Across the United States, sex education curriculum is severely lacking. Many receive abstinence-only education, which can leave out important things like the emotional aspects of sex, how to use protection, and that it is not only normal to have sex, but normal to seek pleasure from sex.
I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and my sex education did not prepare me at all. In middle school, I was asked to sign an abstinence pledge. In high school, the only time I heard anything about the LGBTQ community was when we watched a video on HIV/AIDS. I felt alone. I was a closeted queer and trans person who had no idea how to voice what felt good. Because I never heard the term transgender during sex education, I thought that there was something wrong with me for not feeling like a girl.
I am certainly not alone in my experiences as a transgender person feeling like an outsider in discussions surrounding sex. So, I talked to 12 transgender people from across the country about their experience with sex education and how curriculum can improve to be more inclusive of transgender bodies.
Include Education Specific for Transgender People
Most sex education curriculum is geared specifically toward cisgender, straight people. As such, transgender people are not getting information that is necessary for their own bodies and sexual experiences.
Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, but for those who do, it can be very difficult to have sex at all. Val Wiestner of Alhambra, California, said that a discussion of gender dysphoria in sex education courses would be helpful for cis- and transgender people alike.
“I think it would be amazing for these classes to include things like gender dysphoria. As a trans man…I have found myself having to explain over and over about my body and why I do not like certain things,” he said. Liam Gillin, a student at Marist College, echoed a similar statement. “Something I wish I had learned in sex education was more about how you can stay safe as someone who was [assigned female at birth] and LGBTQ+, and more about how to alleviate gender dysphoria during sexual activity.”
Genitals Don’t Equal Gender
Often, students are separated into two groups (by gender) for their sex education. This can mean students are not getting holistic or accurate education on body parts and bodily functions. When we separate students by their assumed genitalia for sex education, we are reinforcing the idea that genitals are equal to gender, and that there is no difference between sex and gender. This is a bioessentialist viewpoint, teaching people that gender is biological, rather than a cultural construction.
“My experience with sex education was, being in Oklahoma, abysmal,” Aileen Gibson, a student at the University of Oklahoma, said. “While I was taught about safe sex once, the majority of it was awful. The ‘boys’ learned only about the ‘male’ reproductive system, ‘female’ secondary sex characteristics, and what a ‘male’ orgasm looked like. I didn’t even know what a tampon was until sophomore year of high school, (which I had to look up because I had no clue).”
By educating students in a less binary-centric format, transgender youth could find more validation and acceptance from themselves and their peers.
“One of the easiest ways for sex ed curriculums to be more inclusive is to drop the outdated language of ‘female body parts versus male body parts’ and teach everyone about the human body together while acknowledging the vast array of intersex people whose anatomy may not fit into the simple, standard boxes of male and female,” said University of Michigan student Elijah Haswell. “My uterus is not a ‘female body part.’ It’s just that — a uterus.”
Removing the idea that gender and genitals are one and the same can also work to reduce violence against transgender people.
“As a trans person, specifically an agender individual, I wish I could’ve been taught from an early age that genitalia does not define your own gender identity or realm of existence,” said University of Central Oklahoma student Fernanda Casanova. “Specifically teaching sex ed without trans inclusion or overall intersectionality is an act of violence against trans people. That type of mind-set will continue to marginalize trans individuals. You cannot teach separately either; cis individuals also need to know about trans education. That is how you can start to avoid violence against the trans community.”
Teach Alternatives to Heteronormative Sex
There are many ways to have sex outside of a man putting his penis inside a woman’s vagina. By not informing students of other methods of having sex, many may be left with the idea that there is no way for them to safely and pleasurably have sex — especially if they are transgender or gender nonconforming.
“As a nonbinary and gender-fluid person who is also queer, one thing I wish I learned in sex education is more about safer sex between people of the same sex,” said Christine Miyazato. “My sex education mostly revolved around sex that involved cisgender people and heterosexual relationships, so I never really got to learn about what safer sex could look like between people of the same sex. Most of my knowledge about the matter came from going to LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed workshops on my college campus or by word of mouth and from listening to friends’ personal experiences.”
Offer Medically Accurate Education Beyond Abstinence Only
By now, we know that abstinence-only sex education does not work. This method of sex education is not helpful for any students, but particularly for transgender youth who are trying to figure out their gender or what sex looks like for them.
“My sex ed teacher in high school actively sought to teach an abstinence-first mind-set, and all mentions of anatomy, hormones, biological processes were painfully gendered,” said George Washington University student Aedy Miller.
It is also imperative that transgender students are receiving medically accurate information about sex, though most states don’t require sex education to live up to that standard.
“Because public school education is largely state-controlled, sex education policy and curriculum vary wildly from state to state,” said Sin Guanci, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State University. “Accordingto the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) 2018 state profiles, only 31 states and D.C. mandate sex education, seven require culturally appropriate sex ed and HIV/STI instruction, only 12 require that sex education be medically accurate, and only four states mandate that health education affirmatively recognize different sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions (SOGIE) or teach the dignity or worth of all people regardless of SOGIE.”
Guanci said that the lack of policy requiring that sex-education “recognize and affirm” all people based on their sexuality or gender is not the biggest barrier. Unfortunately, seven states prohibit the mention of LGBTQpeople in sex ed except for when it comes to portraying them negatively in terms of disease transmission. This inaccurate information can make transgender youth feel like they need to stay in the closet or that there is something wrong with simply being who they are.
Talk About Consent and Healthy Relationships
Setting boundaries and understanding what consent looks like is vital information for all students in sex education. For transgender people in particular, it can make all the difference in the world when it comes to a sexual encounter being safe and affirming or traumatic and dysphoria-inducing.
AC Facci from Oklahoma City said that pleasure and consent should be discussed more meaningfully by sex educators. “I have a vague memory of learning what constituted sexual assault but I never remember being taught anything that affirmed my ability to say no at any point during a sexual encounter, not just before sex began,” they said.
It is also important that sex educators accurately discuss what healthy relationships look like, especially for students who are LGBTQ.
“I wish that asexuality had been covered, and that there had been more open conversations about emotional involvement rather than just sex itself. Knowing how healthy relationship dynamics work could have saved me and a lot of people I know from some awful and just awkward situations,” said James Washburn, a student of Cornish College of the Arts.
Understand That Inclusion of Trans People Can Save Lives
“During sex education, I often felt alone,” said Athena Schwartz. “I felt like I couldn’t talk about myself or my identity. As someone who has been very passionate about health education, I felt trapped in my shell. I felt like I was watching the class behind a wall; like I was an outsider. A lot of what I learned about trans people was outside of my own high school. I had to go out of my way to even learn the term nonbinary. While I loved what I learned outside of high school, I wish that it was taught in school. I think if more people learned about trans people, then more people would be inclusive toward us.”
When we do not include transgender people in sex education, it can cause significant distress to people from those communities who are present. It can be incredibly invalidating to have educators never acknowledge your existence, especially if you are not finding support outside of the classroom. Just having educators that support their needs and validate their experiences can make all the difference in the world for transgender youth.
“Simply having a word for one’s experience can provide a world of comfort and open the door to greater introspection, self-understanding, and a more comfortable orientation toward the world,” said Jamie, who asked that his last name be omitted. “Having a space for these discussions, even just acknowledgement of the existence of these discussions at the bare minimum, is invaluable to young trans lives.”
Another important step that sex educators can take is to let students know that it is okay to be trans — that being transgender does not make you a burden or mentally ill, that your feelings and gender are nothing to be ashamed of.
“I wish I’d been told that the feelings I was having were okay to feel,” said Aedy Miller. “I wish they’d taken a more expansive approach and taught us more about gender identity as opposed to just sex/anatomy, as that might’ve given me the words to describe how I was feeling in a safe environment.”
For 45 years, Deborah Roffman has let students’ curiosities guide her lessons on sexuality and relationships.
Deborah Roffman
About 25 years ago, a public school in the Baltimore suburbs invited Deborah Roffman to teach a class on puberty to fifth graders. Roffman, who was known as the “Sex Lady” at the private Park School of Baltimore, where she had been teaching for two decades, was flattered. But she was troubled by the restrictions that the public school’s vice principal had given her: She couldn’t use the words fertilization, intercourse, or sex. And she couldn’t answer any student questions related to those subjects. That wasn’t going to work for the Sex Lady.
Eventually, Roffman reached a compromise with the public school: Students would get parental permission to attend her talk, and Roffman could answer any question they asked, even if it meant using the S-word.
Roffman’s title of human-sexuality educator has not changed since she arrived at the Park School in 1975, but the dimensions of her role there have steadily grown. So, too, has her outside work in consulting and teacher training: Over the years, she has advised at nearly 400 schools, most of them private.
Initially, Roffman taught elective classes in sexuality to the juniors and seniors at Park, but within two years, she had expanded to seventh and eighth graders. In the 1980s, she added fourth and fifth graders to her roster. She also meets annually with the parents of students as young as kindergartners, to coach them on how to talk with their children about sexuality, and she leads summer training for the Park’s elementary-school teachers on incorporating sexuality instruction into their classrooms. “There is this knowledge that we keep in a box about sexuality, waiting until kids are ‘old enough,’” Roffman told me. “My job is to change that.”
During her 45 years of teaching, Roffman has witnessed the evolution of the nation’s attitude toward sex education and, as her experience at the public school shows, how uneven that education can be.
Perhaps more than any other subject, sex education highlights the country’s fierce loyalty to local control of schools. Twenty-nine states require public schools to stress abstinence if they teach about sex, according to the latest count by the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., and New York that promotes reproductive rights. Some of the more outrageous abstinence lessons employ troubling metaphors, such as comparing sexually active, unmarried women to an old piece of tape: useless and unable to bond. Only 17 states require sex education to be medically accurate.
Most research has found that sex education for adolescents in the United States has declined in the past 20 years. Like art and music, the subject is typically not included on state standardized exams and, as the saying goes, “what gets tested gets taught.” In the case of sex education, waning fear about the spread of HIV and AIDS among heterosexual youths has contributed to the decline in instruction, says John Santelli, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
But some bright spots do exist, says Jennifer Driver, the vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. For example, in some parts of Mississippi and Texas, there has been a shift away from “abstinence only” to “abstinence plus” curricula, with the latter permitting at least some information about contraception.
Roffman remembers her own sex education while growing up in Baltimore as being limited to a short film in fifth grade about periods and puberty. She began working in sex ed in 1971—when access to birth control was rapidly expanding amid the sexual revolution—helping Planned Parenthood train health-care professionals who were setting up family-planning clinics in the region, and doing broader community outreach.
Four years later, she followed her Planned Parenthood supervisor to the progressive Park School, where students often address teachers by their first name and current tuition runs about $30,000 a year. When she arrived that spring, she heard that the senior-class adviser had recently rushed into the upper-school principal’s office, exclaiming that something had to be done before the seniors’ graduation, because “we forgot to talk to them about sex.”
During the next several years, Roffman not only made sure the school remembered to talk to students about sex but steadily built up the curriculum. At Park, students learn about standard fare like birth control and sexually transmitted diseases but also delve into issues such as the history of abortion rights, changing conceptions of gender roles, and how to build respectful, intimate relationships.
Students start by learning about the reproductive systems, the importance of open communication, and the fundamentals of puberty in their first classes with Roffman, in the fourth and fifth grades. In seventh grade, they take a deep-dive course on human sexuality, covering everything from pornography to the use of sex in advertising to gender identity and sexual orientation. They see her again for a shorter, related course in eighth grade. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Roffman’s seventh graders spent most of a semester researching the candidates’ differing views on sex, gender, and reproduction. “In the process of doing that, I got to teach about every topic I wanted to teach about,” she said.
In high school, students take a required sexuality-studies seminar. The specific content varies year to year, but it’s always based on what Roffman calls the “eight characteristics of a sexually healthy adult,” which include staying healthy, enjoying pleasure, and relating to others in caring, nonexploitative ways.
The through line of her approach, at any age, is letting students’ queries guide her instruction. So she asks her students to submit anonymous questions at the start of the semester, and makes sure that she answers them as the course progresses.
Regardless of whether they grew up in the ’80s or the aughts, kids of certain ages always ask versions of the same questions, Roffman has found. For instance, middle-school students, she said, want to know if their bodies and behaviors are “normal.” Many older students ask her at what age it’s normal to start masturbating.
High schoolers routinely ask about romantic communication, relationships, and the right time for intimacy: “Who makes the first move?” “How do you know if you or the other person is ready for the ‘next level’?” “How can you let someone down easy when you want to break up?”
But some contemporary questions, Roffman said, are very different from those she heard earlier in her career. Sometimes the questions change when the news does. (More than 30 years ago, Roffman started reading two newspapers a day to keep up with the rapid pace of news about HIV and AIDS; she’s maintained the habit since.)
