Sex Education
Or "Why I make it my business to know the agenda and curriculum of any adult who wants to talk to my children about sex."
Boundaries
Boundaries are vital in keeping children safe. They are also, as Tanya Carter argues[1] vital to helping children feel safe. Children need to be taught that they have a right to physical and emotional boundaries, and that if those boundaries are crossed, the fault always lies with the perpetrator, not with the child.
Age-appropriate sex education is vital. Those engaged in sex education must maintain a variety of boundaries – boundaries between teacher and students, students’ personal boundaries, boundaries around outside agencies visiting schools and ensuring proper vetting, boundaries around what materials are used and in what context.
Maintaining boundaries around sex education is vital for a variety of reasons. “Knowing too much” about sex and sexuality is used by professionals as a diagnostic tool for sexual abuse. Children who understand boundaries are less likely to feel guilt and shame, and are more likely to report, if they are abused.
Jobs which involve talking to children about sex are more likely to attract inappropriate adults, putting children at risk, and therefore appropriate boundaries, checks and safeguarding should be more rigorously enforced.
If sex education is age inappropriate, or ideologically driven, it can harm children and break down boundaries rather than reinforcing them. If sex educators get this wrong, they expose children to risk.
Sex education must be done bearing in mind that it is likely that there is at least one child in the class who is currently being sexually abused. They may only realise during that lesson that what they are experiencing is abuse.
Adults do not need to discuss sex and sexuality with children beyond a few basic things that children need to know. At the right ages, they need to understand: puberty, reproduction and contraception; protection against STIs; the law on consent; that the age of consent is to protect them from predatory adults; what their rights are, and that they have the right to say no. They need to know that some people are lesbian or gay, some people are bi and some people are heterosexual, and some people have no interest in sex, and that all of these things are okay.
Discussing sexuality, pleasure and desire is something that is outside the bounds of sex education. You would not discuss these things with your boss or your colleagues. Most people would not even discuss these things with their closest friends. Why, then, should teachers be discussing them with children?
Whilst children (especially those who may have been exposed to pornography or abused) should be told that sex should not be unpleasant, humiliating or painful, maintaining strict boundaries around discussing pleasure is absolutely vital to child protection. Sex education which goes beyond these boundarieds is not for the benefit of the child. It involves adults initiating inappropriate, sexualised, ideologically driven conversations with children. This is what groomers do.
Many of those involved in safeguarding believe that teaching children, particularly younger children and those with conditions such as ADHD, OCD and autism about gender identity is confusing to them and should be avoided. This is particularly true of the kind of teaching that starts with the “genderbread” model and proceeds to ask children to look for their “gender identity.” This model is used with children as young as primary school. Children do not develop object permanence with regards to biological sex until they are between four and seven. Before this, they believe that changing your clothes literally changes your sex.
I wear a lot of dresses. One morning, I was going out to do some DIY. I was wearing a boiler suit, with my hair tied back and a hammer in my belt. My niece, age five, asked me “why are you a boy now?” My son used to get asked whether he was a girl because he likes drawing, and teddies. Given this, confusing primary school children about gender is not a difficult task.
It is your business, if you are a parent, to make sure that any adult intending to do “sex education” with your child is alive to these issues. The conversation you have with them will harm nobody, and it will make your child safer. These conversations signal loudly and clearly that you are shit hot on safeguarding and that your child is not an easy target. If you go armed with resources, these conversations may help a school which is just doing its best, but isn’t well informed, to become more alive to the issues, thereby protecting more children.
For those who think “what about abusive parents” and so on, “doesn’t the school have a duty,” I have a thought experiment. You are behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. You have a child. You have to send it to earth. You have no knowledge about the people you will leave the child with, other than their job title and their biological relationship to the child. The child will rely on the good auspices of whoever you leave her with to raise her. Who do you choose? I chose the biological mother every time. If you have to ask why, I don’t know what to tell you.
David Paisley’s Intervention in the Debate
Paisley recently abandoned a High Court libel action against me. He alleged, amongst an extraordinary list of other things, that I called him a “paedophile enabler.” He has tweeted about how to talk to children about sex and sexuality. A twitter user tweeted “friends 11 year old daughter (P7) after Stonewall sex ed, comes home saying one of her friends is pan sexual another thinks she’s a boy and she’s not sure what she is. Primary school!! Breaks my heart.”
