California has revised its guidance on sex education to public school teachers, encouraging them to talk about gender identity with students and give advice to young LGBT people about relationships and safe sex. Defenders of the rights of LGBTQ representatives praised the new recommendations aimed to draw attention to a community that is often left out of policy sex education.
However, some parents and conservative groups attacked the document of more than 700 pages as an encroachment on parental rights, arguing that his claims for the issues that should be left in charge of the family.
flickr.com/Kevin Labianco/CC
The guidance adopted on Wednesday the Board of education of the state of California does not require teachers teaching children anything. On the website of the state noted that it is intended as a guide for teachers on observance of state standards in health education such as nutrition, physical activity and the fight against alcoholism and drug addiction.
But on the topic of sex the most attention during the public hearings on Wednesday. The manual informs teachers that the kindergarten students can identify themselves as transgender, and offers tips on how to talk about it, adding that «the goal is not to cause confusion as to the gender of the child, and to develop the realization that there are other forms».
For tips on discussing Masturbation with students of the middle classes, including on issues that they are not physically harmful, but also to discuss puberty with transgender teenagers, which creates «an environment that includes challenging binary notions of gender».
Hundreds of Parents Pull Kids From School to Protest LGBTQ person at work Curriculum in California https://t.co/VCvEED2FYb
— Daniel Franzese (@WhatsupDanny) May 8, 2019
Patricia Reyes, a 45-year-old mother came to the hearings for 644 km from his home in southern California, accompanying my 4 year old daughter angelina who held a banner reading: «Protect my innocence and childhood.» «It’s just terrible what they are going to teach. It’s pornography… If this continues, I will not send their to school.»
Among the speakers was 16-year-old Phoenix Ali Raja, a transgender boy, who said he rarely taught information for people like him in the lessons of sex education at his high school in Los Angeles. «I was never taught about how to be in relationships with men-gay,» said he, adding that «talking about sex does not begin in school.»
49-year-old Michelle Mcnutt focused on healthy relationships and consent that it is never too early to teach her two daughters at a state school, aged 11 and 9 years old. «Withholding medically accurate scientific information from them actually does more harm and in fact does not protect your innocence,» she said, dressed in a purple t-shirt with the inscription «Protect TRANS students». If you do not provide children with accurate information about their own body … how can they make the right choice?»
Not less disputes arose around books that the new rules could be recommended to students. In an earlier version of the document proposed that high school students read the book: «S. E. X .: all you need to know guide to sexuality, to help you aged from 20 to 20 years.» The publication includes descriptions of anal sex, coercion, and other perversions.
Few parents read the book and picked it up, so Board members could see the pictures that many have called «obscene». The Board by looking at the pictures, removed the book, as well as several others from the manual.
