The "don't say gay" bill...literally doesn't say gay. It prohibits teacher-initiated instruction about sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, or gender theory for kids under 3rd (?) grade.
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) March 8, 2022
Most controversy here is, as usual, the result of direct and open lying.
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I don't think my age group started sex education until fifth grade. It was all awkward and giggly, with lots of anatomy diagrams and teachers fumblingly trying and failing to explain things in an innuendo-free way. Given the general lack of sex education here in Korea, I see the value of getting kids educated, but I'd agree that third grade is probably way too early to start. At the same time, the idea of preparing kids for the 21st-century realities of polymorphic sexuality is probably good: at some point, kids need to learn about trans folks, two-mom and two-dad households, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. I'm not against kids' learning about such things at all: sexuality evolves even as humans evolve, and people ought to be prepared. Knowledge is power. But again, don't start this stuff when the kids are too young to process the information they're getting. For me, fifth grade was early enough in a sexually simpler era. That's probably still true for today's kids, despite today's sexual complexity.
ADDENDUM: I can see some finger-wagging commenter coming along and leaving a remark like, "Oh, no, you don't get it—even back in the 80s, the complexity was there." I hate such comments because they're intellectually insulting: they indicate a deliberate misunderstanding of what I'm trying to convey. And yes, I'm aware that sexual complexity has been a thing since long before I was born. Homosexuals, bisexuals, etc., have existed since forever; how can I not know that? Still, public discourse back then didn't involve the truckload of terms and pronouns that it does today, and that's the sense in which the complexity has increased—not to mention that, in the 70s and 80s, I was just a little kid who saw the world more simply.
If memory serves, when didn't have sex ed until junior high school, and then it focused mainly on anatomy. I don't recall any discussion of homosexuality at all. Then again, I'm older so this would have been the late 1960s.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Florida law, I don't have a problem with saying teaching about human sexuality issues before 3rd grade is inappropriate. I also fear the classroom training is likely to be more indoctrination, similar to CRT, than education.