She said she received a flood of questions about sexual harassment after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in the early 1990s. The same decade ended with a spike in student interest in oral sex and behaviors that had previously been considered more taboo, such as anal sex.
Sometimes changing student questions signal broader cultural shifts, like the recent surge in student queries about gender identities. “There would have been questions 20 years ago about sexual orientation, but not about gender diversity,” Roffman said. But one recent eighth-grade cohort submitted questions like “How many genders are there?” “What does ‘gender roles’ mean?” “What is the plus sign for in LGBTQIA+?” and “Why is ‘gay’ called ‘gay’?” She finds a way to answer them all.
Roffman’s students appreciate her blunt and holistic approach. As a sixth grader at a charter school several years ago, Maeve Thistel took a brief unit in sex education. The teacher seemed uncomfortable and nervous, she remembers. The condoms the teacher brought for a demonstration were expired, and split when she took them out of the package. Thistel came away from the class with the impression that sex was both “icky and disturbing.”
Thistel, now a college freshman, transferred to Park for high school, where she found that Roffman presented some of the same material quite differently: Her very first step in the lesson on condoms was to point out that all of them have an expiration date that should be noted and heeded.
Under Roffman’s guidance, sexuality at Park has come to be treated as something closer to social studies, science, or other core subjects. Sex ed is “just another part of the curriculum, not carved out as its own special thing,” says David Sachs, a 1988 graduate who studied with Roffman and whose son, Sebastian, is now in 11th grade at the school and has her as a teacher as well.
Like all Park students, Sebastian Sachs had to complete an eighth-grade project wherein he examined the root cause of a social-justice issue. His team picked sexual assault and, with Roffman as their adviser, focused on consent education and how to introduce it in the youngest grades. Sachs and his teammates created a curriculum for preschoolers that, among other things, encourages them to ask permission before hugging a classmate, borrowing a pencil, or swooping in for a high five.
In Roffman’s ideal world, the school would implement lessons like these, and other age-appropriate sex and relationship education, from the earliest grades. Several of her co-workers agree. “Fourth grade might be too late for us” to begin this kind of education, says Alejandro Hurtado, Park’s Spanish teacher for the lower grades. Last summer, Hurtado participated in a voluntary two-week workshop led by Roffman that aimed to create a sexuality-education curriculum for Park’s elementary-age kids. “It will be subtly woven in,” he says, noting that he plans to talk more explicitly about traditional gender roles and expectations in some Latino cultures as part of his own class.
In her teacher training, Roffman encourages colleagues to be scientifically accurate and use age-appropriate language when answering even the youngest children’s questions. Four-year-olds are beginning to understand place and geography, so they will frequently ask where they came from. “The proper answer is that there’s a place inside a female body called the uterus, and that’s where they grew,” Roffman said.
Sarah Shelton, a Park third-grade teacher who also participated in the summer workshop, says Roffman inspired her to not dodge students’ questions about bodies and sex. In the past she’s deflected sex-related inquiries, such as when a student asked about birth control last year.
“I told her, ‘Great question. Ask your parents,’” Shelton recalls. “If that were to occur again, I would say something like ‘When reproduction happens in the body, there is medication that you can take to stop it so you can have sexual intercourse without creating a baby.’”
Sarah Huss, the director of human development and parent education at the private Campbell Hall school in Los Angeles, says Roffman helped her rethink her school’s sexuality education. Huss reached out to Roffman after reading her book Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex. The ensuing dialogue prompted Campbell Hall to begin sexuality education in third grade and to significantly shore up its middle-school programming. Prior to meeting Roffman, “I had taught sex education as ‘Don’t get hurt, don’t get pregnant, don’t get a disease,’” Huss says. “That wasn’t a hopeful message for the kids.”
Huss admires her colleague’s patient tenacity. “She’s walking into schools where there is so much emotional baggage around a subject,” Huss says. “To suggest doing it differently, you have to confront years and years and years of thinking that talking with young kids about sex is dangerous.”
After decades of striving for change both within and beyond Park’s walls, Roffman is optimistic about the future of sexuality education at progressive private schools like Campbell Hall and Park. “I’ve always believed that independent schools have the responsibility to give back to the larger educational community,” she told me. “It’s up to us to demonstrate that, yes, this can be done well and successfully.”
By contrast, “I see very limited movement in the public sector,” she said. And in a country where only a minority of states require medically accurate sex-education classes, her dream of seamlessly integrating the subject from kindergarten up may be a long way off. But Roffman has lived through one sexual revolution, and she holds out hope for a second in education.
Teenagers and young men still don’t have the right vocabulary. Can we help them get there?
By Peggy Orenstein
A while back, during a discussion I was having with a group of high school students about sexual ethics, a boy raised his hand to ask me, “Can you have sex without feelings?” The other guys in the room nodded, leaned forward, curious, maybe a little challenging. Strictly speaking, of course, even indifference is a feeling, but I knew what they meant: They wanted to know if they could have sex without caring: devoid of vulnerability, even with disregard for a partner. To put it in teenage parlance, they wanted to know whether it was truly possible to “hit it and quit it.”
I thought about those boys this week as I watched Harvey Weinstein, in an Oscar-worthy performance of abject harmlessness, hobble on his walker into the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan. The #MeToo movement has exposed sexual misconduct, coercion and harassment across every sector of society. But shining light on a problem won’t, in itself, solve it, not even if Mr. Weinstein ends up with (fingers crossed) the longest prison sentence in history. To make real change we need to tackle something larger and more systemic: the pervasive culture that urges boys toward disrespect and detachment in their intimate encounters.
Despite a new imperative to be scrupulous about affirmative consent, young men are still subject to incessant messages that sexual conquest — being always down for sex, racking up their “body count,” regardless of how they or their partner may feel about it — remains the measure of a “real” man, and a reliable path to social status. As one high school junior explained: “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys. So to do that, you’re going to be dominating. You’re going to maybe push. Because, it’s like the girl is just there as a means for him to get off and a means for him to brag.”
I never intended to write about boys. As a journalist, I have spent over a quarter of a century chronicling girls’ lives — that has been my calling and my passion. But four years ago, after publishing a book about the contradictions young women still face in their intimate encounters, I realized, perhaps inevitably, that if I truly wanted to promote safer, more enjoyable, more egalitarian sexual relationships among young people, I needed to have the other half of the conversation. So I began interviewing young men — dozens, of different backgrounds, in their early teens and 20s — about sex and love, hookup culture and relationships, masculinity and media, sexual consent and misconduct. #MeToo wasn’t the impetus for my work (I began well before the Weinstein story broke) but it quickly underscored the urgency.
Few of the boys had previously had such conversations. Certainly not with their parents, most of whom would rather poke themselves in the eye with a fork than speak frankly to their sons about sex. I can’t say that I blame them: It’s excruciating, and it’s not like our own parents offered a template.
Yet that silence has troubling implications. According to a 2017 national survey of 3,000 high school students and young adults by the Making Caring Common Project, a large majority of boys never had a single conversation with their parents about, for instance, how to be sure that your partner “wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you,” or about what it meant to be a “a caring and respectful sexual partner.” About two-thirds had never heard from their parents that they shouldn’t have sex with someone who is too intoxicated to consent. Most had never been told by parents not to catcall girls or use degrading terms such as “bitches” or “hoes” — this despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of the girls in the survey reported having been sexually harassed.
Adults may assume those ideas are self-evident, beyond the need for comment, but given the rates of coercion, misconduct and assault among men both young and old, boys are clearly not getting the message by osmosis. The vast majority of teenagers, though, who did have conversations like these with their parents — and boys even more than girls — described them as at least somewhat influential on their thinking.
Nor will schools pick up the slack. Most states still require sex education to stress abstinence (a legit option, for sure, as long as it’s one among many: not a mandate that equates sexually active teens with, say, chewed pieces of gum). But many more progressive, supposedly comprehensive classes aren’t much better, often focused predominantly on risk and danger: avoiding pregnancy and preventing disease. Increasingly, sexual consent is being added to that cautionary to-do list, as it should be. Too often, though, that question of yes or no becomes a stand-in for all conversation about sexual decision-making: another way to dodge more nuanced discussions of personal responsibility, open communication, establishing relationships, understanding gender dynamics and — the third rail of sex ed classes — reciprocal pleasure and the L.G.B.T.Q.+ perspective.
I found gay boys, by the way, to be notably more willing and able than others to negotiate the terms of a sexual encounter — they had to be, since who was going to do what with whom could not be assumed. They often seemed puzzled by heterosexuals’ reticence. “I don’t know why straight guys see consent as a mood-killer,” one college sophomore said. “I’m like, ‘if we’re talking, that means we’re going to have sex — this is great!’”
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Dan Savage, the syndicated sex advice columnist, refers to “the four magic words” gay guys will use during a sexual encounter: What are you into?” That’s a very different perspective than that of straight boys, who usually aim for one-word assent to options they define. I do fear, though, that since girls, as I’d previously found, are so often disconnected from their bodies’ desires and responses, their answer to an authentic conversation-starter might well be, “I have no idea.” What might happen, though, if teenagers learned to start talking to each other that way early on?
Absent guidance from trusted adults, boys look to the media as a default sex educator, where they are bombarded by images of female sexual availability and male sexual entitlement. With the rise of the internet, smartphones and video-sharing sites like Pornhub, parents worry about the potential impact of pornography on teens’ sexual expectations. Let me be clear: Curiosity about sex is natural. Masturbation? Great! What’s more, there is all kinds of porn — ethical porn, feminist porn, queer porn. But the most readily available, free content portrays a distorted vision of sex: as something men do to rather than with a partner and women’s pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction.
Boys frequently expressed ambivalence to me about their porn habits. “I think porn affects your ability to be innocent in a sexual relationship,” a high school senior commented. “The whole idea of exploring sex without any preconceived ideas of what it is, you know?”
Even if parents could block all the triple-X sites (and good luck with that), the reality is that exposure to sexual content in media consumption of any kind — TV, movies, games, social media, music videos — is associated with greater tolerance for sexual harassment, belief in rape myths and the objectification of women. “I think music has some of the biggest impact on how guys treat girls,” another high school senior told me. “In the car, my friends and I listen to all this stuff that’s just” — he rattled off several oh-so-unprintable lines about women and sex. “When you hear that, like, five, six, 10 times a day, it makes it hard to escape having that mind-set.”
The promise of hot sex with a cold heart animates college (and increasingly high school) hookup culture — which is why, according to Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College, getting wasted beforehand is so crucial: Alcohol girds young people against the near-fanatic generational fear of the awkward while creating what Ms. Wade calls the “compulsory carelessness” necessary for a possible one-off. Most of the guys I met knew that sex with an incapacitated person is assault. Yet because, in their minds, you need to be hammered in order to hook up, the trick became being (and finding someone who is) drunk enough to want to do it but sober enough to be able to express a credible “yes.” And who is to be the judge of that?
Drunk boys, as it turns out, tend to vastly overperceive a girl’s interest in sex, often interpreting expressions of friendliness as It’s on. Alcohol has also been shown to diminish their ability to hear “no” or notice a partner’s hesitation. Wasted young men are more likely than they would be sober to use coercion or force to get what they want and — still looking at you, Brett Kavanaugh — they are less aware of their victim’s distress.
In consensual drunken hookups, the sex still tends to be meh. It “can feel like two people having two very distinct experiences,” a second-semester college freshman who’d had multiple partners told me. “There’s not much eye contact. Sometimes you don’t even say anything. And it’s weird to be so open with a stranger. It’s like you’re acting vulnerable, but not actually being vulnerable with someone you don’t know and don’t care very much about. It’s not a problem for me. It’s just — odd. Odd, and not even really fun.”
According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist specializing in adolescent male behavior who surveyed over a hundred teen boys about dating and sex, most guys, in fact, prefer physical intimacy with someone they know, trust and with whom they feel comfortable. I found that to be true, too, though they seemed to view it as their personal quirk, not shared by their peers. Mr. Smiler suggests, then, that adults can ask boys what kind of sexual experience they want. “Not just whether they are looking to have an orgasm,” he said, “but about the context and quality of that orgasm. If we’re willing to be more vulgar and pointed, we might even ask, ‘Do you want a partner who’s more than just someone to masturbate into?’”
It occurs to me, after a quarter-century of talking to teens, that the activism on behalf of girls could offer a model to better guide boys. Back in the 1990s, when I first began writing about young women’s quandaries in a changing world — loss of confidence, stunted ambition, negative body image, sexual shaming — there was both a desire for and an apprehension about change: Some parents worried, not irrationally, that raising a daughter to be outspoken or sexually empowered would come at a social cost, that she would be labeled a bitch or a slut. Others raged that girls were being pushed, against their nature, to become “more like boys.”
