Abstinence-only sex ed is ineffective? LGBT students could have told you that

Last week a study commissioned by the federal government officially declared abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education programs do not work.

My reaction: “Well, duh.” I went to Catholic school for 12 years and I never once thought my peers and I were getting enough information about safer sex in our abstinence-only-until-marriage courses, which were called “Family Life” classes. Family Life classes emphasized how sex was only remotely okay if it was with your spouse and used for creating a family. They never once showed (or told) us how to use a condom, much less any other form of latex protection.

Though I attended parochial school, students in other private and public schools across the country received — and are still receiving — similar incomplete and inaccurate information about sexual health. In the 2006 fiscal year, the federal government set aside $113 million for abstinence-only education programs! (Funding for these programs has been soaring since 1996.)

That’s $113 million being spent on programs that often ignore how to prevent contracting STDs and HIV/AIDS. New federal guidelines now mandate that “throughout the entire curriculum, the term ‘marriage’ must be defined ‘only as a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife,’ and the word ‘spouse’ refers to ‘only a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.’”

While it may seem obvious that abstinence-only education doesn’t persuade most students to remain abstinent (out of the 2,000 youth who took part in this longitudinal study, those who participated in abstinence-only programs were no more likely to abstain from sex than their peers who did not participate), the point that is often missed is how these programs exclude gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students. By definition, abstinence-only programs completely disregard LGBT youth, giving them no information about how to keep themselves sexually and emotionally healthy in their relationships.

In addition to blatantly ignoring the educational needs of LGBT students, abstinence-only program curricula give students false information: “Over 80 percent of the abstinence-only curricula, used by over two-thirds of [abstinence-only program] grantees in 2003, contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health,” according to a December 2004 congressional report commissioned by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman.

I’d have to say every sex ed class I’ve ever attended must have fallen into that 80-plus percent. While I don’t remember specifics, the main gist of every class was “if you have sex, you’ll get pregnant, and/or an STD, even if he wears a condom and you’re on the pill.”

Yes, of course it was always implied that sex was between a man and a woman. You’d think that even the most basic heteronormative sex ed class would teach students about condoms, right? Nope, there were no condom demonstrations. If we were good girls, and our husbands-to-be were good boys, then there was no need for condoms once we were married, so we didn’t need to learn how to use them.

No mention of queer sex, no condoms... What exactly comprises abstinence-only sex ed?

I remember when I was 13 my “Family Life” teacher told the girls in our class (we of course were split up into “boys” and “girls” groups during any talk that included references to sex) that our virginity was a rose. Every time we had premarital sex, she said, petals would fall off the rose. Then, we would one day want to get married and we would have nothing to give to our husbands but a shriveled up ugly rose with one petal left. Our husbands would be sad and disgusted with us if we didn’t have a pretty rose to give them. (The reasoning was that instead of a rose, we would have STDs or illegitimate children to give to our husbands, because that’s what you get if you have sex outside of marriage.) Abstinence included abstaining from “second base” as well. We were told to stop at a “romantic kiss” (midway between a grandma kiss and a heavy makeout, the teacher told us) until our wedding night.

Who knows what the “Family Life” teacher told the boys in class. I just knew this information wasn’t really applicable to me. Even though I knew at the time that I was bisexual, I knew this information about having sex with men (something about marrying them, not using condoms and giving them flowers seemed to be the gist?) was not helpful. I was also frustrated that my teachers never brought up how to be safe with a same-sex partner. I assumed there were no big risks in having sex with women, because I hadn’t heard anything about it. But I knew from my vague interest in current events that sometimes newspapers would mention gay men’s risk of HIV. I knew these issues were never going to be addressed in class.

If I hadn’t done my own research online and in the public library, my classes would have left me clueless about negotiating safer sex with a partner of any gender. At my all-girls high school, I ended up being the one that my peers would come to with questions about things like the morning-after pill (Plan B) because they knew I had done research and would be more helpful (and less judgmental) than our “Family Life” teachers.

Our high school teachers told us that Plan B was an “abortion pill that killed your baby.” (It’s not.) They tried to keep us from having sex by giving us scary misinformation. After junior high, I guess our teachers thought the rose metaphor wasn’t enough, so we moved on to beans. In 10th grade my “Family Life” teacher passed baggies full of red and white beans around the class. The red beans represented sexually active girls who would get pregnant or contract an STD. The white beans were the lucky few girls who made it through premarital sex unscathed. I swear it looked like there were about two white beans for every hundred red ones. Abstinence-only education is scary.

While it was scary, it obviously wasn’t enough to stop teens at my school from having sex. Actually, what I find scary is the fact that, regardless of talk about marriage, the little information teens are given is only about vaginal intercourse between a woman and a man. No information is given about the safety of manual, oral, or anal sex.

I know not every student has the time or resources to sit down and educate themselves about sexual health issues like I did. Though I never claimed to be any kind of expert, my classmates thought I was because I knew more than what was taught in class (which was nothing). I can’t believe that 11 years after the federal government started to invest heavily in abstinence-only sex ed, it’s still happening. $113 million is a high price to keep kids ignorant. It’s a high price to ensure that LGBT students have no idea how to negotiate safer sex. I hope the release of the federal study last week leads to some changes. I hope educators will finally start equipping students with the safer sex information they need, regardless of the gender of their partners.

Read the Task Force’s April 16 statement about the study.

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