most though were the accounts from people who’d experienced SA. I never wanted to put anyone through that.

My sex ed was one step above abstinence only, and even then the teacher made sure to emphasize at every possible opportunity that abstinence was the only 100% effective method to prevent pregnancies/stds and made sure to really harp on the failure rates of condoms/other methods. I wasn’t even shown the banana condom demonstration, we briefly touched on consent and there was nothing on sex/relationships.

Oh and it was pretty much taken for granted that it was for cishet relationships, there was a brief lip service to “1 in 10 people are gay” (inaccurate, and it made sure I didn’t realize I was bisexual until my mid 20s since I was attracted to the opposite sex so I must be straight and no need to further examine these other feelings)

We all got split up between girls and boys so we didn’t even get to hear the others’ stuff. The girls sex ed also doubled as an ad for pads and tampons. The video tape they played for us was very clear that it was sponsored by a brand and we got samples afterwards. Otherwise it was basically “here’s how a tampon works” and “don’t have sex”.

My sex education explained the parts of the organs, periods, and genetics. They didn’t even explain what sex is.

The biology and contraception part was the only thing that I didn’t find incredibly uncomfortable at the time. Being placed into intimate group discussions with our usual teachers most of which I had rather negative feelings for was pretty unconformable.

Early on we had a class wide discussions where we were asked whether anyone wanted to share anything and one girl talked about being SAed by a stranger on open street.

And yeah nothing queer was mentioned other than that you should still use condoms.

And “PIV” sex was the only method acknowledged to exist.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized sex exists outside of cishet vaginal insertion. I too had much the same sexed in school, dry talk about conception, birth, and banging teenagers over the head about abstinence.

My sex ed was almost 30 years ago at 10 years of age and further education in health class at 16. All of it (both elementary and high school) was very mechanical. Nothing about actual sex was spoken about aside from how to avoid STDs and simple stuff like sperm meets egg. It was all anatomy and what puberty does.

I’m really not sure what you’re trying to expand it to would’ve really fit without turning it into a proper course. We only had half a day in 5th grade to cover it and the teachers very clearly didn’t want to do it, but knew they had to. As for health class, it would’ve been nice to have been expanded upon, but I’m not really mad about it. It is what it is. I’m sure I wouldn’t’ve wanted my older, surly PE teacher teaching me about love and romance. I would’ve felt all levels of disgusting if that occurred. In fact, that’s probably one of the reasons (aside from it not being part of common thought back then) they didn’t teach it. For some reason, my district had an issue with pedophiles becoming teachers.

Cishet public highschool (like 2 decades ago) here… I think mine actually did a pretty good job. Huge focus on consent, addressed multiple strategies of birth control, hetero and homo relationships. Talked about things like hookups and why they’re risky / how to protect yourself.

Especially for being that long ago, mine was a 10/10.

…it probably came down to my individual teacher saying ‘fuck the guidelines, I’m giving these kids a real education.’

its especially horrific to think that some peoples first exposure to sex is sexual assaultremoved. I firmly believe that we should be aware of sex as soon as we able to understand it, as if something is a part of your body you should understand what it does.

Yeah in an ideal world it would be better.

But in this one in a lot of areas the teachers and others have to fight hard just for the bare minimum stuff because the KKKristian parent groups would rather their children remain ignorant out a belief they’ll be chaste if they’re not told about it or told that abstinence is the only acceptable option and that nothing further will be said on it. That and those same groups pushing to fear-monger about condoms always break or aren’t effective or how birth control is dangerous and their anti-abortion messages they want inserted. Just to get out the bare minimum cis/straight focused scientifically accurate sexual education to kids is an incredible battle in many areas.

You add in teaching kids about non-straight matters and these same already furious fundies go through the roof with rage about woke and indoctrinating children and so on and they pull in some other people who have homophobia to join them at that point. In a big progressive city you can do that and not have them sweep the school board and shut it all down but you still have all these fundies who are literally a few drinks and a little encouragement from another party away from picking up their rifle and murdering people over this kind of thing. And many of them will pull their kids from public schools to put in private Christian schools with no regulations or rules where the teachers can scream all day about how non-straight, non-cis people are demons who are going to hell and where the kids themselves are little monsters who will bully anyone perceived as queer. And many states give tax money to these schools with the end goal of the Christians being completely defunding the public school system by attrition so the only good schools are Christian ones. There’s no easy solution to this.

Which comes back around to one important thing: America needs a cultural revolution on steroids if it is ever to be saved. Probably two or three such happenings really.