But years of attention to girls’ experience, of work by parents and professionals, has reduced some of those fears, eased constraint, expanded girls’ roles and opportunities: Things aren’t perfect, not by a long shot, but they are better. Nonetheless, I found myself wishing, in my conversations with girls, that their early sexual experiences did not have to be, as they so often were, something they had to get over. That will require reducing the harm boys cause, whether out of monstrous venality, entitlement, heedlessness or even (maybe especially) ignorance.
For their own well-being, as well as their partners’, they need a counternarrative to the one that elevates the transactional over the connected, the sensual, the kind; boys need to value mutual gratification in their sexual encounters, whether with one-offs or long-term partners. That won’t be accomplished in a single “sex talk,” nor, really, any one easy fix, any more than you could teach your child table manners in one sitting. But at the very least, listening to their struggles is a start. I think about a guy I talked to early on, a rising college junior who’d equated a girl’s invitation back to her room with sexual consent. “I want to do the right thing,” he told me, “but I don’t know what the right thing is. I just know what I know, which is a lot of really confusing and wrong” stuff. He pressed forward unthinkingly, one might say manfully — or as he described it, “boom, boom, boom, boom” — until she put a hand on his chest, saying, “Whoa! I don’t want to do that.”
“And in that moment,” he said, “I could see just how wrong it was. The utter lack of communication that took place in those five to 10 minutes. And even realizing that I didn’t feel great myself about what we were doing. I just…” He shook his head regretfully. “I thought that was the only option. I thought that was the way things were supposed to be.”
How did you learn about sex? Were you taught that it’s a natural part of life or that it’s a sin? Did you receive medically accurate information that prepared you to make safe and responsible decisions regarding your sexual activity? Or were you told that all sexual activity is bad and that having sex makes you unwanted and dirty, like chewed gum?
As odd as that metaphor may sound, it’s just one of several used by abstinence-only and sexual risk-avoidance programs to shame students, instead of providing reliable, accurate information. Now, condom brand Trojan and Advocates for Youth are raising awareness of such unethical strategies by turning chewed pieces of gum into protest symbols with their #Not ChewedGum campaign (NotChewed Gum.org or SRAisAbstinenceOnly.org). On October 30 the two organizations coordinated a billboard-sized exhibit in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, with the message “You Are Not Chewed Gum. Information Is the Best Protection” crafted entirely from chewed gum.
Other insulting examples used to shame students include:
The used piece of tape: Students stick a piece of tape on their own arm then take it off and pass it to another student, who does the same. The teacher notes that the tape isn’t sticky anymore, concluding that when you have sex with multiple people you ruin your ability to experience emotional intimacy.
The cup of spit: Multiple students spit into one cup and the teacher asks if anyone wants to drink it. When no one does, the teacher explains that the cup of spit symbolizes someone who has had sex with multiple partners; “no one will want you.”
The dice roll and paper doll: Students roll dice and are handed a paper baby based on the roll. The lesson is that sex is risky and can always result in pregnancy, no matter if contraception is used.
The shredded heart: After students write their hopes and dreams for the future on a paper heart the teacher selects a student’s heart to tear into pieces. The teacher tells the class that once they have sex their hopes and dreams are destroyed.
The toothbrush: The teacher shows the class a used toothbrush and asks the boys if they would like to use it. When they say no, the teacher then turns to the girls and says that once they’ve had sex, they’re like the used toothbrush; “who would want you?”
The unwrapped candy: The teacher unwraps a piece of candy, has the students pass it around the class, and then asks if they’d rather have the candy that everyone touched or a wrapped candy. The lesson is that once you’ve had sex you’re like unwanted unwrapped candy. People will choose the untouched candy instead of the “dirty” one.
The crockpot and the microwave: Teachers explain that girls are like crock pots because they “heat up” slowly, while boys are like microwaves because they “get hot” quickly. Girls are also taught to be responsible for making sure boys don’t heat up too quickly.
“We need to counter harmful and shameful programs, and give people resources and tools so they can gain as much knowledge as possible,” said Bukky (pictured here), a nineteen-year-old representative of the Advocates for Youth International Youth Leadership Council and a current Howard University student who was present at the October 30 event in DC. She’s interested in working on global reproductive justice because she had a very “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding of sex as a direct result of growing up in Idaho and attending the Church of Latter Day Saints’ schools. “If you talked about consent and birth control, you were shamed.”
Abstinence-only lessons are especially cruel to girls by claiming that they—unlike boys—are less valuable after having sex “whether they wanted to or not,” implying that sexual abuse is a female’s responsibility to avoid. This inequity is reinforced by the societal protection of girls’ virginity and the simultaneous celebration of boys’ promiscuity. Recently, rapper T.I. boasted in an interview that he takes his eighteen-year-old daughter to get an annual “hymen check,” but is fine with his fifteen-year-old son having sex. In response to that interview, feminist writer and Humanist Heroine awardee Jessica Valenti reminds us that there’s no medical definition of virginity. “There is no physical marker on men or women’s bodies that demonstrate virginity (not even hymens), and sex means something a lot broader than heterosexual intercourse.” However, seven states require only negative information be provided on homosexuality as part of sex education and several states aren’t even required to provide medically accurate information.
While the #NotChewedGum campaign focuses on the gross and backwards lessons of abstinence-only programs, the #ThxBirthControl campaign by Power to Decide celebrates the unlimited possibilities contraception gives individuals, couples, and families. People are encouraged to learn more about birth control and related legislation, share their stories, and ask questions, providing the comprehensive sexual education that should be in every classroom.
It’s Not a Dirty Word and I Think Kids Should Know What It Is
By Jackie Gillard
It may seem shocking and vulgar to some, but teaching appropriately aged children of all genders about a body part existing only for a woman’s sexual pleasure isn’t just about a woman’s pleasure.
Almost all Canadian school sex-ed curricula avoid discussions on pleasure and focus on reproduction or risks, in either clinical information or warnings to our kids against all the “bad” things that can happen from having sex.
Even naming body parts often excludes the clitoris — it’s labelled in only a few suggested curricula. Yet sexuality educator Nadine Thornhill, PhD., emphasizes, “A child’s knowledge of all sexual body parts — including the clitoris — and understanding what feels good physically versus what doesn’t, are vital components of ensuring children truly comprehend what consent is all about.”
It’s a concept that can be difficult to grasp if you belong to the school of thought that heterosexual sex is about a man “doing” something to a woman; it’s not, and never should be classified as such.
A man asking if he can “do” those things is only one facet of consent.
If a woman doesn’t understand what feels good to her, is her agreement truly consent? Does she actually care or even know she’s not obligated to participate in any kind of sexual interaction that is not pleasurable for her as well? These concepts apply to men, too.
In the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, men need to comprehend that a woman’s body does not exist simply for their pleasure or reproduction.
The idea that only men are sexual and women are reproductive is incorrect. Both genders are reproductive and both are sexual. The taboos around sexual enjoyment only perpetuate a disservice to both — women grow up feeling shame for bodily agency and sexual enjoyment, while men grow up not fully understanding the sexuality of their partners or how to satisfy them sexually.
We can’t possibly continue to uphold a secretive cover to women’s bodies and their pleasures. Our kids shouldn’t grow up believing anatomy like the clitoris and its functions are dirty, gross or simply a mystery they may go looking to potentially dangerous sources like the internet to have explained.
As parents, it’s our job to ensure we instill in our families a healthy sexual education based on gender equality and fact.
A few years ago, the creation of three-dimensional models of both the inner and outer clitoris taught me — at the ripe old age of 46 — what this integral part of my anatomy looked like inside.
I was born in the sexual liberation decade of the ’70s, yet didn’t even know the correct name or function of a clitoris until my early twenties. Interestingly, I had full comprehension of what my reproductive system looked like, as well as the inner and outer anatomy of mens’ sexual parts, when I was a teenager.
For those unaware, the clitoris actually is formed during gestation from the same tissues that becomes a penis in men. In fact, scientific studies have confirmed that the penis and clitoris have many similarities; enough to have some refer to the clitoris as the “female penis.”
Sadly, the penis and the clitoris are treated very differently by society. Modern culture still blushes at the mention of the clitoris and is generally lacking in even the most basic information about it. I consider myself a feminist, yet I too failed to name and describe this integral part of a woman’s sexuality with both my kids during every one of our open and honest discussions of sexuality.
Only a few Canadian provinces list the clitoris in the curriculum for naming genitalia, and it seems only Quebec discusses the concept of sexual pleasure with high school teens, at the interpretation and comfort level of the teacher leading the classes. My own daughter had a teacher in Grade 4 who only discussed girls having vaginas and didn’t even name the vulva, let alone the clitoris.
Contrary to what I believe to be the erroneous fear that teaching kids about the clitoris will somehow push them towards premature sexual activity, studies have shown honest discussions about sex actually have the opposite effect.
Curiosity is often what motivates youth to experiment sexually, and coupled with a lack of knowledge, can lead to unsatisfying, unpleasurable or even painful or negative sexual experiences for both genders. In the Netherlands, the sex-ed curriculum includes topics like sexual communication and differences between porn sex and real sex. Pleasure is discussed in the context of comfort with one’s own body and communicating personal sexual desires to a partner. The outcome? The Netherlands reports three times less sexual violence than America and has a lower teen pregnancy and STI rate.
At the bare minimum, those with a clitoris should know its name in the event of clitoral health issues. Like any other part of the body, the clitoris can require medical attention. Sadly, bodily shame about problems “down there” prevents some women from discussing issues of concern with even their own doctors.
By the time I turned 18, I still never got the “sex talk” from my parents. I entered the world equipped with only the knowledge mass media, pop culture, and my high school freshman sex-ed class could give me. At the time I thought I dodged an awkward bullet, but a few years later, I realized I missed out on a lot of helpful information. And it’s become the norm for a lot of teens to only know how TV shows or movies depict relationships or sex and never have anyone actually knowledgeable and relatable to talk to about our real experiences.
During my first week of college, I witnessed a ton of uncomfortable situations through my frightened 17-year-old eyes. Most of us freshmen were trying to fit in with our 20-year-old peers, but we had no idea what we were doing when it came to navigating relationships, sexual or otherwise. Most of those twenty-somethings didn’t even know much more than we did. Even though we were considered independent and exploring relationships in the young adult world, my experience in college didn’t feel too far off from high school. The young and uneducated were learning about sex and relationships in the most hurtful ways possible, from the simultaneously young & uneducated.
While my experience seems to be the norm for most teens, it doesn’t have to be. And you as parents can make all the difference in having a genuine conversation about sex with your teen. This is how I wish my parents talked to me about sex.
Understand the Internet Changes Everything
I know you were a teen once too, but there are new beasts in teens’ lives that are more vicious than the average adult can understand without first-hand experience.
Our world is interconnected in an extraordinary way. In this Catfish era, entire relationships can be conducted via text message or DM and can become virtually sexual even before the first real-life meet up. It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity. And attempting to “disconnect” us from the world or taking our cell phone away only makes us better at using friends’ phones during school.
Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions.
Considering that this interconnectedness is inevitable, embrace it and try to encourage our knowledge and mastery of emotional intelligence on these platforms in addition to in real life. Teaching us how to navigate both worlds now will make us balanced and ready for the emotional and sexual relationships of the real world to come.
Keep the Conversation Real
The “sex talk” conversation can be over before it even starts if it doesn’t feel authentic. As important as it is to come to me as a concerned parent, come to me as a real person, too. A real person who was my age once, who had these same feelings and extreme transformations happening all at one time, and who understands that the world that I live in is a wild ride. There’s an organic way to be on my level outside of just lecturing me by saying “I was your age once.” Connect with me, tell me your own personal stories, share with me your experiences. Allow me to relate to you triumph and your trial, let me reflect and identify even if it’s in silence. Don’t force me to open up because at times, when you’re a teen and there’s so much you’re not supposed to do or know, revelation is in absorption.
It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity.
Please, Don’t Condemn Me
Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions. On top of the wide range of changes we go through, the last thing we need is our parents telling us there’s something wrong with us too. Telling us we shouldn’t be having sexual feelings at such a “young age” doesn’t stop us from having them. Accept me for where I am and understand that may be different from where you were at my age and that’s okay. As teens, we’re growing into our own young adult selves, and we can only do that successfully when we have some sort of support.
Prepare For Awkward Moments
Within these conversations, don’t make us feel like we have to say what you want to hear. Be open enough to hear some things you aren’t ready for. Also, be tactful enough to understand that there may only be one chance to have this conversation the right way. Create a safe space, an understanding space, and most of all, an accepting space. Accept us for where we are in our experience, and we’ll accept you trying to guide us. It may be awkward and it will feel weird, but it will make a world of a difference. You can make the world of a difference.
