Sex Ed Matters coming to DD’s school

[WomanInGrey]

Has anyone come across Sex Ed Matters? I was doing some research about them, as they’re coming to my DD’s school, and their focus seems to be on period poverty and LGBTQ+ issues.

Their website isn’t that helpful (www.sexedmatters.co.uk/foundingsupporters) as I can’t download their toolkits to see their content. Their Twitter is largely about period poverty.

I just want to know if they stick to the DfE guidelines or if my dd is going to be told that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body, or given those inaccurate stats about trans kids being at the highest risk of suicide. She tells me that it’s taken as read at school (among the girls) that JKR is awful and no one agrees with her, so I think there is likely to be quite a strong audience reaction to any discussion of gender identity, and I’d like to know how this group manage it.

They look to be very social justice orientated - lots of campaigns, empowerment, consent, LGBT etc. Their website looks professional and interesting: www.sexedmatters.co.uk/.

Superficially I think it looks great with none of the self interested individuals wanting to tell their own story that we see with certain other lobby groups self identifying as sex educators.

As the school is legally responsible for everything the organisation says and does, you could ask the school what checks they've done to ensure children won't be sold the "born in the wrong body" nonsense?

I had never heard of them until reading your post but I followed your link to their website.

They have a 'Sexuality and Gender' toolkit with a picture that my computer allowed me to zoom into.

The subtitle to the toolkit is "Everything you need to know about sexuality and gender with an LGBTQ+ focus". I noted symbols that represent non-binary and other made up genders. There is a gender and sexuality venn diagram with the usual big overlap. I could also make out the following sentences on a cut out megaphone, "Stop street harassment", "Trans equality matters" and "What will you gender and sexuality campaign be?"

Looks very dubious to me.

Just found there is more than one photo on the website

They give that 82% statistic

Ooof red flags

Dammit. I was hoping it would all be balanced and fine and ‘some people
believe’ and I wouldn’t have to get involved. I’ve already done it for
primary school. This is much harder as I just don’t know the people involved at all.

Depressing - sorry OP - I only scanned it.

When Kiera Bell lost her case on appeal, this nasty, nasty organisation SHARED the twitter posts from Stonewall and from Gendered Intelligence, crowing about this
twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1438862185984364555?t=rjDBuAjq_w1Xg-CE_RyZ6A&s=19
They look to be well in bed with Stonewall, from their tweets, they share lots of Stonewall stuff.
Red flags!!!

They talk a lot about periods but don't mention girls once

Ooh look, they are defining trans...

Oops, I missed out their lovely graphic:

This bothers me, but not enough to make a fuss about it. Dd knows full well she’s a girl and she gets periods, no confusion likely there.

The definitions seem ok, too, as they don’t conflate gender and sex.

I am concerned about the inaccurate suicide statistics, and about whatever else they plan to say that isn’t publicly available. I can’t tell if they promote it as the truth, or as ‘some people have a gender identity, there are lots of possible ones, it’s fine not to have one at all as some people don’t’. I am particularly concerned that they may push the idea (to teenage girls) that objecting to a male bodied person in their sports team or changing rooms would be both unkind and transphobic.