I’ve been mentoring some queer kids.
They reached out because the sex ed they got in school completely flubbed it and failed to address them, their bodies and relationships and the sex they wanted to have or were already having. The teachers blanched when they asked questions and looked away and got squirrelly with them.
These kids are forthright, articulate, intelligent, self aware, charming as fuck. They are cis and trans and nonbinary. They sometimes say things that shock the hell out of me, even though I know full well how low the bar for sex ed curriculum is. Like when one of them stopped me to ask: what is a vulva? and I was so surprised I couldn’t control my reaction.
They also say lots of things that are wholly unsurprising but catastrophically sad to me. Like: why won’t any of the people teaching us about sex talk about how lesbians do it? Why does our sex ed class ignore trans people? Why won’t anyone acknowledge that people fuck for reasons other than reproduction? Is asexuality real? Am I broken forever because I had a bad experience and don’t want anyone to touch me? Is the G spot even a thing? Why is consent so complicated? Why don’t they talk about orgasms - that’s the point, right?
So we talk. I answer their questions and send them to resources written by people who respect kids. I’m so grateful those resources exist. I’m so glad to be available to catch the questions.
I’m painfully aware that it’s not enough.
I’m just one among the many tender-hearted, committed, solid educators who get to show up for the baby queers - who, it must be said, are thankfully, gorgeously coming out in record numbers and in many more places than ever before, because it’s safe to show yourself when you know you’re not alone. Queer kids are resourced right now in ways that have no historical precedent and lives are being saved on so many levels and thank heavens for all of it.
And still: the fact that these conversations are such a far cry from what’s offered to kids as the baseline of standardized sex ed EVEN IN A PROGRESSIVE STATE makes me want to set things on fire.
Because really: What the fuck is sex ed for? WHO is it for?
What are we accomplishing here if we don’t speak to the needs of the young people in front of us?
What are we so damn scared of?
This is true for everybody else too, by the bye - especially the cis girls, for whom standardized sex ed is further entrainment to the unstated and omnipresent cultural assumption that they owe hetero sex to cis boys, that their own pleasure is secondary at best, and that their sexual fate is to tolerate discomfort and then take all the responsibility.
(That thing I want to set on fire? Found it.)
Then I turn around and work with adult women who are still operating on those assumptions and are still continuously wounded by them, and who don’t understand “what’s wrong with them” when they don’t enjoy sex the way they’re supposed to.
It is a complex thing to get with a person who has lived for so long within a belief system that diminishes and gaslights them constantly and then ask them to imagine that their suffering isn’t their fault, and that nothing is wrong with them or ever was, and furthermore that they’re eating crumbs from their own feast table. There’s a lot of grief and rage and recognition and repair ahead of us as grown women.
And it’s ok. We will got to get with it if we’re ever to make it into what we desire, and we are, and we will. We are completely capable of this. It’s our curse to undo, too.
But we must do better by our kids. We have to do better for them than just defaulting to the inadequate, terrifying, covertly or overtly shame-filled version of it we most likely received, surrendering to whatever they’re learning at school.
It’s not either/or. It can’t be.
Real sex ed is including the kids in our lives in the open acknowledgement across all contexts that sexuality is an innate, normal, vital, delightful aspect of human life.
Read that again.
You know how some of us - mostly white people, often in gendered groups - lament the lack of heroic initiatory processes in our society, and then imitate or steal the rituals of other cultures to try to regain some semblance of intact humanity, colonizer-style?
The conversations of sexual education is one fundamental initiation of our young people into their adulthood, their growing bodies, their power. There is a transition that is fucking begging us to step in and create language and offer counsel and support to our children and we are MISSING IT. We’re outsourcing it to schools and to the internet because it’s cringey for us, and then we just miss the entire thing.
So they do their best to set themselves free without us, and they initiate themselves. Despite all the incoherence surrounding them, they do it. The kids are undoing the long curse, and nowhere is that miracle more plainly visible than in the baby queers, who are some free ass motherfuckers if ever I saw any.
But let’s not saddle them with our baggage, hey? The fact that they’re able to survive our crap isn’t a reason to make them survive it. So let’s stop weighing them down with horrid, fantastically gender-skewed, cisheteronormative, ableist and frankly racist “information”, shall we?
Let’s get our shit together so that we can tell them the truth. The whole truth. Including the parts where we admit we don’t know and have to ask around. Because COMMUNITY! Imagine that.
It takes effort to take something normal and ubiquitous and screw it up this badly, so -
What might happen if we just relaxed, suddenly? Answered the questions being asked? Admitted to our own feelings of lack? Planted the seeds of an exquisite world of pleasure and agency and deep, robust selfhood and relational equity?
That world is already here. It really is. These kids are proof of it.
We just have to let it touch us.