The unsettling truth is that the fight over Ontario’s 2015 sexual health curriculum was a fight over a very imperfect document. People expect a lot of a sex ed document: it’s supposed to touch on a broad range of topics, including anatomy, gender, sexual intercourse, birth control, online safety, relationships, and bullying. Some of these are sensitive subjects. Ideally, the curriculum should capture the social realities facing today’s students, and prepare them for the world they live in.
In that respect, the 2015 curriculum was already out of date, important topics were addressed late or not at all, and material about queer and trans identities was not integrated into other parts of the curriculum.
That said, it was miles ahead of the 1998 sexual health curriculum, which is what the Ontario government returned to in their interim 2018 materials. That curriculum was written before important developments in queer and trans legal rights. The LGBTQ2+ community would argue that our bodies and our experiences were almost completely absent from the document’s mandatory teaching content.
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