Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses
We can’t teach safe sex if kids don’t understand their own and others’ gender identities
Demonstrators protest for transgender rights with a rally, march through the Loop and a candlelight vigil to remember transgender friends lost to murder and suicide on March 3, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
he National Interest: Once a month, this column is tackling broader questions about what the country should do about gaps in achievement and opportunity, especially for boys of color, in a partnership with The Root.
We can’t teach safe sex if kids don’t understand their own and others’ gender identities.
Women across the gender spectrum are being killed and raped every day, but our policy debates about gender are hung up on bathroom use in schools, a GOP-fueled witch hunt intended to demonize transgender women.
If we really care about keeping women safe, we need to reform sex education—as well as bathroom signs—to help young people better understand and navigate gender identity: the self-defined and, too often, societal-prescribed state of being a man, woman or other identity on the gender spectrum.
If a good understanding of bodily functions were all teens needed to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, schools would be just fine offering a good biology course. But kids need to learn about gender, along with the skills that promote safe sex, if they’re going to have positive relationships and respect one another.
Like forbidden conversations about race in education, gender is also a taboo subject, causing more than philosophical disagreements and policy conflicts. People are dying at the intersections of ignorance, gender, race and sex.
Eight transgender people have died this year, and 22 transgender people died last year in the United States because of violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign. It was the most ever recorded, according to the advocacy group.
Looking more closely at this year’s deaths, all eight transgender people killed so far in 2017 were transgender women of color, Put more gender studies in schools’ sex ed courses - The Hechinger Report:
