I’ve spent the past week or so—in between client deadlines and parent stuff—slowly updating the state legislation pages on Guerrilla Sex Ed.
I’ve made it to Montana so far.
There are only eleventy-billion states left to go. 😩
It’s tedious, but I think it’s important to provide this information on the site, if only so we can know what we’re up against. If we have a sense of what’s going on in our state, we can then be more intentional about filling in the gaps at home, or we can get more involved in sex ed advocacy at the local level, or we can lock ourselves in the bathroom and weep while stuffing our faces with Cadbury Mini Eggs. (Just me?)
These past few years have seen a glut of new bills introduced, many of them seeking to restrict access to sex education.
And as I’ve brought each state’s legislation page up to date, making sure the basic laws are current and then listing out the bills to watch, I’ve gotten just a little bit depressed.
There are proposed bills around “obscene content.” There are “forced outing” bills. There are “parental rights bills.” There are “risk-avoidance” bills.
And while there are also proposed bills that seek to expand access to comprehensive and inclusive sex education, they seem buried in all the other bills that seem designed purely to keep our kids in the dark about what it means to be human, and to restrict parents’ ability to make smart, healthy decisions for their own children.
If you’re as agitated as I am, I encourage you to take a look at SIECUS’s 2024 State of Sex Education Legislative Look-Ahead. It contains information on all of these bills, and also highlights trends across the country.
For example, common points of focus for more regressive bills were book bans and censorship, forced outing and misgendering, parental rights, and laws that would negatively impact trans youth.
On the flip side, progressive bills included those that sought to improve sex education, protect those within the LGBTQ+ community, provide assault and abuse prevention instruction, improve access to sexual and reproductive health services, and increase menstrual equity.
If those of us who supported the issues in that latter paragraph would only get louder, the onslaught of regressive bills might feel less overwhelming.
Again, take a look at this report and learn how you might get more involved in your own district.
I think it’s time we kicked those garbage bills to the curb.
- Steph 😘
The Book Sanctuary Movement Over the Past Year
At the end of 2023, I wrote a news piece for Poets & Writers on the rise of the book sanctuary movement over the past year. Why might it be relevant to your interests? Welp. The majority of books that have faced challenges of late are those with a focus on gender, sexuality, and race. Here’s a teaser of the piece, which just came out in February.
Last spring, Mark Adler noticed a dramatic uptick in attempts to ban books at the Paris–Bourbon County Library in Paris, Kentucky, where he is the director. Before that, library staffers fielded the occasional request for a book to be removed from shelves. But by the fall of 2023, they had already received requests to pull 102 titles from the library’s collection.
“Watching as that progressed over the next couple of months and the toll it took on staff, that was hard,” says Adler. “And I remembered why I became a librarian, and I let myself cry. It was just this flood of tears for a few minutes, and then that was replaced by anger and indignation.”
Aware that other libraries were shouldering an increase in attempts to ban books, Adler began researching methods used to protect access to challenged titles. He discovered the “sanctuary” movement, which marks libraries and other institutions as safe spaces for books that have been targeted by activists with the aim of keeping them from readers. With his recommendation the library’s board adopted a resolution in November declaring the library a sanctuary.
Read this entire article over at Poets & Writers.
Full Disclosure: Sex Ed in the News
Relevant to the whole book banning thing, the American Library Association has released “book résumés” for challenged books so that book review committees can more efficiently evaluate titles. I think this is so neat.
Relevant to all those bills on Capitol Hill, eight states were successful in restricting sex ed last year, and this article takes a look at how it’s only the beginning.
I wrote about online safety last month. If that didn’t convince you we need to be aware of what our kids are doing online, and have conversations with them about how to move through the world wide web safely, there’s always this horrifying NYT article about girl influencer accounts managed by moms. [cw: pedophilia and grooming] It’s next level stuff, but really illustrates some of the dangers that exist online.
And because I’d rather not end on that note, here’s some good news: Despite opposition, the Wake County, NC school board has approved a grant for LGBTQ+ projects and diverse books!
Sex Ed Resources
I wrote up this fun list of middle grade fiction that sneaks in sex ed. ;)
Educator Kathleen Hema did up this fun reel on how to respond to questions about condoms depending on your child’s age. It’s a great illustration of how these conversations can shift over the course of a child’s life.