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I shouldn’t have had to learn safe sex from the queer community.

This is why LGBT+ centers are so important. Even though it's not their responsibly, they're doing a great job picking up the slack

At least you had some sex ed. We were always self-taught, and learning from the hub isn't most healthy.

The only thing that really helped me was that my first serious gf went to a different school district and knew some basics.

My sex education class, and yes I really wish I was lying here:

They separated us by gender. A guy in his early 20s maybe late teens came in, hadn't seen him before. He gave a talk about how if we watched porn we would only be attracted to "a plastic bag" and not love our future wives while one of the super Catholic teachers we had nodded in agreement. Looking back I am pretty confident he was some college student in some religious school.

Not so fun fact, I have a sister who became a mom at age 19.

Well don't leave us hanging, have you had sex with a pregnant woman and did the baby grab your sausage?

In order to learn about sex you're going to have to learn about either straight sex, gay sex, or both. Turns out both types of sex happen to exist. If you're going to learn about straight sex you should probably learn about gay sex too in case you're gay. If you're trans the topic of puberty and your changing body gets 10 times more complicated. You should probably learn about that in case you're trans. It would be helpful for queer kids and the things they experience to not be left out of sex ed, also so that kids who don't know there's some form of queer yet don't grow up thinking that they're broken.

Since both straight and gay sex exists, and because trans people exist too, learning about sex from those perspectives is important.

This kind of education is what could have stopped an entire country from thinking that AIDS is caused by being gay.

Excluding queer sexuality and gender from sex education is what we've been doing since forever, and surprise it's left queer kids unprepared for the things they will encounter, and the other kids with the kinds of assumptions that you express here.

Then why do they only teach about straight sex?

You are mistaking this as being about "expressing"when it's about navigating it, and that certainly includes understanding healthy realtionship development between individuals that decide to engage in sexual activity.

The treatment sex ed as being risk assessment and harm reduction strategy is incomplete without some key points that also protect people having sex for recreational purposes specifically ones that LGBTQIA people tend to use as their primary forms of sexual engagement. Like if you don't have a segment on anal sex with information about how it makes some STIs more transmissible, how anal sex with female partners is more likely to cause injury, and yes some basic pointers on techniques for making it safer for the people who rely on it as their primary form of being sexually intimate then you do leave people open to :

• Higher physical risk of injury when experimenting with sex.

• being potentially pressured into something with unique models and techniques needed for truly effective STI reduction.

• people believing that it's ultimately less of a big deal or life course altering because "you can't get pregnant" so treating those behaviours as less risky

Removing or omitting sex ed that does not mention other risky forms of sexual intimacy other than heterosexual reproductive sex means you are creating blindspots of safety for everyone as many forms of sex like anal have become culturally prized even in heterosexual relationships. The prudish idea of "we can't teach them techniques !" often stands of the way of fully comprehensive safety instruction leaving some demographics out in the cold as privileged people continue to treat those forms of sex as taboo and stigmatized.

That's unfortunate close-minded teachers are allowed to teach subjects like these.