Rant about LGBT Education in Schools

I think living in a conservative state, it will be harder to have the education that is needed. Those state tend to be a bit power hungry on that, and want you to follow the catholic ways of understanding the world instead of progressing with the times. With that being said, it's difficult to have an education that will focus on LGBT, and it sucks! I think it should be a part of the school curriculum.
in all cases, yes, I agree haha.

 

I hear you. There should be at least one lesson per that whole curriculum regarding LGBT relationships.

 

Alright, I'm gonna add my two cents collection here.
I have to agree, and there is also a point to make : it varies differently in different countries. I'm gonna divide it and nest it into spoilers so everyone doesn't have to painfully scroll through everything, because they're quite raw, probably a bit broken in sense, and messy.

On Child Development classes and the cisheteronormative culture :

Spoiler

Your "Child Development" class interests me. I kind of get the idea of what it teaches students about. No such thing exists where I live, and here we have the tenacious habit to do things the way most people around us do (usually unhealthily without thinking about going against the norm), and our culture has many many flaws that are thus perpetuated (I mean, the Latins were great but we also got some of their downsides). But I digress. On the matter of addressing us LGBT+ folks in school : I have never had an official curriculum mention any of us. None. Zero. In fact, I've never had one about cisgender heterosexuals either. We don't teach what marriage is at school here, really, it's so in our culture that people just know, and most of the time, while often acccepting the possibility of same-sex marriage, people default to heterosexual & cisgender expectations (due to deeply rooted heteronormativity, the lack of difference between "sex" and "gender" in our language, and the linguistic impossibility for gender non comforming people to express themselves since every noun/adjective/article/pronoun has a gender that's either male or female). There's also the taboo of sex that I'll talk about later. And the specter of (religious inspired) purity that supposedly children/early teens incarnate, which shan't be stained by the learning of impure, dirty sex! When 6th graders make sex jokes and basically already know the cishet basics, that's BS; funnily enough, in 10th grade, most can't explain what a healthy relationship is like. I digress.
So we don't need to teach cisheteronormativity at school for it to be literally burned into every little French child's mind, like mine, and many others'. Now I'm sure if we did teach those things (when to marry, how to have friends and stuff) it would be great, and if it were the least inclusive, that's be earth-shattering. The last "if" statement though would trigger backlash (and it kind of did when our government tried to create a curriculum for kindergarteners centered around the identification of gender roles and stereotypes and addressing the importance of not having to fit them if we don't want to, or as the opponents branded it : "they gonna tell mah baby he can be a girl!!").
So by the time people who grew up along with me arrived in 4th grade everyone only knew of the cis-het way of behaving. Sure, I was in a pretty poor suburb, and heck, I didn't know what homosexuality was until 5th grade and gosh look at where I am now. Plus even now if I say "gender is a social construct evolving on a gradient spectrum" I'll hear "yes but she/he has a penis/vagina". Yey.

Growing up with the mindset that things only work one way when you're about to discover that you're not meant to fit the mold is pretty damaging (especially without positive role models), and when you don't have models of healthy relationships, let alone healthy same sex relationships, well, you're doomed, unless you don't question things, which, why would you if you're "normal"?

Here, the big elephant of sex education and my personal experience of it.

Spoiler

I'm gonna be honest with you, I studied sexual education in America. It sucks. It's more often heteronormative christian fear-based abstention-only brainwashing rather than real education, when it happens (and sometimes I wish some people never had to sit through those classes; it's better not to have than have something damaging). I'm almost sure it has doomed the good part of an entire generation of your country, and it's only getting worse (after getting a bit better). On the aspect of LGBT+ inclusivity, I wouldn't even start there. There's so much wrong with how those things are taught right now that having a nation-wide compulsory base would be a minimum, with, why not, a bit of inclusivity (but you know if you're too progressive at once those laws are blocked). I'd leave no opt out choice, although I understand the argument of parents having a say in their children's education (although then they can put them in private schools). It'd great if it also included things like consent, healthy relationships (which might be covered by Child Development, I don't know), and all of that, but I digress again.

