Sex Education?

Or sexist indoctrination

As a feminist campaigner against male violence towards women and children, I’m a passionate supporter of responsible sex education being on the school curriculum. All I got at my rundown comprehensive in north-east England, back in the 1970s, was how babies are conceived – nothing about puberty, sexual consent, or keeping safe from sexual exploitation. Six decades after the advent of the gay and women’s liberation movements, you’d think things would have changed for the better.

Instead, in some Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) classes, kids are being taught that several hundred genders are available for them to choose from, and schools are inviting the likes of transgender charity Mermaids in to indoctrinate them with the belief that children can change sex. Parents are being told they have no say in what their children are taught, and those that do complain run the risk of being labelled anti-gay and transphobic.

Current RSE lessons in our schools are not only failing to challenge potential child abuse – they almost seem to be celebrating it.

Earlier this month, Clare Page lost her legal battle to compel a school to share sex education materials used in her 15-year-old daughter’s lesson. The teenager had reported to her mother that she’d been told to be ‘sex positive’ towards relationships in the course of an RSE session delivered by the School of Sexuality – a provider which has worked with more than 300 schools. Consulting its website, Ms Page discovered one of the teachers on the course describing themselves as a ‘master, fetish trainer’, while others were linked to the commercial sex trade. The website also featured articles on “anal fun and frolics” and “the problem with heteronormativity”.

Shockingly, the judge ruled that the commercial interests of the third-party sex education provider outweighed the public interest in forcing the school to release the lesson plan.

Last year, a group of parents in Wales lost a legal fight against sex education in primary schools. These parents had complained about the Welsh Government’s new Relationships and Sexuality Education Code, arguing that the teaching about some aspects of LGBTQ+ identities – such as how some children are trapped in the wrong body – is dangerous.

This was a child safeguarding issue – but the parents were branded as bigoted by transgender activist groups.

As an out and proud lesbian, and also a secularist, my support for these parents might surprise you, but I am looking at the bigger picture. Whilst I would not concur with the argument put forward by some religious parents that their children should be exempt from RSE, I do sympathise with concerns about indoctrination from groups such as Mermaids.

As a left-wing feminist who believes in frank and open discussion about matters relating to sex and sexuality, I am hardly a prudish reactionary. But my feminist campaigning has taught me that children are extremely vulnerable to being indoctrinated by terms like ‘sex positivity’ – which means celebrating activities such as pole dancing, stripping, and pornography.

How did we get here? Three years ago, school curriculum sex education was reformed after campaigners demanded it be brought up to date. Those fighting for reform insisted that issues such as pornography and ‘sexting’ were added to the curriculum, and I wholeheartedly support this. Our girls need to understand the dangers that face them through newer and ever more insidious forms of sexual exploitation – and we need to educate our boys about the consequences of their actions when they access pornography on their smartphones at school.

The rot set in because many schools (short of teachers with the relevant expertise to teach sex education) decided to outsource this work to private providers. Many of these providers us ‘copyright’ issues to justify their refusal to share materials with parents, and although government guidance is very clear that the curriculum needs to cover issues such as abortion, age of consent, sexual violence and pornography, it also states that teaching must be age-appropriate.

In the absence of any government-approved list of sex education providers for schools (despite demands from both parents and education experts) this has become a free-for-all for the likes of Stonewall, Mermaids, and others that push gender ideology on kids.

It's not just these external organisations that are the problem, I have heard of teachers calling children bigoted and ignorant for denying that it is possible to change sex. One 15-year-old girl who approached me with the support of her mother told me she was shocked when her teacher insisted that there is ‘such a thing as feminist porn’ when talking about how porn teaches boys to disrespect girls. Ask yourself a question when considering all this: who benefits from this ideology? It’s certainly not girls.