The Power of Inclusive Sex Education

The night the cable channel Freeform aired an LGBTQ sex-education-themed episode of its teen drama The Fosters earlier this spring, Madison Russell spent the evening in front of her television with tears rolling down her face. A high-school junior, Russell has identified as a lesbian since age 11, but when she took a school-mandated sex education class at her Hiram, Georgia, high school, she couldn’t see herself in the curriculum. “We were informed on the types of protection for heterosexual couples, but never the protection options for gay/lesbian couples,” Russell said. LGBTQ kids weren’t even mentioned.

Russell’s experiences aren’t unique to rural Georgia. According to a 2013 survey by GLSEN, a national nonprofit focused on providing safe educational spaces for LGBTQ students, just 5 percent of LGBTQ students reported having health classes that included positive representations of LGBTQ-related topics. And a 2015 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found just 12 percent of millennials said their sex education classes covered same-sex relationships at all.