Sexual predators have found an easy access point into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps, making virtual connections right in their victims’ homes.
Many of the interactions lead to crimes of “sextortion,” in which children are coerced into sending explicit imagery of themselves.
We asked two experts how families could best navigate gaming and other online activity that can expose children to sexual predators.
Dr. Sharon W. Cooper is a forensic pediatrician at the University of North Carolina and an expert on sexual exploitation. Michael Salter is an associate criminology professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Both are internationally recognized for their work in the field of child sexual abuse.
The following recommendations have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Set rules for when and how your child can interact with others online
Dr. Cooper: The conversation on online safety should begin with a statement that there will be rules because a parent loves his or her children and wants to see them be safe and have the best that is in store for them.
I empower parents to know that they control access and should always exert that control. Research has shown that parents who mediate online behavior have the most resilient children. It is about time online (not too much), content (age-appropriate and prosocial) and parental empowerment (access is a gift, not a right).
Spend time with your child on new games and apps
Dr. Salter: Gaining some shared experience on a new service helps you identify risks, builds trust and provides an opportunity for nonconfrontational conversations. You can find out more about different platforms by going to trusted sources such as Common Sense Media and the eSafety commissioner website in Australia, which provide useful summaries of new apps and their safety features.
Talk to your child about online safety, and listen
Dr. Salter: You can start by talking about our rights and responsibilities online. You can emphasize that, online, we have an obligation to treat people well, and a right to be treated well by others.
You can brainstorm with your child the kinds of situations where they might feel unsafe, and the strategies they can use to stay safe. Set reasonable rules, but keep the conversation open so they feel comfortable coming to you if something happens that concerns them.
We’ve had situations where children have stayed silent on really major sextortion cases for months because they were already in trouble online and didn’t want to be in trouble for breaking the rules, too. Groomers and abusers rely on silence.
Encourage your child to raise any concerns with a trusted adult
Dr. Salter: Red flags that an online “friend” can’t be trusted: They tell the child to keep the relationship secret; they ask for a lot of personal information; they promise favors and gifts; they contact the child through multiple platforms and services; they initiate intimate discussions about the child’s appearance; and they insist on meeting face to face.
The first thing is for children to raise concerns with adults they trust. They should know never to send a nude image on the internet and remember they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do. Their most common mistake is not listening to themselves when they feel uncomfortable.
Be on the lookout for warning signs of abuse
Dr. Cooper: We try to avoid making children feel they are wholly responsible for their safety because if they fail, they develop significant guilt and self-blame. That being said, the most important warning signs are too much time online and angry reactions when parents put in a cease-and-desist order. Others are contact with a “voice” they do not recognize, and contact with someone requesting inappropriate behavior, including duping their parents.
Educate your child about blocking users who make them uncomfortable
Dr. Salter: While exploring a platform or app with your children, find out how to report and block users who make them feel unsafe. Encourage them to use this option if they receive unwanted or uncomfortable contact. If the user persists, contact your local police.
Don’t blame your child if abuse arises
Dr. Salter: The first step is to remain nonjudgmental and reassure your children that they are not in trouble. Groomers rely on children feeling too ashamed to tell, so it’s important to be supportive.
The most common mistake parents make is embarrassment — being unable to create a space in their relationship with their children where it’s O.K. to discuss their emerging interest in sex. It’s really hard to talk to children about their sexuality.
Take charge as your child’s online protector. No one else will.
Dr. Cooper: The industry is not about the business of promoting safety. I have yet to see a new cellphone purchase accompanied with a “How to keep your children safe with this device” pamphlet. We should empower children and show them how to report to trusted authorities.
Exploring sexuality with others can be scary, confusing, and thrilling, and digital devices make every interaction more consequential. Consent must be given in person, during sexual activity, and whenever a new form of sexual activity is initiated. Many young people communicate and establish relationships through technology. This may provide a false sense of knowing someone, intimacy, or readiness to engage in a sexual relationship. With all of the abbreviations young people use (hu = hookup, wbu = what about you, dtr = define the relationship, etc.), they are in many ways abbreviating relationships. It is important to consider that the only way to truly know if you are comfortable and ready to be sexually active with someone is to actually spend time with them.
As adults, we can talk to teenagers about knowing whether they can trust someone and are ready to be more intimate. This means considering whether they are comfortable discussing issues such as consent, how far they want to go, what they are ready to do, etc. If their partner pressures, manipulates, or guilt-trips them into activities they don’t feel ready for, they should consider whether this is a relationship they want to continue.
Sex educator, speaker, author, and my personal rock star, Emily Nagoski, has a beautiful garden metaphor I use with my students to deepen their understanding of consent within the context of their sexuality. It goes like this: When you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich, fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s (a.k.a. your brain and your body). Your family and culture (the immediate and broader communities you’re a part of) plant seeds and tend the garden. They also teach you how to tend it. Those seeds are the language, attitudes, knowledge, and habits about love and safety, bodies, and sex.
Each garden is unique and has different needs depending on the vegetation those seeds yield. Some gardens may require extra sunlight and water, some may need extra fertilizer or shade, some may be drought-tolerant or need extra vigilance when it comes to weeding out toxic and invasive species. Over time, as you become an adolescent, you start to take on the responsibility of tending your own garden. While discovering what’s in your garden, what it needs, and how to take care of it, you get to choose what gets pulled out and what gets to stay.
Consent is having the agency to decide who gets to enter your garden and what will happen while you’re there together. It’s the option to choose whether someone comes in and how they behave while they are there—do they play and frolic, or stomp and trample? Consent determines how long they get to stay, and whether they get to plant something or take anything with them when they leave. You should ask before entering someone else’s garden. Honor it because it’s theirs. And anyone you let into your garden should help it thrive.
Parent–Teen Conversation Starters
My students give me the best advice for how to approach conversations with teenagers. Be concise and focused. Allow your teen to guide the conversation. Talk less and listen more. It’s OK to say “I don’t know.” Stay open to different perspectives. Avoid letting the conversation become a family debate. Worry less about what your teen is doing and more about how they feel about it. Have many smaller conversations over time in different contexts. My students also emphasize the importance of selecting questions from the list below that will resonate with your own teenager. Every teen is unique and up to different things and dealing with different issues, so be selective with the questions you choose.
In your own words, what is consent? What are some examples of consent that come up in everyday life?
What’s the value of consent? How does it relate to healthy relationships?
What are some examples of asking for consent?
What does it feel like when someone doesn’t respect your right to choose for yourself? How do/can you respond?
How can you connect your understanding of everyday consent to sexual consent?
Why are some people trying to change the notion of consent from “no means no” to “yes means yes”? What is the difference, and do you agree or disagree?
What are some examples of consensual questions for the following: asking someone out; deciding how you’re going to spend time together; or being sexually intimate with someone?
What are the circumstances in which consent cannot be given?
What are some important characteristics of a sexual relationship beyond consent?
Resources: Everyday Feminism magazine has a helpful online comic strip titled What If We Treated All Consent Like Society Treats Sexual Consent?
Straight Answers to Teen Questions
Why is “yes means yes” better than “no means no”?
“Yes means yes” comes from the media’s coverage of recent affirmative consent laws (“affirmative” is the legal language used that requires someone to ask for agreement to initiate a level of intimacy). Until affirmative consent laws were created, the phrase “no means no” reflected widely held thinking around consent and sexual assault. It meant that if someone said no to a sexual act, the person initiating the activity should respect that boundary and stop what they are doing. This is still important. If someone doesn’t want to engage in a sexual act, they can say no and the other person should stop or it might be considered sexual assault.
“Yes means yes” is an improvement on “no means no,” because “no means no” assumes yes until that person expresses their discomfort by literally saying the word no. Ideally, all people would feel comfortable and confident enough during a sexual encounter to say no. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, especially with young people. Asking for affirmative consent, if the question truly allows for either answer, expresses respect and care for a partner’s sexual experience. It is also more positive because it affirms desire and hopefully leads to better sexual communication. It is the kind of communication that ideally should happen during sex and in healthy relationships. Beyond yes is enthusiastic consent, which means not only does the other person agree to what you’re doing together, but also they genuinely desire it and they’re excited about it.
What would be considered “another level of intimacy”?
An example of another level of intimacy might be going from making out with someone to taking their clothes off, or when two people are feeling each other up and one reaches into the other’s pants. Another example is when someone goes from intimate touching to moving down the other person’s body to give oral sex. Different people experience different levels of intimacy in different sexual situations. Some people may feel that kissing is more intimate than genital touching. Others may think that genital-to-genital intercourse is more intimate than oral intercourse. It depends on the person, so ask and pay attention to how your partner responds.
Do I have to ask for consent even if I’m really close to the person?
Yes, you must ask for consent even if you’re really close to your sexual partner. A preexisting relationship does not equal consent. There are many benefits to knowing your partner. In a healthy relationship, trust and care are built over time. This allows for both partners to communicate without fear of being judged. Sometimes, consent is wordless between people who know each other really well. Communication happens with body language, facial expression, and pleasurable sounds. Still, paying attention to context is important for everyone. The context or circumstances that surround the sexual activity can change within moments and may influence how someone feels sexually, and it is important to understand that context may influence consent. And if the consent is wordless, the partners involved must be attentive to each other and make sure that whatever is happening between them is something they both want.
When do I have the right to say no? When is it socially acceptable?
You have the right to say no at any time in a relationship or within a sexual experience. The answer to the second question will likely vary depending on who you talk to. We live in a sex-negative culture (one that focuses on objectification, sexualization, sex stigma, and body-shaming) that doesn’t always promote healthy perspectives on sexuality, especially for young people. It may seem and feel like you have to say yes because that is what you see in the media or what you hear from your friends. A sex-positive and sexually healthy society would make it socially acceptable to say no to sexual activity whenever you feel you want or need to. Remember that you are under no obligation to engage in behavior you don’t feel ready for, no matter the circumstances.
There are different ways to say no that you may want to consider. Within any type of relationship, be clear with your no. If you are in a healthy relationship, engage in a conversation with care and respect, so you can talk through what you’re both thinking and feeling. What your partner wants matters. Being a considerate and generous lover is mature and responsible. Encouraging people to talk openly about consent, and the ability to say yes and no, benefits everyone. Everyone deserves that kind of respect from a partner, and it makes for a healthier relationship.
If you are saying no in a hookup situation, be clear and assertive. If you and your partner are engaged in a respectful sexual encounter and care about each other’s experience, it should be OK to engage in open and honest dialogue. You could say, “I’m not comfortable with that but would be comfortable with [activity].” If your partner only seems to care about getting off physically and doesn’t consider your experience, then be clear and direct with your no and end the hookup. Bottom line: you have the right to say no.
Can someone give consent if they are drunk?
No. The legal language of affirmative consent legislation for being drunk or intoxicated is “incapacitated.” A person cannot give consent if they are incapacitated, which means they aren’t able to think clearly because they are under the influence of a substance or drug (alcohol is considered a drug). The point at which someone becomes incapacitated is different depending on many variables, including genetics, size, tolerance, how much of a substance they consumed, what kind of substance they consumed, when and how they took the substance, if they had recently eaten, or if the substance had an additional substance in it. If someone reports a nonconsensual experience and the people involved were incapacitated, the police or authorities on a school’s campus (if it took place at school) will investigate to determine whether the people involved were incapacitated and if this impacted the situation.
If I send a nude or “dick pic,” does that count as consent?
No. You cannot give consent to sexual activity over a phone or other digital device, especially if you are under the age of eighteen. Nudes do not equal consent. In fact, unless someone asks for a nude photo, it can be considered sexual harassment. And if you’re under eighteen, taking sexually explicit photos of yourself and “sexting”—sending nude photos—is considered trafficking in child pornography and is against federal law. Some states have teen sexting laws to deal with this common issue because the consequences for teens who violate federal law can be severe. Remember, too, that what is on your device and what you send to others is essentially public. Just because the photos disappear from your phone doesn’t mean that someone didn’t screenshot and forward or save them. If you send a nude photo, you should expect that it will probably become public at some point and may be circulated. Would you want your family, employer, college admissions officer, or future romantic interest to see it? Probably not.
What if I’m comfortable doing something sexual with a guy but not a girl?
Your body belongs to you; you get to choose how to touch and be touched. The guidelines are the same for managing what’s going on while you explore sexuality with someone, regardless of gender. No matter the person and how they identify, it’s important to communicate your desires and limitations and to listen and ask for theirs. Mutual respect doesn’t depend on how someone identifies. Communicate with a potential sexual partner in the moment. If they are safe and OK to be with you sexually, it’s OK to do what you want and don’t want. Period.
