![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pahichan.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/pjimage-1140x641-1.jpg\")
<\/a>However, for queer youth this education is often neglected, if present at all.<\/div>\nThe sex lives of sexual and gender diverse teenagers in Australia are often left out of the classroom, making the exploration and affirmation of their queer identities especially difficult.<\/p>\n
The rise of initiatives like Minus18<\/a> and the Safe Schools<\/a> program has\u00a0made\u00a0information more accessible to LGBTI youth, but there is still a long way to go to make it omnipresent.<\/p>\n For a number of LGBTI advocates in Australia that are now adults, learning about things like consent, sexual fluidity, and online sex in high school would have helped them immensely as queer youth coming to terms with who they were.<\/p>\n In high school a teacher advised Rugg and her classmates to abstain from sex as part of their sex education. It was an all-girls Catholic private school and a religious educator was running the class.<\/p>\n The lessons lasted for around one term and were heavily centred on biology, with a particular focus on sexually transmitted infections.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were told that condoms weren\u2019t effective and not to trust them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like the joke in Mean Girls<\/i> \u2013 the teacher was telling us not to have sex.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until much later that I realised so much was missing.\u201d<\/p>\n As someone who began identifying as gay after high school, Rugg believes she was probably always gay but didn\u2019t have the education or tools to understand it. There was simply no visibility or presence of anything other than cisgender, heterosexual, and monogamous intercourse.<\/p>\n But her first exposure to queerness was in a narrative arc on The O.C.<\/i> that involved a queer woman.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until she started having regular sex and engaging in relationships that she realised sex was so much more than anatomical body parts and venereal diseases.<\/p>\n Despite the wealth of things to know about queer sex, Rugg wishes high school had equipped her with the understanding of one concept in particular: consent.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember being 13 at the public swimming pool with friends and there were three older boys there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the time something happened I thought was fun but it was this wildly inappropriate sexual experience \u2013 I thought the guys must think I\u2019m cool but I look back now and it was so fucked up, I was a child being taken advantage of.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I look back at it objectively it was assault but I still don\u2019t feel like it was because I wasn\u2019t equipped with the capacity to understand it at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Rugg believes all students should learn about queer sex and queer relationships, whether they\u2019re queer or not.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll always find it really amusing when anti-LGBTI people say \u2018we can\u2019t teach kids about queer sexuality because it might make them gay\u2019,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s funny because all gay kids that have grown up learning about straight sexuality are still gay.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving that education is important, and it\u2019s not just about sex. It should be about queer families, queer relationships, and it\u2019s important for everyone in the class to know it\u2019s okay to be gay.\u201d<\/p>\n With a focus on consent, boundaries, and respect, Rugg also believes many schools need to move away from the Mean Girls<\/i>, anatomical, STI-fearing form of education.<\/p>\n \u201cSex is fun and exciting and something really beautiful you do with another person, it\u2019s joyful and romantic and it\u2019s really lovely, rather than being this terrifying thing that gives you diseases,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n One hour was devoted to teaching Scott and his classmates about sex in high school, spread across two classes in physical education. 60 entire minutes.<\/p>\n In the time it takes to watch a film, Scott had already been \u2018enlightened\u2019 with all the information his school deemed necessary for him to learn as a teenager, and had moved on to his regular class activities.<\/p>\n And the only mention of gay sex during that hour was one throwaway line delivered by the teacher saying that sometimes, two men have sex.<\/p>\n \u201cI completely tuned out, I felt that what was discussed was pretty basic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I\u2019d already known things from looking online and finding out that way, so the information relevant to me wasn\u2019t covered in class.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a lot worse as I got older and started to dive into topics like consent, sex online, navigating online sex, and engaging queer sex as a positive thing \u2013 those areas were definitely not on my radar as a high school student and it took a lot to discover those.\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of the knowledge Scott acquired as an adolescent was sourced via the internet and through conversations with friends, something he admits was problematic in areas as the stuff he heard and read wasn\u2019t verified, leading to a number of misconceptions.<\/p>\n He wishes he\u2019d learned about how to navigate sex online as a gay man.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such a core component to sex especially in 2017, and that was really new when I was in high school,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it was a lot of trial and error for my own education.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom Minus18\u2019s perspective through working with young people we find that a lot of information is learned online which is really cool, but then there\u2019s a lot of misinformation out there as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Scott added that he wants sex education to be less gendered, as his experience saw boys and girls into groups as a means to receive disparate information.<\/p>\n \u201cSchools should come at it from a gender neutral perspective, because a lot of the lessons we\u2019re taught around boundaries were taught to girls even though they applied to me as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were split into groups of gender and taught things based on their gender, even though the information was simple and for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Being bisexual didn\u2019t seem like an option for Dani Weber when they were in high school, with the two sessions of sex education at their school focusing exclusively on penis-in-vagina sex.<\/p>\n And while the education wasn\u2019t fear-mongering, it also wasn\u2019t pleasure-focused and rendered queer sex invisible.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought that when girls kissed girls it was only for a boy\u2019s attention, I didn\u2019t know what sex could look like with someone of the same sex,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n \u201cI literally didn\u2019t think it was an option for me.\u201d<\/p>\n When Weber left high school and started university in Melbourne, they were able to take part in the first radical sex and consent week, tagged as: \u2018the sex ed you wished you\u2019d had in high school\u2019.<\/p>\n The event was queer-focused, pleasure-focused, and consent-focused, and it was what helped Weber realise they were bisexual.<\/p>\n As a non-binary drag performer they play an active role in queer communities, a source of invaluable sex education that was absent in school.<\/p>\n The fluidity and broadness of sex are things Weber wished they\u2019d learned about in high school.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly I wished I learned that sex can be almost anything,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing non-binary and bisexual as an adult I realise that sex can mean many things but in high school it didn\u2019t feel like that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so important if you have a non-normative body, for instance if you\u2019re trans or intersex, to not only have one model of sex. It\u2019s so harmful.<\/p>\n \u201cI wished I\u2019d learned that opposite sex relationships can be fluid, experimental, and queer as well. Just because you\u2019re with someone with certain body parts doesn\u2019t mean you have to have heteronormative sex.\u201d<\/p>\n Weber added that learning how to approach sex with someone of the same sex would\u2019ve been helpful as well.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a bisexual person I had no idea how to approach same-sex people, I didn\u2019t know how gender roles would play out or how to communicate effectively,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou should get sex education around how to ask for what you want respectfully, and how to hear no and take it respectfully.\u201d<\/p>\n Copy :\u00a0http:\/\/www.starobserver.com.au\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kathmandu\/Pahichan – SEX education is accessible for many young people in Australia.\u00a0Whether it\u2019s via a condom and a banana in the classroom, an uncomfortable but necessary conversation between a parent and their child, or posted as a photo series on Tumblr, young people are generally taught about reproductive and heteronormative sex as part of their adolescence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":6941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,621,492,490,11],"tags":[749,447,502,894],"class_list":["post-6940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-news","category-opinion","category-slider","category-world","tag-australia","tag-bisexual","tag-lgbti","tag-same-sex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6943,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6940\/revisions\/6943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}SALLY RUGG\u00a0<\/b>LGBTI rights campaigner<\/em><\/h4>\n
MICAH SCOTT\u00a0<\/b>CEO of Minus18<\/em><\/h4>\n
DANI WEBER\u00a0<\/b>Drag performer and presenter for PROJECT ROCKIT<\/em><\/h4>\n