I’m sitting in my elementary school library alone. I have to sit here for about an hour, until sex ed class is over. Then I can re-join my classmates.I am too embarrassed to tell my friends that my parents won’t let me go to sex ed. I don’t want my friends to think that my family is weird — that the one girl in their class who wears hijab is weird. So I make up a story: I tell my friends that the reason I’m not going is because I got a special kind of detention. I misbehaved in class, so the teacher says I can’t go to sex ed. I have to sit in the library instead.I don’t know if my friends believe me.When I was sexually abused later in life, the perpetrator exploited my lack of awareness about my body and about sexuality. When he crossed lines, I didn’t know the lines were supposed to be there. I didn’t have the words to name what was going on. All I knew was that something secret was happening: this was the kind of thing that you’re not supposed to speak about, that you’re supposed to be ashamed of. So I kept it to myself, even though part of me wanted to talk about it. Part of me wanted to scream.But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Just like in my library “detention,” I stayed silent and alone. My lived experience, as a Muslim who was brought up in a conservative household, serves as a reality-check for those parents who believe that removing children from sex ed, or preventing sex ed from happening, will somehow enable them to control their children’s destinies. For example, many of these parents believe that by pulling their children out of sex ed, or by stopping curriculum related to LGBTQ communities, that they will prevent their impressionable children from becoming gay. Or trans.Read more:The naked truth about how the repealed sex ed program compares to the 1998 one that replaces itOpinion | Judith Timson: Rolling back sex education is not good for kidsOpinion | Edward K ...
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