Isn’t it OK to push just a little to try to persuade someone to go further? I’m not going to force someone, of course, but what if they just need a little convincing?
Nope. Not OK to push even just a little. The need for any sort of persuasion makes the situation nonconsensual. Coercion, or saying things like “C’mon, it’ll feel good,” “Just relax, don’t worry about it,” “If you like me you’ll do this,” or “Everyone does this, what’s wrong with you?” is not consent. Adding social power or leverage to the dynamic is also not consent. Saying things like “C’mon, don’t you want to be first pick of the team next year? You know I’m the captain,” “If you don’t do this, I’ll have to post those pictures you sent me,” or “You don’t want everyone to know you’re gay, do you?” is not consent. It is coercive and exploitive. It is manipulative, unhealthy, bullyish, and disrespectful to pressure someone into second-guessing themselves and compromising their emotional and physical safety; if taken too far it can even constitute assault.
Can consensual sex be regrettable?
Yes. If consent is asked for and given, without the influence of substances, the impairment of a mental or physical disability, coercion or age disparity (one partner is over eighteen, the other is under eighteen), then the sex is legal. Just because the sex is legal, however, doesn’t mean it’s right. If it isn’t consented to for the right reasons—for instance, someone wasn’t ready, the sex wasn’t physically or emotionally safe, or someone else’s well-being is impacted (like a friend is betrayed)—someone may regret having participated in it. Legal sex is not necessarily ethical or “good” sex. Ethical sex is legal and takes into account the well-being of the participants and others who may be impacted by their actions. Good sex is legal, ethical, and feels pleasurable and satisfying for both partners. To avoid regrettable albeit consensual sex, make sure you choose to engage in sexual activity for your right reasons.
Sinai Torrejon, program services coordinator at Girls Inc., leads a class discussion on gender and sexuality at Western High School in Anaheim, California, on September 20, 2019.
It’s the second meeting of the Informed and In Charge program at Western High School, and today’s activity is called the “sexuality wall.”
The gist is pretty straightforward: At one end of the classroom is a big sheet of paper with “Sexuality?” written in blue marker. “Write down as many different terms regarding sexuality, regarding identity, regarding gender, as you may have heard,” the instructor, Sinai Torrejon, asks the class.
A mix of around 20 students from different grade levels — wearing tank tops and wide-legged pants, ripped jeans and hoodies, false eyelashes and no makeup — grab markers and get to work. They chat among themselves. “I wrote pan — pansexual,” one says. “Asexual means you don’t like nothing, you don’t have those feelings,” explains another.
The students seem calm and comfortable. Though they take the activity seriously, they’re also having fun with it: One of them uses several different markers to write “bisexual” and “lesbian” in letters that look three-dimensional, like they’re popping off the paper.
In fact, the whole classroom has a relaxed feel. The students sit on plastic chairs, not traditional desks. A table at the front holds prizes the teens can win in icebreaker games, like makeup brushes and stickers. One girl casually eats from a container of instant ramen. This is Southern California after all, where open-mindedness and chill are branded exports.
When they’re finished, Torrejon helps the students — all part of a dropout prevention program at Western called the Independent Learning Center — define the terms on the wall. LGBTQ+, she explains, “is a term that is trying to be inclusive of all the other identities and sexualities that there are.” Queer, she says, “can be used as a slur or as a derogatory term,” but now some in the LGBTQ+ community are “taking ownership of that word.”
Next, they move into a discussion of the differences between gender identity, gender expression, and sex.
“Can someone else tell you what your gender identity is?” Torrejon asks.
“No,” several students say.
“Is it okay to not be 100 percent sure yet?”
“Yes!” is the enthusiastic response from the class.
A bit later, Torrejon tells the class, “You are your own person. You are unique. You are perfect the way you are.”
Welcome to the future of sex education in America. California wants to lead the way.
But even in one of the bluest of blue states, where just about 32 percent of voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in 2016, programs like the one at Western are getting backlash. In 2016, the state passed a law requiring that schools offer LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed with lessons on gender identity and expression as well as materials on HIV prevention and healthy relationships. Last year, the state released draft guidelines aimed at helping schools put the law into practice, and since then, parents have been pushing back — with some even taking their kids out of public schools so they don’t receive the new sex ed.
The day before Torrejon gave her lesson about gender and sexuality, parents, advocates, and even students protested outside their legislators’ offices around the state, demanding a repeal of the law. One parent, Shanda Ellsworth-Lobatos, called it “a cognitive behavior modification program to sexualize and groom your children” at a protest not far from Western.
What’s happening in California is a version of a conflict that’s likely to ramp up around the country in coming years. What some parents and conservative groups call “indoctrination,” sex education advocates call changing the world: teaching students to respect each other’s identities and autonomy in ways they hope will lead to less sexual assault, harassment, and homophobia in society at large.
As Jennifer Driver, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the nonprofit SIECUS (until recently known as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States), told me: “We like to frame sex education as a vehicle for social change.”
The movement toward an education based on acceptance over abstinence
For many people in their 30s and older, the phrase “sex education” probably conjures up images of an awkward assembly in a high school gym, if it conjures up any images at all. Picture Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years, watching his gym teacher trying to draw a diagram of the female reproductive system, but instead scrawling something that looks like a cow.
In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic inspired states to get more serious about sex ed, and by the 1990s, most states required some form of HIV/AIDS education. But conservatives almost immediately pushed back, calling for sex education to focus on abstinence, and the messages students got about sex could be confusing — even in California.
A teacher at the High School of Fashion Industries teaches AIDS prevention in her hygiene class in New York City, on November 27, 1991.
As a high school student in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I remember getting a classroom visit from a man living with HIV who helped demystify the virus and talked about prevention. I also attended an assembly led by a woman who said that every time you have sex, it’s like putting a piece of tape on your arm and ripping it off, until the tape — which represents you — is covered in hair, disgusting and useless. This, I later learned, is a common abstinence-based lesson.
Today, 39 states and the District of Columbia require some form of sex or HIV education. But only 17 require it to be medically accurate — meaning educators can teach that condoms don’t work or that innate gender differences govern everything from how people look at their fingernails to how they carry their books. And abstinence-based education (now sometimes described as “sexual risk avoidance education”) has become more common, not less, since I was in high school, thanks to support from Republican administrations. By 2014, half of middle schools and a three-quarters of high schools focused on abstinence. The Trump administration has also been a strong backer of the abstinence-only approach — in 2018, it issued new funding rules favoring abstinence-based programs.
One big problem with abstinence-only, though, is there’s no evidence that it works. As Aaron E. Carroll reported at the New York Times in 2017, several studies have found no effect of such an approach on teen sexual activity. It also doesn’t teach students what they need to know about contraception and sexual health if they do decide to have sex.
That’s why sexual health advocates around the country have backed comprehensive sex education for years. Truly comprehensive sex ed should include information on abstinence, but also on sexually transmitted infections and contraception, Driver told me. Lessons should be inclusive of all sexual orientations and gender identities. And it’s not just about avoiding pregnancy and STIs — comprehensive sex ed, Driver said, should also include lessons on healthy relationships, consent, and decision-making, as well as analysis of cultural norms and values around sex and sexuality.
Sex education can be a “powerful vehicle to change societal norms,” Driver said (SIECUS recently made this concept part of its name, rebranding as SIECUS: Sex Ed For Social Change). For example, the rise of the Me Too movement has sparked “a lot of conversations about consent,” she said. But “very few people can articulate what consent looks like.”
By contrast, “what would a world look like if everyone had comprehensive sex education?” Driver asks. “How would the Me Too movement look very differently?”
California might be about to find out. The state has been on the forefront of the movement toward more comprehensive sex education for years. In 2003, the state passed a law requiring that HIV prevention be taught in public schools, and that all sex education materials “be appropriate for use with pupils of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and pupils with disabilities.”
But critics said the law was too vague, and in 2016, the state implemented the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which requires that students get sex education that includes information on HIV and pregnancy prevention, healthy relationships, gender identity, and more — including abstinence — at least once in junior high and once in high school. All course materials must be medically accurate, and discussions of relationships must be inclusive of same-sex couples.
Since then, school districts around the state have been updating their curricula to comply with the law. For example, Anaheim Union High School District, which includes Western High School and about 16 other junior high and high schools, added lessons on human trafficking and gender identity expression to its high school health curriculum to comply with the law, said Patty Hatcher, a health curriculum specialist with the district.
In many districts, like Anaheim Union, California students get sex education from their health teachers. But some districts also bring in visiting teachers from groups like Planned Parenthood and Girls Inc., a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to fostering the health and education of girls. In many cases, the visitors supplement what the district is already doing. But when there’s no one trained on staff, the outside groups may provide all the sex education required by the state.
Over the course of about 12 class periods, the Girls Inc. program teaches students about menstruation, birth control, STI prevention, sexual harassment, consent, dating violence, and more. Classes are open to anyone who identifies as a girl, no questions asked, according to Jessica Hubbard, director of program services for the Orange County branch of Girls Inc. The organization doesn’t offer an equivalent program for boys, but at Western Independent Learning Center, where most classes are online, students of all genders may also take an online health class that includes sex education.
About 25 miles away in Irvine, also part of Orange County, the district adopted Teen Talk, a research-based curriculum for students of all genders that covers anatomy, STIs, pregnancy prevention, and body image, among other topics. It also includes one lesson specifically devoted to sexual orientation and gender identity, which “does a great job in dispelling myths and stereotypes” like the idea that being gay is a choice, Kelli Bourne, who is in her 14th year of teaching health science at Lakeside Middle School, told Vox. But it also uses language throughout that’s inclusive of all orientations and identities: “Teen Talk does not favor one type of relationship over another,” she said.
Overall, the goal of Teen Talk is to “drive home to kids that there is a range of values” when it comes to sex, Bourne said. And values — whether something is okay or not okay — are at the root of a lot of questions students ask in class, she said.
When it comes to sex and sexuality, Bourne explains to students, some people believe one thing, and others believe something else. Ultimately, “it’s up to you to decide what you believe,” she said, “with input from your parents and your family.”
Conservative pushback is mostly about LGBTQ inclusivity
About a month into the school year, around 20 people gather outside Assembly member Tom Daly’s office, about 10 miles from Western High School. These are the families in Orange County who feel that, despite what programs like Teen Talk say, they’re not getting enough input. They feel their kids are learning values at odds with their own.
At the latest of several “Sex Ed Sit Outs” to protest the law, parents hoist handmade signs with messages like “education not indoctrinate” and “no gender ID ideology.” Some have brought their kids, who play on the grassy median strip next to the sidewalk. A few older students take a more active role.
One first-year high schooler, for example, holds a cardboard sign reading, “AB 329 is a sexual grooming program.” He is here with his mom, but he tells me he also believes that the sex education law violates freedom of religion. “It’s either you’re a girl or you’re a boy,” he says. “That’s what I agree with.”
Meanwhile, many parents say CHYA violates their parental rights. “This law doesn’t respect our beliefs and rights as parents to teach our children how they should behave and live,” one mom, Ofelia Garcia, tells me.
“Even if I didn’t have any grandchildren or children, I would be doing this,” Garcia says. “As a daughter of God, this is to speak for my faith.”
Parents protest the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA) outside Assemblymember Tom Daly’s office in Anaheim, California on September 20, 2019.
Garcia says she’s against “the gender ideology” put forth by CHYA, and that she hopes the law will be revoked because “because otherwise our children are going to be against us.”
The fear that sex education will pull kids away from their parents is a common theme. So is a concern about lessons involving gender identity.
Shanda Ellsworth-Lobatos, for example, tells me she started homeschooling her son, a third-grader, after she found out his Anaheim elementary school was planning a Diversity Week but had not notified parents of content involving LGBTQ or gender-nonconforming people.
Students were going to read Jacob’s New Dress, a children’s book about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, she said. “They had a whole series of things that they were going to do with the children but they were not going to disclose to the parents.”
Ellsworth-Lobatos also said teachers had been told “if a child is struggling with gender identity, not to notify the parents.” On the whole, she said, the school was “lack of transparency” and “parent alienation.”
The Anaheim Elementary School District (separate from Anaheim Union, which includes only junior high and high schools), however, says alienating children from their parents is the opposite of what it intends. “Clear communication with our families is paramount,” Elsa Covarrubias, the district’s director of communications, told me. She said it was absolutely not district policy to keep parents in the dark about children’s gender identity. “We are in contact with parents regarding anything that impacts their children,” she said.
Girls Inc. says it encourages students to talk to their parents about what they learn, and the group hosts evening events where parents can be more informed about the program. Also, CHYA requires that sex education in California encourage each student “to communicate with his or her parents, guardians, and other trusted adults about human sexuality.” And the law allows parents to opt their children out of sex education if they choose.
