Wintersong

As far as I'm aware, the "heterosexual act" is only ever taught in schools in so far as it pertains to the biological act of reproduction. There are no lessons on oral sex, masturbation, s&m, doggie style, or pretty much any other sexual act. Why on earth should kids need lessons in homosexual sex?

dc koop

If kids are going to be made aware that gay people are part of our society then it's logical to assume that kids will want to ask questions about them which will ultimately lead to questions on how gay people practice sex.

To deny that this could happen is only wishful thinking

yellowroom

pre-pubescent kids have very little interest in sex. Their concept of it as a pleasurable activity for recreation just doesn't kick in till puberty, for obvious reasons.

They think of relationships in very Disney terms - holding hands, cuddling, kissing. If they saw two women holding hands they are not going to think - but how do they have sex? any more than they would if they saw a man and a woman holding hands.

And in fact if that's the first thing an adult thinks when they see a same sex couple, then I think that's a very sad state indeed.

kodokan

I can't think of a time when my daughter didn't know that boys were anatomically different. She has a parent of each gender and had the usual cavalier toddler disregard for privacy or any notion that people may want to pee alone; she has a brother; she had a sort of 'health class' in her Swiss kindergarten one day where, for the benefit of kids with shyer parents and no opposite sex siblings, they explained it all with anatomically-correct dolls.

I can easily imagine them doing the same class - I was present for it - incorporating notions of transgenderism suitable for that age group with just a couple of extra sentences about how some people are boys on the outside but that in their heads, they feel they are girls, and vice versa. And the kids just shrugging in a 'huh, that's interesting fashion', like when they heard about bears hibernating all winter or some such. Total non-issue, it really is.

kodokan

Agreed - my son was the most curious-about-everything, wanting-to-know-how-the-world-worked child I know, and - as can be seen above - was entirely used to coming to his parents with every possible question that popped into his head. And even with him it was several years between finding out about how sex made babies, and realizing that adults did it at other times too, just for fun!

kodokan

And I suppose the big issue for everyone with transgender and questions of gender identity is that we know it now - we can't unknow it.

We know that all fetuses begin with external female genitalia, and that sometimes the process of becoming a boy baby goes awry halfway through. We know that not every baby's birth can be greeted with 'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' We know that some people have a measurable mismatch between their external appearance and their internal organs or their DNA. We know there are likely other biochemical or genetic reasons affecting people's gender identities that we haven't yet identified.

We know that this has always been happening, but that until recently the people affected had no choice but to hide it and live lives of fear and tragedy. So what do we do now - carry on pretending it doesn't exist?

Leaving aside the monstrous cruelty of this for the children concerned, that would mean the rest of us would collectively become science deny-ers - we would have to tell our children that the entire world is neatly divided into boys with penises and girls with vaginas when we KNOW that's a flat-out lie.

Bring on the fluidity and ambiguity, I say, and start having some real conversations about what it means in our culture to be male or female; the biology; the associated expected behaviors. It'd certainly make all those programs aimed at getting girls into science and engineering a lot easier, and stop stay at home dads from being regarded as novelty freaks.

RGH80

Speaking from my own experience:

Trans people, children included, are embarrassed and motified that the genitalia they have doesn't look how it should look and will go to extreme lengths to ensure nobody sees it. Most trans women don't even want to risk the faintest outline of it appearing in their clothing (see tucking).

Children, on the whole, don't care about genitalia. If anything, boys find the concept of their penises funny. Girls are 'more mature'. Trans girls will not find their penis the slightest bit funny.

Bathrooms are segregated by gender, not sex. Most of this bathroom panic has occurred because sections of society have suddenly realised this isn't the same thing, and want to cram them both in the same box to ease their anxieties.

RGH80

Agreed.

The funny thing about gender is that it's an incredibly weird concept. People just DO it, without thinking about it. And it's one of the few things that massively dominates our lives, yet we don't really stop to question why we do the things we do as a result of it.

When people start to question gender, which often happens when trans people are in their minds, they can't cope with it. The easiest thing to do is to invalidate the group of people who seem to have a grasp of gender beyond what society passively accepts. And one of the routes to that is to become fixated on genitalia, and many people struggle to get beyond that.

kodokan

I'm finding this thread, and the resulting ponderings I'm having about gender, completely fascinating. I think it's exciting to imagine a society where people didn't have to have a rigid gender identity, where we had moved away from trite simplifications of boys liking dirt and cars and math and sport and being considered emotional cripples, and girls liking pink and dolls and dresses and make up and art and being governed by their hormones and obsessed with their hair.

The less people have to live in irrelevant, somewhat biological but mostly societally-determined boxes - man, woman, black, white, young, old - the better, in my view. It'll get rid of a lot of the annoying 'should-ing' that goes on.

yellowroom

I like the sound of that society too.

However, there seems to be a large proportion of society that lives by those same rules and social conventions and they are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are no longer relevant. I think maybe the genitalia and bathroom fixation may be one outworking of this "uncomfortableness". Maybe like some of the civil rights fights of the past, we have to show that really the world will not end and the world will actually be a better place - if you are not female/black/gay/transgender then voting rights/equal pay/equal marriage/gender neutral bathrooms do not directly impact your life and you can carry on exactly as before. But life is improved for those people who ARE directly affected. No-one loses and some people win. Who can argue against that?

Wintersong

You were specifically talking about "a class" - i.e. a school setting. That conversation is beyond the scope of any class given at school. That's all I was saying.

Leslie

Erm ... how did you learn about how homosexuals practice sex?

scrubbedexpat099

We did not, any advice?

sir_eccles

There is definitely a generational gap between say "the old white male politicians" and "millennials". I recall when the argument about gay marriage was fairly heated a few years ago. My brother in law who is now in his mid twenties was very much of the opinion that why shouldn't they have marriages, no big deal. They don't care, it doesn't bother them in the slightest.

The older generations are all over thinking it, trying to work out if it is bad for them.

dc koop

I'll tell you straight Leslie. . Some kids at my school used to talk about "bum boys" After a while I learned that it meant men who "did i in the back end". Bit of a surprise at the time but at eleven years of age just about everything is a surprise. There were plenty of names for these men, none of them nice but that was a long time ago.

This is not intended to insult or offend any gay members by the way but just to answer your somewhat directly put question

I never learned much of anything about sex from my parents. They just weren't the type to talk about the subject. There was no sex instruction at schools either at that time. There were some vague comments about going "blind" or "hairs growing on the palms of my hands" when my mom discovered a boatload of girlie magazines under my bed but that was the nearest I got to learning anything at home but by that stage I was pretty well clued up on sex anyway.

Like most kids of my generation sex instruction consisted of whispers and sniggers and scribblings and drawings on lavatory walls.

I knew very little about the diseases caused by sexual contact until I went into the army and like all soldiers learned through watching some rather graphic and frightening training films on the subject provided by the Medical Corps