So now my other two cents, on the story of how sex ed works here.
We're not bad, but we're doing it wrong. Firstly, you have the taboo of sex fostered by our society's unwillingness to openly talk about those topics. I knew the basics by age 10 (which I know now was mostly BS and heterosexual nonsense), most of us did, but there was the shadow of shame hanging over all that was related to sex. We had (uncomfortable) sex scenes in movies, and most of our curse words were related to that. So for us, sex = gross = adult stuff = forbidden to us youngsters = shameful = taboo was a logical way of thinking, at least where I was. That's why in sex ed class, everyone tried to distance themselves, with jokes and giggles and "eeeeewww"s. I prefered the finger in the ear method and literally spent the first two hours of sex ed I ever had with my ears covered trying to smother my shame, whilst convincing myself it was gross and we were too young to learn about it (that or unconsciously I couldn't accept the idea that my thing was meant to go in a woman's thing, still today, it grosses me out). It was useless, and from what I can recollect of it (a lot more than I want to admit) it only dealt with contraception and puberty, both things that all of us 7 graders knew about (though more or less well) through the media and our families. Kids aren't that dumb and oblivious. To this day I still barely know how to put a condom on (which was taught to the girls, not us guys, because yes, we were put into two groups), and all I'd have known without personal research would be the stages of puberty.
The second round was one hour in 8th grade. Same thing, no hearing, hough at the time my reasoning was mostly "I don't wanna hear your heterosexual bullcrepe I'm trying to cope with the fact I'm a friendless hopeless gay freak who fell in love with his best male friend". It was fun. The only mention of anything I could related to was when one of the people teaching it to us read my question (which was more of a lamentation about me dying before I'd need their teaching; depression is great) and briefly talked about at risk populations, amongst which were the gays (not even bisexual folks, like in a world of just gay/straight, period).
And do you know what's worse in that? I had throughout all my education (and I'm in 11th grade now) Three hours of education on sexuality. The French law requires two hours mandatory.. per grade, starting from 6th grade (I think, maybe less). Less than 25% of all French middle schools and high schools actually comply with that law, which is from 2001. My High School (which I'm not gonna brag about but it's pretty classy and neat) doesn't even have those interventions for us.
When a 17 year old girl doesn't know a darn thing about how she's done down there or how it works for her, or even that she too can pleasure herself, that it's normal, there's a problem. Same thing when she's coerced into sexual intimacy many times by her boyfriend and doesn't understand what it wrong. When you have some (supposedly straight) guys talking about girls like they're discussing hunting season yield, which reflects entirely on how they act with girls, there's a problem.
When you have kids who have to find out everything about same sex relationships and sexual intercourse (like I had to do and if I had one euro for every hour of sleep I lost to that I could buy myself a new laptop with 32GB of RAM), or even stay in denial because they're convinced to be deviants or going through a phase because they've never been exposed to something other than "guys love girls / girls love guys" (which is becoming more and more rare but it happens), since school never debunked those claims, and most often they're repeated by the society around them, there's a problem.
I'm breathless just writing that like I shouted it.. And I'm not even addressing transgender/gender non conforming invisibility, which is only beginning to be acknowledged as an issue as of right now.

So where am I getting at? Here in France we do things very differently. LGBT inclusion in school, or even threats to the longstanding cisgender heterosexual norm taught and ingrained in everyone's young mind results in mindless and consistent backlash. We saw that in 2013 when same sex marriage was made legal (that wasn't even in school), and in 2014 with the "ABCs of equality" (that was in school and the backlash was bad, real bad). We have a long way to go to dissociate from our customs (especially on the topic of gender)..
You in the US? You already have some of the structures (Child Development classes, associations ready to hand great curriculum models for inclusive education, although you have the worst sex ed in the developed world, except in Poland, because, wow, just look at Poland's sex ed), you need to keep fighting, because the backlash right now is terrifyingly strong (especially for trans inclusion). Legislature is needed, standardization is needed, most likely those issues will only be addressed if enough parents request they're addressed, or if more teens are killed because of bullying, because they're convinced they'll disappoint their families, because they could never accept themselves in a world that taught them to fit a mold nothing could get them in shape to, and in deep (red?) states, that's less likely to happen.