But parent protests have continued, heating up last year with the release of a state document called the Health Education Framework. The framework isn’t law or a required curriculum — instead, it is intended as guidance to help school districts develop curricula in line with CHYA. But parents soon began protesting My Princess Boy, a picture book about a boy who wears dresses and a tiara, and S.E.X: The All You Need to Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties, a book by the founder of the popular sexual health information site Scarleteen. Parents said the material was too explicit, and objected to teaching younger children about gender identity.
In May, the state removed six books, including My Princess Boy and S.E.X., from the framework, a final version of which is slated to be released early next year. But some parents were unsatisfied, and with the start of a new school year, protests began again.
California’s Orange County, where Anaheim is the largest city, has been one of the biggest hubs of pushback against CHYA (other counties in the blue state where parents have protested include Santa Clara, just south of San Francisco). The county is historically Republican territory. Ronald Reagan launched his political career with a speech in Anaheim in 1965, and Richard Nixon’s presidential library is in the nearby city of Yorba Linda, where he was born. A majority of residents voted for John McCain for president in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
However, Orange County is changing — the county went for Hillary Clinton in 2016; in 2018, Democrats flipped four congressional seats there, turning the county entirely blue. But in some ways, Anaheim feels more like middle America than like Los Angeles, less than 30 miles to the northwest. Near Assembly member Daly’s office, a Hooter’s restaurant advertised “Military Mondays.” And as protesters against the sex ed program lined the sidewalk, more than a few passing drivers honked in approval.
Orange County has always a specific brand of conservatism, though: It’s not the type of place where overtly anti-LGBTQ messages are always spoken out loud. Residents are used to having to curb their language for surrounding progressives. And Republicans in California aren’t known for holding particularly socially conservative views — residents sometimes use the term “California conservative” to refer to someone who’s liberal on social issues but favors low taxes and small government.
All that is to say that some of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric espoused by Republicans around the country — like former Virginia attorney general and recent Trump appointee Ken Cuccinelli, who has said that acts of homosexual sex are “against nature and are harmful to society” — are less common here. Aggressiveness is not the norm.
For example, most of the parents on the sidewalk on this September day say their opposition to CHYA is not about homophobia or transphobia, but about their desire to choose what their kids learn. “It’s not about hate or disliking or anything like that,” Ellsworth-Lobatos says. “It’s about my parental rights and what I want to teach my child.”
Then again, there is a minority that imparts a more direct message. At a forum on CHYA held by the Anaheim Republican Assembly the night before the protest, Arthur Schaper, an activist with the “pro-family” group MassResistance, referred to the law as the “California Unhealthy Perversion Act.”
“There has to be a culture shift in this state,” he told the crowd of a few dozen at a German restaurant not far from Daly’s office. “Being gay is not okay. Yes, I just said that. If I can’t say that in Anaheim, we’ve got a problem.”
The benefits of comprehensive sex education are well-documented
What proponents of laws like CHYA have on their side is research and numbers. In California, a large majority of parents have historically supported comprehensive sex education — 89 percent, according to one 2006 survey. Nationally, most parents also support comprehensive sex education.
According to one 2017 study, more than 93 percent of American parents think it’s important to teach sex education in middle school and high school. Meanwhile, 92 percent of Democratic parents and 75 percent of Republican parents said high school sex education should include discussion of sexual orientation.
Unlike the abstinence-only approach, education like the kind students at Western and Lakeside get is also supported by research. Comprehensive sex education programs have been shown to reduce sexually transmitted infections and increase use of contraception — as well as reducing sexual activity, the goal of abstinence-only programs, Carroll reports at the Times.
And the benefits go beyond those typical markers of sexual health. “We know that comprehensive sex ed can help people develop healthier relationships” as well as helping them have “honest conversations with their parents about values,” Driver said.
There’s also evidence that sex education can help reduce sexual assault. One 2018 study found that students who received sex ed that included discussion of how to say no to unwanted sex were significantly less likely to experience penetrative sexual assault once they got to college. Abstinence-only sex education did not have the same effect.
While anti-sexual harassment advocates often emphasize teaching people not to commit harassment and assault, rather than teaching people to avoid it, there’s evidence that education can help in this way too. A 2015 study found that a middle-school program that taught communication and emotion management reduced instances of sexual harassment and homophobic name-calling at school.
Sex ed can also help to dismantle gender stereotypes. “With comprehensive sex ed, young people are able to reject or unlearn the harmful stereotype that depicts boys as constantly working to ‘score’ by having sex with girls and, conversely, depicts girls as non-sexual beings who are responsible for managing the behaviors of boys,” SIECUS communications manager Zach Eisenstein told me in an email. Some abstinence-only programs, he said, reinforce these stereotypes by comparing girls to Crock Pots (because they supposedly take a long time to “heat up”) and boys to microwaves (which heat up quickly).
When students learn that there are a variety of gender identities and expressions, they “are better suited to identify, question, and reject feeding into harmful gender stereotypes from the start,” Eisenstein said.
After the students at Western wrote terms on the sexuality wall, the class moved on to a discussion of the idea that girls like dolls and boys like action figures, or that girls should be pretty and boys should be strong.
“That language really does have an effect on us,” Torrejon told the class. “We absorb that and we internalize that, and then as we get older we kind of put those stereotypes on other people.”
Inclusive sex education can be especially protective for LGBTQ young people, Driver said. Research shows that when a school has an LGBTQ-inclusive sex education program in place, LGBTQ students are less likely to experience depression, drug or alcohol abuse, and bullying, she added.
Such education has benefits for all students, Driver said, including those who don’t identify as LGBTQ. “Students learn to value other people’s perspectives,” she explained. “They learn to value and have empathy for people who are different from them.”
For proponents of inclusive sex ed, this is the goal: for students to learn not just to protect themselves from STIs and unintended pregnancy, but to treat each other — and themselves — with care and respect. And if they get education like this now, the thinking goes, maybe when these kids become parents, they will be more accepting of their children’s identities and help them make informed choices. Homophobic views like those expressed by Schaper will be less common in the future.
While most parents are in favor of comprehensive sex ed, change is slow.
Despite the research supporting it, and the parents who want it, comprehensive sex ed still isn’t the norm in many places around the country. In part, that’s because education in America isn’t federally controlled. Even with a more supportive president than Trump, the White House only has so much influence over what goes on at the state and local levels. And at those levels, there are enough parents opposed to sex education — and enough conservative groups to back them up — to block a lot of attempts at change.
In other words, implementing comprehensive sex ed remains an uphill battle, but one a growing number of states feel is worth fighting.
If history is any guide, California has often helped lead the way on progressive legislation, from a law loosening abortion restrictions in 1967 to one legalizing medical marijuana use in 1996. And with state legislatures turning increasingly Democratic in 2018, some see a coming “blue wave” that could bring with it more socially liberal reforms around the country.
Then again, if California has taken years to fully implement its 2016 law, change elsewhere in the nation is likely to move even more slowly. For example, when an Arizona school district considered implementing a comprehensive sex education curriculum called Rights, Respect, Responsibility in 2018, the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel sent the district a cease and desist letter. The group said the school district was in violation of an Arizona law banning HIV/AIDS education that “promotes a homosexual lifestyle.” The state repealed that law earlier this year, but such restrictions are still on the books in several states.
Because schools tend to be locally controlled, “there’s so much variation among what young people will receive” not just from state to state but from district to district, Driver said. In California, for example, while Anaheim has been on board with CHYA from the beginning, other nearby Orange County School districts delayed implementation, according to EdSource. And while Girls Inc. used to teach sex education across the county, districts started dropping the program when protests against CHYA started heating up. Now Anaheim is the only one left.
For opponents of CHYA and of LGBTQ-inclusive sex education more generally, these delays are a good thing. Education about sexual orientation and gender identity “should be done in the privacy of your home,” Ellsworth-Lobatos said.
But supporters of inclusive sex education say they’re not teaching kids ideology. They’re just respecting who their students are: nonbinary, male, female, gay, straight, asexual, or any of a variety of the above and beyond.
Sometimes sex education is a two-way street. During the class I visited at Western, students taught Torrejon the meanings of several terms, including “demi girl” and “demi boy,” which refer to people who are nonbinary but with some identification with the female or male gender. People who identify that way “use she/they pronouns or he/they pronouns,” a student explained to the class.
Torrejon says she sees the impact of the Girls Inc. program on the students she teaches: “They’re just so much more confident and comfortable within themselves” after the program, she said.
Like Bourne’s class, the program includes an anonymous question box, but students sometimes leave positive feedback instead. “Just hearing how appreciative they are for being able to learn all this, when they know the stigma on it otherwise, is the best feeling ever,” Torrejon said.
After the September class, I asked a few students what they’d learned. “I learned different types of sexualities and different pronouns,” one told me. “I didn’t really know that there [were] that many.”
Another student, a 17-year-old senior, told me he’d done a lot of online research about gender and sexuality in previous years because for a time, “I wanted to be male.” Today, he uses he/him pronouns but says, “I don’t label myself right now.”
Talking about sex and gender identity always makes him nervous, he told me. After class, he was still “a little bit” nervous, he said — “but a lot less.”
Just reading the title of this article is likely to bring many parents out in an uncomfortable sweat.
Having the sex chat with your smalls is totally filed under the awkward convos parents dread, but being able to talk openly and honestly about the subject has multiple benefits.
Recent research has revealed that children who feel able to talk to their parents about sex are more likely to delay having sex until they are older, as well as making healthy and sensible choices like using contraception.
Couple that with the fact that many parents could well be underestimating the extent of children’s exposure to sex and porn online, with recent stats revealing children as young as seven are viewing porn online because of the lack of age checks, and it becomes clear that having the sex chat could be more important than ever.
Knowing you should tackle the subject is one thing, knowing how to do it is quite another.
But there are ways to open up the discussion with minimal blushes and embarrassment on behalf of all parties.
When should I talk to my children about sex?
While there is no correct age to talk to children about sex, according to the NHS, it’s never too early to start talking about it. “If your child is asking questions about sex, they’re ready for truthful answers,” the site explains.
The site goes on to explain that “talking to children about sex won’t make them go out and do it. Evidence shows that children whose parents talk about sex openly start having sex at a later stage and are more likely to use contraception.”
Which has to be a good thing.
Plus, the earlier you do it the less chance they will already have picked up, often incorrect, information from their playground pals, which could warp or distort their views on the subject in the future.
How to talk to your children about sex
Check your reaction
Your reaction to children asking questions or being curious about sex or gender has a huge impact on the child and the messages they internalise about sex.
“Children pick up on verbal and non-verbal behaviour,” explains Sarah Calvert a Psychotherapist, Psychosexual and Relationship Therapist.
“If they feel a parent/carer is negative about sex, they can develop a negative attitude; conversely if the parent/carer is positive, they are more likely to develop a positive relationship to sex and their own sexuality.
“That’s why it’s so important for parents to think about where they are with this subject, and what they may be unconsciously communicating to their children.”
Try to be sex positive
Calvert says good sex education encourages positive attitudes towards sex and sexuality, enabling children to grow up to lead confident and happy sex lives.
“It’s important to be positive about sex and speak about the pleasures that a healthy and happy sex life (with one’s self or with another) brings,” she explains.
“We should feel confident to empower their sexual exploration and development rather than cloud it in a cloak of shame. It’s also important to ensure our children have information that empowers them and enables them to keep them safe, teaching them about boundaries and consent.”
Do some prep
Give yourself time to think and explore your own attitudes and beliefs about this subject before speaking to children.
“Everyone has their own views on sex that have been formed to a large extent by messages they have received, many of these from childhood,” explains Calvert.
“It’s crucial that parents are aware of their own filter, and question why it exists. For example, we’ve all received messages about gender and how girls or boys should behave. How have these messages impacted and informed who we have become?
“The same goes for sex and sexuality. We need to be aware of the lens that we view these subjects through before discussing them with children.”
Pansexual, skoliosexual, asexualbiromantic. How young queer people are identifying their sexual and romantic orientations is expanding—as is the language they use to do it.
More than 1 in 5 LGBTQ youth use words other than lesbian, gay, and bisexual to describe their sexualities, according to a new report based on findings from The Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. When given the opportunity to describe their sexual orientation, the youth surveyed provided more than 100 different terms, such as abrosexual, graysexual, omnisexual, and many more.
While many youth (78%) are still using traditional labels like gay, lesbian, and bisexual, another 21% are exploring new words to describe—in increasingly nuanced ways—not only their sexual orientation but also their attractions and identities as well.
Young queer people are redefining sexuality and attraction in their own terms, and are leading the way in how we talk about them.