Paisley responded:
“The correct response when your 11 year old comes home saying they learned about LGBT+ people and they’re “not sure” what they are is to say “that’s nice dear, have you done your maths?” The reason it “breaks your heart” is that you think being LGBT+ is lesser than cis heterosexuality. My friend’s son came home from school at 12 and said he had a boyfriend, his mum was more curious what happened to his girlfriend, who she quite liked. He’s been “bi” for quite a while and it’s a non-issue. Difference from the above being that friend’s son actually exists.”
The child mentioned in the woman’s tweet has been exposed to age-inappropriate sex education. It has confused several children in their primary school class about their sexuality and gender identity. A parent’s response to finding out that their primary school child has been exposed to this and was now confused about their gender identity or sexuality should emphatically not be “that’s nice dear, have you done your maths.” Even the most committed gender ideologue might at this point start a dialogue with their child about what they had learned.
A responsible parent without such ideological commitments might, at the very least, have a few questions for the school:
a. Why are you talking to ten and eleven-year-olds about pansexuality?
b. Have you used the genderbread model with these children, and if so, what is your understanding of it.
c. Why have you been engaging my child in ideologically driven, age-inappropriate conversations about sex, sexuality and gender identity?
d. What else have you taught to this class?
These are not bigoted questions – they are questions about whether adults, talking to children about sex, are doing so in a factual, age appropriate, and ideology-free way. It is a parent’s job to monitor who is having sexual conversations with their children, and to ensure that those conversations are appropriate.
These are not unusual conversations in schools in the UK nowadays. Inappropriate and concerning sex education of this nature is a new phenomenon which is ideologically driven and is being taken into schools across the United Kingdom by organisations such as Educate and Celebrate.
Paisley shames the original tweeter, calling her a liar and accusing her of fabricating the story, because she understands instinctively that there’s something wrong about this kind of sex education. This shaming of women with safeguarding concerns is repeated throughout Paisley’s tweets and capable of enabling and emboldening child sex offenders and others with malign motives.
Paisley implies that parents should not have concerns about ideologically driven, unrelated adults, talking to their children about sex. He also states that any parents with such concerns must necessarily be drive by transphobia and homophobia. This pronouncement has the capacity (intentionally or not) to enable paedophiles. It normalises unrelated strangers talking to children about sex and sexuality in a way those children do not have the capacity to understand, based on an ideologically driven agenda.
In her book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” Carla van Damme talks about one prolific abuser of children. He talked about grooming a large number of children who he never ended up actually abusing. When asked why he bothered, even with children he knew he would not end up abusing, he said “I was getting her ready for the next guy.” Groomers do not just groom individual children whom they plan to abuse. They groom whole communities - sometimes so effectively that people who would never abuse a child end up spouting rhetoric that enables child molesters, and effectively doing their grooming work for them.
Having age-inappropriate conversations with children about sex and sexuality, which they are not capable of processing or understanding, is never in the interest of the child. It is always grooming. Even if the individual having the conversation with the child does not end up abusing them, even if the adult in the conversation has no sexual interest in children at all, having this type of conversation with a child “gets her ready for the next guy.”
This tweet is in support of those who would have those conversations with children, and in direct opposition to those who are concerned with safeguarding. Paisley’s tweet justifies grooming, enables paedophiles, breaks down boundaries, and shames and disempowers those who want to maintain them by implying that they are homophobic and transphobic for raising concerns (a theme that is repeated throughout his tweets).
There are many reasons that somebody might talk in this way. An individual might be the victim of abuse themselves and therefore lack understanding about what is appropriate. They may be ignorant or inexperienced regarding safeguarding and sex education, or regarding children generally. They may not even know the extent of their own ignorance. They may be taking a position that they don’t believe to get “internet points.” They may have swallowed enough queer theory to send them doolally. They may have LGBT glitter in their eyes and be so enamoured of their “progressive” position that they fail to see risks involved. They may have darker intent. I do not know Paisley’s motivation, but either way, his intentions are immaterial. The effect of his words in the debate is the same.
Paisley tweeted that parents should turn a blind eye and not enquire too closely into what adults are teaching their children about sex. This is the exact opposite of what responsible parents should do. It undermines safeguarding, by telling parents not to enquire too closely into unrelated adults who have been confusing their children about sex, and thereby directly enables those who want to commit sexual crimes against children.
It is astonishing to me that somebody who tweeted the way Paisley did would attempt to have me arrested, and then take a high court libel action against me, for calling him a paedophile enabler. The tweets mentioned in this article are just a few of the long series of tweets in the same vein. I will be publishing more of them over the coming days.
Sex Education
Thank you Ceri you explain so clearly what I struggle to put into words about all this ‘we’re just being sex positive’ stuff.