In the 90’s, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States published a “Call to Action”, which outlined the goals they had for the coming years, and ultimately their plan for nationwide comprehensive sex education by the year 2000. However, depending on your definition of “comprehensive”, their goal still has not been met 15 years later. We can see the results of the lack of comprehensive Sex Ed if we compare Texas’s teen pregnancies over the past decades to California’s same statistics. They start out relatively similar, and then over about 10 years, California’s rate dropped by 64%. Texas’s, on the other hand, stayed roughly the same. The difference? California introduced new, intelligent state-wide laws on how to teach health classes in public schools. One of their main clauses was the Abstinence-only education is literally not allowed by the state. On the other side of the desert, Texas implemented state-wide abstinence education, or, as I like to call it, non-comprehensive sex ed. The final precursor to the main points of this essay is that, although hellfire Baptist preachers may tell you differently, social media has not led to a rise in LGTB+ people across the world, but instead sparked a rise of acceptance and connected people to each other, so that instead of hating …show more content…
This topic opens up a whole new can of decidedly controversial topics, sure to make opinionated people either run or scream. However, the facts speak for themselves. The number of people who identify as transgender is rising in the world. This isn’t due to people learning they can “choose” their gender, but instead is due to the fact that this issue is just now gaining publicity, and people are learning that they’re not freaks. It’s not a matter of “Honey, even though you were born with certain parts, you can choose not to have those”; it’s a matter of the fact that these children have lived in self-loathing for however long they’ve been alive, not even knowing what they want or what’s wrong, but instead understanding themselves just well enough to know that not everything about their existence lines up. As psychotherapist Janet Smith