So hopefully by the time we're old people young minds will look at today's education and think of it like we think of early theories on the structure of earth : nonsense. Maybe we will be the ones to change that, maybe not. Until then we have to act as second class educators, because ignorance is probably the worst thing to ever happen in humanity.

On that, good day to you, fellow humans.

 

I remember my sex ed being really...stupid honestly. I never learned about lesbian sex or gay sex or even how to put a condom on. We were taught absence and how a woman's virginity was sacred.

Wish it was a little better now for the kids. Should be told there are at least LGBTQ to begin with. Ugh...this is kind of depressing.

 

Yikes! I had a year of sex ed in 6th grade, while I lived in Pennsylvania. By what I'm seeing, I'm probably quite lucky. (the course even mentioned about the benefits of masturbation. And we colored drawings of genitals XD ) However, there was only one reference in the whole year about gay people, and that was when we watched a video that was debunking myths about STIs

Health in 7th grade felt rushed and it focused more on abstinence during the sex ed unit. We spent one day to quickly learn facts about birth control methods

 

My entire health class (which had sex ed deeply embedded into it) was also pretty crap. It offered the absolute basics of it and even then it was outdated (the book we used was released back around 2003 and I took it during the second half of 9th grade back in 2013)

 

In sex ed all we did was talk about going through puberty! No talk about safe sex, or sex at all! Kind of pointless really ... However, I do think they should be talking about same sex relationships as well. I live in a large LGBT community and whilst it's not taught on the National Curriculum, it is taught outside of school hours in some schools. This means it's optional. I think some parents worry that their child will "turn" gay if it is taught in school, but not teaching it tells people that it's wrong. My friend home schools for the very reason that she wants her children to grow up knowing that same sex relationships are ok (she is bi). The thing I've always found strange though is how it's not taught in schools, yet most of the schools round here (excluding the Catholic schools) encourage the kids to watch or join in the Pride parade every Summer! I also know that one school refuses to teach about same sex relationships but does have an LGBT after school club! I honestly think it should be in the National Curriculum!

 

In my school everyone claims to be pretty tolerant. But in fact this year (11th grade, students around 17-18) it was the first time a teacher told us about LGBT*, and because I'm in this grade for the second time I know this isn't "normal". In fact we're the only class in which the teacher told us about transgender, what it means to them and their families, about the OPs etc. It was literally the first time an adult who's not part of LGBT* told us that trans*people are valid.

 

Never had anything to do with LGBT mentioned in any sex ed classes, or in school entirely.

 

Forgot to even mention about any LGBT stuff they taught in regards to sex ed. Despite the fact that my high school had a pretty sizable LGBT population, nothing having to do with it or safe sex in regards to sex in the LGBT community was even mentioned.

 

I'm in one of the more conservative states so the bar is set even lower, nothing I was exactly unaware of in the curriculum and absolutely nothing a gay girl would need to know. Apparently my argument was convincing enough that I was able to often avoid the class (It was really just immature boys and occasional dong jokes, just too rowdy for me.) but not enough for them to upgrade/update it. Sometimes they'd show a basic video from the 90's or something, but very simple stuff.

I mean, sure google would probably help a bit but it'd be nice if the class actually taught it's subject more thoroughly. I don't know what a girl can give another girl or any of that. But I guess it's fine because I don't particularly plan on doing any of that anytime soon. I'm still young. And hopefully smart enough.