As a teenager I understood that if a man and a woman have unprotected sex, the woman might get pregnant. I never ever thought that a man could get pregnant because I understood that you need a sperm and an egg to make a baby, the man has the sperm and during sex the sperm goes into the woman's body to meet the egg and that's where the baby grows. I understood that taking the pill prevents pregnancy, and I had some vague notion that the pill works by tricking the woman's body into thinking it is already pregnant. I understood that STDs are transmitted through bodily fluids and that the only protection against them is condoms.
I understood from about the age of 8 that I would go through puberty which meant I would start having periods once a month, grow breasts and grow hair on my body.
I didn't understand how ovulation works, or that you can only get pregnant on certain days in your cycle. I didn't know what a cervix was. I didn't know how the morning after pill worked. I didn't know what an abortion involves. I didn't really know much about childbirth other than what I'd seen on TV and the fact that some babies are born by caesarian. I had never heard of PCOS or endometriosis.
I don't remember ever really learning about gender, but I had a strong sense of when something was sexist.
I have no idea when I first heard about trans people, but I must have been in my teens because a friend's older brother transitioned (hormones, surgery, the works) and I remember patiently explaining to my mum that Mark had had a sex change and was now a woman and we must call him Heather and refer to him as she. So whilst this was certainly not something I saw as normal, it must have been something I had already heard about, and I had much less trouble accepting it than my middle aged mum. Now I look back and think, "Well of course, she had given birth to two children, of course she was going to struggle more with the idea that humans can change sex than a teenager whose knowledge of human reproduction was entirely theoretical and pretty sketchy at that point."
So that was me, 20-25 years ago. And I do think that, despite the gaps in my understanding, I was quite well informed. And I think that despite my comments about Mark having changed sex, I'm pretty sure I always knew we were just being polite, and that Heather would never be able to, for example, have a baby.
What really bothers me about the teaching of sex and gender to children these days is that really young children, who have extraordinary imaginations and are very impressionable, appear to be being taught that whether you are a boy/girl/man/woman is a question of identity, not biology, and that it is about how you feel inside rather than what body parts you have. Some of these children, particularly those who don't have opposite sex siblings and have never shared a bath with a child of the opposite sex, might not even understand that children of the opposite sex have different private parts. So a lot of them must spend their early childhood thinking that being a boy or a girl is like being a Man U fan or a Gryffindor or something else entirely abstract.
For those children who decide at a young age that they are a girl because they like dolls (but are male) or that they are a boy because they like football and lego (but are female) this is going to be their absolute reality until they get to the age of 10 or so and are confronted with an even more absolute reality: puberty. By that point it is already too late to avoid a huge amount of distress and psychological trauma, whether they end up going through any kind of medical transition or not.
But what is the impact on the other kids, who have not decided that they identify as the opposite sex, but have nonetheless been taught these beliefs about sex and gender from a young age? What do they think a boy is and what do they think a girl is? How do you explain to a group of 9 year olds who have spent the last 5+ years being taught that whether you are a boy or a girl is just a question of how you feel, that boys and girls have different parts, that they will go through different paths to adulthood, and that their bodies will become very different and function in completely different ways?
Because I feel that, having grown up at a time when what we were taught about sex was actually grounded in biological reality, my own understanding of how this stuff works was fairly fuzzy.
So if you are trying to teach a group of 9 year olds about human reproduction, surely you are starting off on the back foot if those 9 year olds don't actually understand what a girl is and what a boy is, and that this is unchangeable. Sure, you can teach them about periods. But how do you explain which of them will get periods and which will not? And how do you ensure they all understand that a boy who identifies as a girl will not get periods but a girl who identifies as a boy will? And if you do manage to communicate that effectively, how do you deal with the emotional fallout among trans identifying kids for whom this is devastating news?
Using the phrase "person with a cervix" in healthcare communications aimed at adults is confusing enough when those adults are people who learned about human reproduction at a time when the teaching was still based in scientific reality.
Children being taught this crap about gender today are going to be even less capable of identifying whether they are a "person with a cervix" or not than today's adult women.