You start to have this association with sex and sexuality as this
really shameful, awful thing, which means you
don't talk about it.
It means you're not having open conversations,
with anybody about what you're doing or
what you want to do, or what you think you might like, or who you might
love. Which means you do dangerous things.
My first memory of sex ed – we had a
health class.
And they showed us
a video – the video
at that point looked like it was ancient, so
I don't know old it would have been, but
it was this British video
where people were talking about
puberty and how you were going to start to
smell weird and get hair in
different places. And that was about
it. And mostly
all we did was laugh through it – like people just made jokes
about it.
I remember the felt
dolls. And
we were separated by
sex assigned at birth, or whatever
legal information was on our documentation –
so all the little boys
would go in one room; all the little girls would
go in another, and then
we were given dolls and then we had to
put patches
where hair would grow as you
went through puberty.
We weren't given any indication
of what a queer or trans person
was. I was almost in my mid-20s before
I even learned what the word
'transgender' and 'transsexual' were.
Rocky Horror Picture show was the first memory
I had – I must have been like 12 or 13
when I saw it. That was the first
place that I saw anything that I thought might
be kind of like
what I felt like I was. But if it had been
introduced when I was in elementary school,
Tim Curry, doing all of the
things Tim Curry does in that musical,
wouldn't have been the
example that I carried into my 20s of what I might
be.
We had health
classes that would
talk about development, but there was no
connection to what development
meant to our broader lives
as human beings, and what it meant
in relation to engaging in relationships
and friendships, in romantic
interests, in sexual interests
and all of these things. Because being a young child,
everyone has curiosities,
and so you get all of this information
but you don't know what to do with it or where to store it.
So we were split up and
our gym teacher had to teach it.
Our gym teacher was a huge jock – he was
terribly homophobic.
He talked to us about blowjobs
and congratulated one
of the guys in the class for having got a blowjob. That was
what we – oh, and he said that anal sex was
gross.
It means for those of us who
were curious about that or were trying things like that
out, that we
were doing it in ways that I know were
not safe, at all.
It's not like I didn't have the internet – I just had no idea what to
search for.
There's not a conversation of
what it means to go through puberty and
what it means if you don't actually feel that your body
is doing things that you want it to do –
which, I realize probably everyone going through
puberty is like, 'I don't actually want my body to do this,'
but when it's
this disconnect between your gender identity
and what everyone is telling you –
'This is how you should be developing,' –
I think it then gets really confusing
and I think it can really become internalized,
as to,
'There is obviously something wrong with me
because I'm not developing in this proper way.'
The older curriculum doesn't teach you
respect for each other.
It doesn't teach you consent.
It doesn't teach you about gender or sexuality.
It doesn't teach any kind of respect for difference. Not having a
guided, well-thought-out
conversation about something like consent
just
allows for sexual violence to
keep on happening in high schools.
It further alienates
queer and trans folks. If
a really solid sex-ed curriculum,
like what we had, had been allowed to
sit and really get taught,
in depth, for many years,
so many things could be avoided. And then they come to university
and the same kinds of things happen. Sexual
violence is a huge problem
in our society,
and not taking steps to
be talking about it – not
taking really active steps to be doing something
about it, means it's not –
it's just not going to get better. It's not something
that goes away on its own. You can't
not talk about it and have it
disappear.
When we have those explicit conversations
and they're mentioned and they're talked
about, I think it's really important, because it allows us
to be more critical, to understand
that, 'This is where I don't fit,
and this is what this means,'
and other folks can say, 'Okay, why don't
you fit here, and how can we all change that?'
How do we make sure that everyone fits,
or there's no need to fit?