Why words matter
Finding a word to describe your sexual identity can be a moment of liberation. It can be the difference between feeling broken and alienated to achieving self-understanding and acceptance. And when specifically describing one’s sexuality to others, labels can help create a community among those who identify similarly and facilitate understanding among those who identify differently.
Words to describe the specifics of one’s sexual and romantic attractions (affectional orientation) are becoming more important to younger generations. Anticipating The Trevor Report’s findings, the trend forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson’s Innovation Group found in 2016 that only 48% of youth in Generation Z identify as exclusively heterosexual, compared to 65% of millennials.
How do you define sexual orientation?
Whether you’re within the queer community or not, we all have a sexual orientation, or “one’s natural preference in sexual partners”—including if that preference is to not have any sexual partners, as is true of many in the asexual community.
Sexual orientation is a highly individual and personal experience, and you alone have the right to define your sexual orientation in a way that makes the most sense for you. Sexual orientation is also a complex intersection made up of different forms of identity, behavior, and attraction.
Identity
Gender identity may influence your sexual orientation, but it’s important to remember that sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing. A person has a sexual orientation, and they have a gender identity, and just because you know one doesn’t mean you automatically know the other.
But in discovering your gender, you may redefine your sexual orientation in new ways. This experience can be true for transgender people, who may undergo changes in their sexual orientation after their transition—or who may change their labels, such as a woman who adjusts her label from straight to lesbian to describe her attraction to other women after transitioning.
Our identities cannot be put into one single box; all of us contain many different types of social identities that inform who we are. This is, in part, why Dr. Sari van Anders, a feminist neuroendocrinologist, proposed the Sexual Configurations Theory to define sexual identity as a configuration of such factors as: age and generation; race and ethnicity; class background and socioeconomic status; ability and access; and religion and values. Anders’s theory takes into account how our many identities factor into our sexual identity, and recognizes that our sexual identities can be fluid too.
Behavior
Sexual behavior also influences how we discover and define our sexual orientation. But, who you’re currently dating or partnered with, or who you’ve had sex with before, does not dictate your sexual orientation. Nor does it fully define who you are and who you can be.
Someone may have sexual experiences with a certain gender without adopting any label for their sexuality. Someone may have had a traumatic sexual experience, such as sexual assault, with a gender that has no bearing on how they self-identify. A person may have attractions they’ve never acted on for various reasons. An asexual person may have engaged in sexual activity without experiencing sexual attraction. Sexual and asexual behavior all inform one’s sexual orientation but do not define it.
Attraction
We most often think of attraction purely in sexual or physical terms, but it also includes emotional, romantic, sensual, and aesthetic attraction, among other forms. For example, a sapiosexual (based on the Latin sapiens, “wise”) is a person who finds intelligence to be a sexually attractive quality in others.
Attraction also includes the absence of attraction, such as being asexual or aromantic, describing a person who doesn’t experience romantic attraction. (The prefix a- means “without, not.”) Unlike celibacy, which is a choice to abstain from sexual activity, asexuality and aromanticism are sexual and romantic orientations, respectively.
Why is there a new language of love and attraction?
Sapiosexual and aromantic highlight ways in which people, especially LGBTQ youth, are using newer words to express the nuances of sexual and romantic attractions—and the distinctions between them. Many assume a person’s sexual orientation dictates their romantic orientation, or “one’s preference in romantic partners.” But romantic and sexual attraction are separate, and sometimes different, forms of attraction.
While many people are both sexually and romantically attracted to the same gender or genders, others may have different sexual and romantic desires. Someone who identifies, for instance, as panromantichomosexual may be sexually attracted to the same gender (homosexual), but romantically attracted to people of any (or regardless of) gender (panromantic, with pan– meaning “all.”)
Asexuality is not a monolith but a spectrum, and includes asexuality but also demisexuality (characterized by only experiencing sexual attraction after making a strong emotional connection with a specific person) and gray-asexuality (characterized by experiencing only some or occasional feelings of sexual desire). And, quoisexual refers to a person who doesn’t relate to or understand experiences or concepts of sexual attraction and orientation. Quoi (French for “what”) is based on the French expression je ne sais quoi, meaning “I don’t know (what).”
While asexual people experience little to no sexual attraction, they, of course, still have emotional needs and form relationships (which are often platonic in nature). And, as seen in a word like panromantic, the asexual community is helping to contribute a variety of terms that express different types of romantic attractions. Just like all people, an asexual person can be heteroromantic, “romantically attracted to people of the opposite sex” (hetero-, “different, other”) or homoromantic, “attracted to people of the same sex” (homo– “same”). They may also be biromantic, “romantically attracted to two or more genders.”
As more people identify as trans or nonbinary, words like androsexual (andro-, “male”) and gynesexual (gyne-, “female”) describe sexual attraction to gender expressions or anatomy, regardless of how a person identifies their gender. Someone who identifies as androsexual is attracted to masculinity or male anatomy. Someone who identifies as gynesexual is attracted to femininity or female anatomy.
Androsexual and gynesexual do not define the gender of the person being labeled the way the words lesbian (a female homosexual) or gay (a homosexual person, especially a male) do. These terms can be easier for gender-fluid people to use. Sexual orientation can be fluid, too, as describes the experience of an abrosexual person, whose sexuality could be fluid, for example, between bisexuality and homosexuality.
Certain genders and body parts may play a large role in many people’s sexual orientations, but others may be specifically attracted to people with nonbinary genders. The word skoliosexual is defined as an attraction to people who identify with a nonbinary gender. Skolio– is based on a Greek root meaning “bent” or “curved”; negative associations with these words have compelled some to use the term ceterosexual instead, with cetero– based on (et) cetera, cetera meaning “the rest.”
Defining relationship types
Some young people are beginning to clarify not just their sexual orientation, but also their preferred relationship type. For example, a person who identifies as pansexual nonamorous is sexually attracted to all genders (or regardless of) gender (pansexual) and does not seek any form of committed relationship (nonamorous).
The importance of clarifying the relationship type that you prefer can help dispel common misconceptions that the genders you are attracted to dictate the number of partners you desire, such as the myth that all bisexuals are polyamorous.
In the write-in portion of the The Trevor Project’s survey, youth used nuanced language to explain the complexity of their sexual orientations and desired relationship type, such as one youth who replied “I’m a [grayromantic] polyamoroushomosexual.” This young person identified their romantic attraction (grayromantic, or “occasionally experiencing romantic attraction”), sexual attraction (homosexual), and the number of partners they prefer (polyamorous, “involving multiple consensual romantic or sexual partners”). Grayromanticpolyamoroushomosexual paints a far more specific picture than just gay does.
One may also prefer solo sex and romance, such as those who identify as autosexual or autoromantic (auto-, “self”). A person may desire many sexual partners of any gender, but zero romantic relationships, which can be identified as non-monogamous aromantic pansexual.
You don’t have to be queer to use more specific terms to describe the number of partners you prefer or the relationship type you desire. An individual whose identity more closely conforms to current societal norms, such as a straight, cisgender, married woman, could also describe her sexuality in more specific terms, such as a monogamousheteroromanticheterosexual woman. This means she desires one partner of the opposite gender, to whom she is both sexually and romantically attracted.
Beyond labels
Despite the proliferation of labels, there are still many who choose not to identify. Of the 52% of Generation Z that doesn’t identify as specifically straight, many eschew labels altogether.
For many whose identities are fluid, living without a label can be more liberating than adopting one. For others who are questioning or exploring their sexuality, going without a label is more comfortable than committing to one that doesn’t quite fit.
Defining yourself
Unique labels—including the lack thereof—allow us to speak to the differences in our lived experiences. We do not all experience the world in exactly the same way, and we should feel free to describe our individuality using the words that do that best.
You are the expert of your experience, and know better than anyone else how you feel, what you value, and what you need. You deserve to use as many or as few words as you want when describing your unique understanding of your sexuality.
And it’s OK to use different labels depending on the situation, too. If a person is concerned for their safety, they may choose to disclose very little or nothing about their identity. Or, if someone is speaking to a person unfamiliar with the LGBTQ community, it may be easier for them to use labels such as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Sexual and romantic relationships are a huge part of our lives. These relationships are often the most important ones we have, building the foundations of our families and support systems. New words are an exciting way to help you discover, understand, and express your sexual orientation and attraction—and new words help give us the freedom and power to define ourselves.
“This work highlights the fluidity that many adolescents experience in terms of how they label their sexuality and who they feel sexually attracted to,” says lead author J. Stewart, a PhD student at North Carolina State University.
For this study, researchers looked at data from 744 students from rural high schools in the southeastern United States; 54% of the students were girls, 46% were boys. Students filled out surveys each year for three years, spanning either their freshman through junior years or their sophomore through senior years. Researchers collected the data between 2014 and 2016.
The researchers found that at some point during the three-year period, 19% of students reported at least one change in their self-labeled sexual identity—for example, classifying themselves as heterosexual in year one and as bisexual in year two. Some students reported multiple changes, such as switching from heterosexual to bisexual between years one and two, and then back to heterosexual in year three.
There were also notable differences between male and female students, with 26% of girls reporting some change in sexual identity over the three-year study period, compared to 11% of boys.
In addition to how teens labeled their sexualities, researchers looked at the extent to which teens reported being romantically attracted to boys and/or girls. The study found that 21% of students reported changes in who they were attracted to over the course of the study. As with sexual identity, some students reported changes in romantic attraction between years one and two, and again between years two and three.
Again, there were notable differences between boys and girls, with 31% of girls reporting changes in romantic attraction, compared to 10% of boys.
“Some adolescents shifted between sexual minority identities and/or attractions—gay or lesbian, bisexual, etc. as well as varying degrees of same-sex attractions—across all three years,” Stewart says. “Others fluctuated between heterosexual and sexual minority groups. And when we looked at the extent to which sexual identity, attraction, and sexual behavior aligned, we saw some interesting trends.”
The researchers found that the majority of people who identified as sexual minorities also reported some degree of same-sex attraction—and most had engaged in some form of sexual behavior with a person of the same sex.
However, there was more variability among students who identified themselves as heterosexual—particularly for girls.
For example, 9% of all female students labeled themselves as both heterosexual and having at least some attraction to girls. And 12% of girls who reported being both heterosexual and having no sexual attraction toward girls also reported engaging in same-sex sexual behavior.
“The results for boys mirrored those for girls, albeit to a lesser degree,” Stewart says.
“Adolescence is a time of identity exploration, and sexual orientation is one aspect of that. One takeaway here is that the process of sexual identity development is quite nuanced for a lot of teens. And based on research with young adults, we expect these patterns will continue for many people into their late 20s and even beyond.
“To be clear, we’re talking about internally driven changes in sexual orientation,” Stewart says. “This research does not suggest these changes can be imposed on an individual and does not support the idea of conversion therapy. There’s ample evidence that conversion therapy is harmful and does not influence anyone’s sexual orientation.”
The researchers are already considering future directions for the work.
“The data in this study comes from kids growing up in the rural South,” Stewart says. “It would be interesting to see if these numbers vary across different sociopolitical environments. Additionally, we weren’t able to identify how these patterns looked among trans and other gender minority adolescents. That would be an important direction for future work.”
“You are not chewed gum,” read an art display featuring wads of gum, located in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., unveiled on October 30 by advocates for science-based comprehensive sexual education. The display, organized by Advocates for Youth and Trojan, sought to push back on abstinence-only messaging that says sexually active youth are comparable to a chewed piece of gum for future partners.
The unveiling comes at a particularly crucial political moment for sexual and reproductive health. Earlier this summer news broke that the Trump administration had awarded $1.5 million in Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program funds to anti-choice organizations such as Obria and Bethany Christian Services. Additionally, some high-profile abstinence-only sex education activists have taken up prominent posts within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, rebranding what has been commonly known as abstinence-only sex ed to the more vague “sexual risk avoidance.”
But according to advocates, no matter what these programs are called, they still paint normal human sexuality as inherently shameful. “We see [that] this one was a very common factor in a lot of schools: the idea that anybody who is sexually active, their worth is lessening and lessening every single time they engage in activity, which isn’t true whatsoever,” says Bukky, a 19-year-old student at Howard University and a member of Advocate for Youth’s International Youth Leadership Council in an interview with Teen Vogue.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 10 states and Washington, D.C., require that only abstinence-only sex ed be taught in public high schools, while 29 other states require that abstinence-only be stressed within sex ed curricula. Just 17 states require medically accurate sex ed be taught in public schools. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, released in October, STI transmission rates for syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia have hit an all-time high in the U.S.
