My son lucked out. I was his school counselor. When a girl in first grade asked him and his friend if they were going to get blow jobs when they grew up, he came to me to ask what a blow job was. If he hadn’t, the only definition he might have gotten would have been from her. That’s how most kids get sex “education.”
One of my specialties as a therapist is working with transgender people. I only work with adults now, but I did work with young transgender teens early on.
The young teens knew nothing about sex. Or what they did know heard from peers or saw on porn, when they could access it. And they knew how to access porn. How do I know? The concerns they brought up made it clear.
One had no concept of the specifics of intercourse or masturbation. When his clitoris enlarged after beginning testosterone, he reported that it also caused sensations he wasn’t used to and didn’t know what to do about. He felt anxious.
Another told me pre-transition they were worried because they used a large teddy bear to rub against, and would have what they thought might be orgasms. They thought this was unusual and perverted.
They were also caught more than once — both pre- and post-transition — watching porn on their school computer — at school.
Denying sex education to young people doesn’t protect them from anything. It certainly doesn’t protect them from “becoming” trans or gay.
People who are gay and lesbian usually fully realize it when they are young teens and experience romantic, physical, or sexual attraction toward their same gender. That’s when the hormones start flowing.
However, in a 2018 longitudinal study by San Diego University, it was found that 1% of surveyed children 9 and 10 years-old already self-identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender.
People who are trans generally are aware of it at an very early age. Many of my clients have said they first became aware of feeling different from their assigned gender at ages 4 and 5. They didn’t know anything about sexuality. They simply knew they didn’t feel like the gender they were assigned.
Discovering orientation and gender is no longer as confusing as it was before more information was readily available online. Still, many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender kids have nowhere to go for information.
Actually, many kids of all orientations and gender, including cis-hetero kids, have no place to go for information.
Or they resort to getting their information from peers and porn.
Their peers are all around them, physically and on social media. They can access porn anywhere, including school.
Children from 12 to 14 or so are in an exploratory stage about everything. Their curiosity includes sexuality and gender.
Their developmental stage is similar to toddlers. They venture out to the world, get frightened or insecure, and run back home. Home needs to be where they feel safe. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they don’t have a real home. When that happens, they may only feel relatively safe with peers.
Is there a factor of peers influencing others to explore more gender fluidity? In my experience with them, yes.
However, cutting off an avenue to get their basic questions answered isn’t going to stop them from being influenced by peers. They still will be, but with no one to go to in in order to sort out their feelings, thoughts, and experiences.
Ah, but then there are still books they can access for information, right?
Wrong. The groups working to stop any type of sex education in schools are also trying to ban books on gender and healthy sexuality from school libraries and teacher’s classroom libraries.
That leaves the traditional way to learn — the way most of us learned— from peers and porn. That worked out just fine, right? Or, they may be told to simply abstain, don’t ask, don’t tell.
The lack of adequate sex education in schools has led to the U.S. having the highest teen pregnancy rate of all industrialized nations. Also, as reported in Simple Health,
People ages 15–24 make up about a fourth of the American population, but they accounted for nearly half of all new STDs reported in 2013*. Reading between the lines, that makes medical providers very suspicious about the quality of sex ed being provided.
Never mind education about gender and sexual orientation, kids in at least 20 states in 2020 were getting no sex education of any kind. Not even about preventing pregnancy and STDs.
Again — in an ideal world, — parents would be their source of information. Not necessarily unbiased information, but at least information.
We all know this isn’t an ideal world.
There are kids without parents. They come to public school from group homes. Others are foster children. Some foster parents provide good information and stable lives to kids in their care and some don’t. Some children have been sexually abused in their home. Not only is information not available to them, they are in actual danger sexually.
What qualifies a parent to teach their children about sex? I’m not asking why they have the right to do so, or choose who does, I’m asking what qualifies them.
Moreover, what qualifies those parents to decide how and where all children learn about sex, gender, and healthy sexuality?
I find it hard to believe that the Gen X and Boomer politicians, parents, and grandparents who make up the conservatives working to ban books, stop sex education, and even normal conversation about teachers’ and students’ families, received all their information about sex, gender, and sexuality from their parents.
Or maybe that is the problem.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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