Sexual health advocates say now is the time for action. “I have seen many times over the impact of shame-based abstinence only education,” says Logan Levkoff, a sexual health educator involved in the protest. “I think it has implications; tremendous implications for physical health, and certainly has implications for emotional health, and none of them are good implications. So to be a part of a program that is really saying abstinence only sexuality education and [sexual risk avoidance], as they’ve been rebranded, are setting our young people up to fail.”
The message of the day brought back memories for Bukky’s colleague on the International Youth Council, Ayanna, a 19-year-old student at George Washington University. “This really resonated with me because my sex education in North Carolina was just shaming, just all around,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We never talked about sex. So just the fact that sex is something that is pleasurable and, like, fun, and not something that, you know, necessarily has to be like a marriage for procreation. That’s a very heteronormative, cis perspective on it. We didn’t talk about… what sex can look like in different types of relationships with different genders. And we didn’t talk about anything related to gender expression. It’s just ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
Former Disney Channel star Joshua Rush was also on hand to detail for Teen Vogue his own experience with sex ed in his home state of Texas, which requires abstinence-only sex ed be emphasized, and later in California, which requires medically accurate comprehensive sex ed. “I grew up [in Texas], and I know there’s different personal convictions in the way that people feel, and a lot of that comes from religion,” he says. “But the fact of the matter is that this isn’t a conversation about religion. This isn’t a conversation about culture. We’re not telling kids, ‘Hey, go out, have sex.’ We’re telling kids, ‘Hey, go out, and have the information that you need. If you choose to make that decision.’ There is no shame in having all the information possible. There is a problem when people don’t have the right information.”
Ayanna frames the issues surrounding sex ed as a “concoction of terrible decision-making” centering [on] adult hang-ups with sex. According to her, sex ed needs to match up with the reality adolescents are facing today.
“We know that high schoolers and even some middle schoolers are out here making pretty adult decisions because of the circumstances that they’re in,” says Ayanna. “So instead of trying to shelter them and coddle them and to give them, like, this sweet sugarcoated birds and the bees, we have to be real and honest because we know what young people are doing. So why not? And they’re gonna do it anyway. So why not make them prepared and safe so that they can live full lives and not be shamed to be who they are and engage in practices that they want to with consent with other people?”
It’s a message preteens need to hear as they navigate puberty, friendships, bodies, attraction, and the sticky mess of being a person. This short graphic novel, written by Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna and illustrated by friend of A-Camp Isabella Rotman, is out now through Limerence Press, the same publisher that gave us A Quick and Easy Guide To They/Them Pronouns. It covers the anatomical nuts and bolts of sexuality, sexual health and puberty and also dives into social aspects like consent, how to get support from adults you trust, sexuality and gender identity.
The story features five friends: Rico, Malia, Max, Sam and Alexis. This group of middle schoolers are having a range of experiences with and feelings about sex and their bodies. They talk to each other about some of the tricky topics they’re facing, challenge each other’s biases and shame, and help pump each other up as they face different challenges.
Rotman and Corinna hope the book will help fill gaps in sex-ed curricula and be a resource for parents and other trusted adults to help walk pre-teens through these essential conversations that neither adults or kids are always comfortable having. The book models language around how to have these conversations by, for example, letting the kids talk about gender and sexuality on their own terms.
“I do think the majority of the education around gender at this point is being done by sex educators and I want to give them credit for that!” Rotman said. “But when you go and try to look for a sex ed guide you’re going to find a lot of really binary language and it was really important for this to be an exception to that. We have trans and nonbinary characters that talk about that in language that is accessible to the age group.”
In fact, Corinna said they believe Wait, What? is the first sex ed guide that does not use any gendered language to talk about menstruation, especially targeted at the preadolescent age group.
The book deftly acknowledges that each of its five main characters is different in their experience of their bodies, sexualities, genders, romantic interests, and overall development. It allows each kid to define their experience on their own terms and shows a little of their process of becoming comfortable with their unique selves, while promoting kind and thoughtful behavior toward all peers.
“I came up a punk kid, a queer kid, [in] the 70s and 80s, so normal was never my god that I worshipped,” Corinna said. “It’s tricky because when people ask us if something is normal, you want to reassure them because you don’t want them to feel fearful or shameful or embarrassed. But as the platypus represents, a lot of stuff is weird! It’s weird by any standard! There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘of course it’s normal,’ to help reassure someone, but we should also make room for people to get more comfortable with things that aren’t normal! When you talk about people with… quite uncommon gender identities or orientations, there don’t have to be a billion people like that for someone to not have something wrong with them.”
Of course, this book is aimed at young people themselves, but it’s also a perfect conversation opener for any adult that works with, or frankly knows, any young people. It is non-judgmental and at times truly profound. As a 28-year-old queer, trans adult, I found phrasings and ideas that felt new and resonated, like when the kids talked about how genitals are kind of weird, but so are ears! and toes! As a person who cares deeply about the queer and trans kids coming after me, it feels valuable to have new, age-relevant language to help empower them with information and give them tools for exploration and discovery. Wait, What? is a quick read that packs a lot in, using dialogue, narration and images to share information for all types of learners.
Corinna and Rotman hope the book will make its way into homes and libraries as well as be a helpful supplement for classrooms and sex educators. It’s available online wherever books are sold and making its way into real live bookstores too. So far the reception has been very positive, although Corinna acknowledged some nervousness around putting out a sex-positive, gender-affirming book about sex for middle schoolers, because “this age group isn’t buying their own books. If the adults aren’t ok with it the kids aren’t going to see it!” So it’s up to all of us adults to get Wait, What? into the hands of kids who need it.
As Rotman put it, “this is very much the book a queer aunt buys you.” Hear that, queer aunts?
These days in countries like the U.S., it’s a lot easier than it has been in the past for girls to pursue hobbies, careers, and preferences once thought exclusive to boys. There’s, of course, still much work to do in creating truly equal opportunities and access, but the good news is that there’s much less of a push to shove all girls into traditional caretaking and homemaking roles. Some parents may even be eager to support and celebrate their daughters’ interest in sports, science, adventure, and the like.
How about our sons?
Ask yourself this: How would you feel about your son wearing skirts and makeup, joining the cheerleading squad or ballet, and spending a lot of time giggling on the phone talking with his friends about schoolyard crushes?
Why many parents struggle to let their boys be “feminine.”
A 2018 study in the Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity found parents tend to be more uncomfortable with their child having gender-nonconforming behaviors when their child is a boy than when their child is a girl. Parents were also more likely to try to change boys’ gender-nonconforming behaviors than to try to change girls. In other words, parents are way more OK with girls doing “boy stuff” than with boys doing “girl stuff.” (Those words don’t actually mean much, of course, but we’ll get to that.)
That discomfort from seeing boys display traits we associate with femininity stems from a combination of sexism and homophobia, explains Jesse Kahn, LCSW, CST, director and sex therapist at the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York.
“Sexism is rooted in the belief that men are superior to women and masculinity is superior to femininity,” they tell mbg. “As such, ‘male qualities,’ or masculinity, is inherently more acceptable and desirable. Boys deviating from masculinity are then viewed as offensive and inferior.”
The above study also found that parents who showed more “warmth” toward their son were more likely to try to change his gender-nonconforming behaviors. The researchers posited that this finding suggests parents who intervene to guide their sons back toward traditional “boy” behaviors might be doing it because they think it’s good for him. For example, perhaps these parents feel like their son will get bullied or shamed for their “girly” behaviors, and so they believe steering him away from those behaviors is the right thing to do for his well-being.
But in truth, denying a child’s authentic self can create major physical and mental health problems for them down the line: everything from social alienation to lack of proper health care access to increased suicide risk.
“Protective instincts are rote and innate, and they tell us that when something feels dangerous, we should take the easiest and quickest route to restore safety,” sex educator and crisis counselor Cavanaugh Quick, LMSW, tells mbg. “The problem is that restoring safety isn’t inherently the same as eliminating the threat. Confronting the negative behaviors from others, reinforcing positive reception and love with our young people who experience them, and encouraging an expanded possibility for this kind of expression in our boys both restores safety and targets the threat directly.”
Kahn adds, “A lot of research has shown us the power of acceptance from one’s parents. The strongest protection a parent can offer is supporting their child, which begins with examining their own judgments.”
How to raise sons without pigeonholing them into gender stereotypes.
1. Remember that “boy” doesn’t really tell us anything specific about someone’s interests or habits.
Don’t assume you know what your son will like or how he’ll act just because he’s a boy. “Boy” doesn’t really mean anything in particular, after all—we have associations about what being a “boy” and a “man” mean, associations that we’re taught growing up and that get reinforced by our culture and by the media. Then we start teaching them to our children. Research has shown us time and time again that parents treat girls and boys differently, affecting everything from their color preferences to their emotional intelligence to their STEM skills and much more.
“Listen to and stay curious about your child’s interests; if they deviate from your gendered expectations, challenge yourself to both allow your child to engage in that activity as well as be supportive (as supportive as you would be of something you deem more acceptable),” Kahn says. “If a parent is nonresponsive, appears uncomfortable, less interested, or less excited about something their child is doing that is considered nonconforming, the parent is reinforcing their beliefs regarding gendered expectations. Kids pick up on that information.”
Do your best to avoid making assumptions—or being outwardly surprised if your son does something outside of your assumptions. Just remember this: There’s nothing innate about boys liking blue, trucks, sports, girls, or action movies, nor is there anything innate about boys being unemotional or bad at cooking and cleaning. If most boys are like that, it’s because we’ve collectively taught them to be like that. There’s nothing wrong with them developing those traits, of course, but there’s no reason to actively push your child into any of them just because he’s a “boy.”
2. Actively offer your son the “feminine” options.
Just like with the word “boy,” the word “girl” doesn’t really mean anything unless you make it mean something. Whatever it is you typically associate with girlhood, make sure your son has a real opportunity to choose that if it appeals to him.
“That means not just saying ‘I’m OK with it if you want to do this’ but actually making stuff available and actively participating in offering expanded options to your young people,” Quick explains. “Take them down every aisle in the clothing/toy/school supply/etc. store when you’re shopping and just ask them what they like. Make space for them to make decisions when possible, instead of being directive. Support and encourage them when and if they pick stuff that you think isn’t masculine.”
3. Watch your gendered language.
Watch out for things like “man up,” “be a man,” “tough guy,” and “boys will be boys.” And when boys and men around your son do something that conforms to your familiar definition of masculinity, try to avoid making comments about that behavior that imply it’s inherently masculine. (Some examples: “Boys always play so rough!” or “Of course all the dads stayed home to watch the game tonight!”)
“When speaking to children, parents unconsciously use feminine adjectives to describe their daughters and masculine adjectives with their sons,” Kahn adds. “Don’t use language that boosts gendered expectations about how people of specific binary genders are ‘supposed’ to act.”
4. Introduce your sons to people who are gender-nonconforming.
Kahn also recommends introducing your kids to gender-nonconforming and trans people, whether in their lives, in history, or in the media or TV shows. That exposure can help kids start to understand gender for what it really is—not something set in stone based on body parts but rather something that’s just about what behaviors and traits feel comfortable and authentic to any individual.
“Teach [your] children that gendered constructs are not facts, and successfully communicate that their interests, identities, [and] presentations don’t have to be confined to an assigned gender or role,” Kahn explains.
5. Keep educating yourself.
“You can’t teach what you don’t know,” Quick points out. “Talk with yourself about what your gender (nonconforming or not) means to you and why it’s important. Why do you make the choices you make? How do you feel when someone forces you into something different? … Asking and exploring these things for yourself gives you more insight and helps you model that exploration for your young ones.”
If you have no idea where to start, pick up a book about gender to read in your downtime. Kahn adds that seeing a gender-affirmative therapist can also be a really helpful way for parents to educate themselves and figure out how to best support their child, especially if their child is queer or trans.
6. Be an advocate in your community.
Your son might have the most traditionally “boyish” gender expression ever (whatever that means); that’s totally cool. Just remember it still doesn’t give you a pass to go back to passively or actively supporting stereotypes. No matter your kids’ gender identities, raise them so they know how to actively question the gender norms they’ll inevitably encounter outside the home, so they can choose for themselves who they want to be. Support their growth into open-minded and accepting young people who’ll be able to support the gender identities of their peers, whatever they may be. That also means correcting your kids when they’re making gendered comments about their classmates or about TV shows.
You should also stay engaged in conversations around gender, especially around your children’s schools and your family’s larger community. Does your kids’ school have a weird, gendered policy about girls being allowed to wear nail polish but boys aren’t? Or about which uniforms or bathrooms trans kids are allowed to use? Use your voice to advocate for freedom, expression, and inclusivity.
“I believe in focusing on changing the environments we live in so that a gender-nonconforming child doesn’t have to fear being teased, bullied, or have to change as a means of protection from judgment,” Kahn says. “That change starts at home.”
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