Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No26

Newsletter Themes: Biology under threat, and the sexualisation of children

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This week we reprint extracts from an article about the politicisation of biological research, something that is highly limiting and has dangerous implications for the development of biological knowledge and that has become a threat to the very idea of scientific inquiry.

Then Colin Smith usefully unpicks some of the key themes underlying guidance coming out of the World Health Organisation and other groups who appear to be influencing the way Scottish guidance has developed towards an approach that denigrates parents and replaces them as moral guides with ‘sex positivity’ experts.

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From the Skeptical Inquirer: the poisoning of biological research

SUE would like to thank Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja for allowing us to publish an extract of their article The Ideological Subversion of Biology.

In that article, they explain in detail how the new dogma has distorted biology by promoting the idea that sex is on a spectrum, and that psychological and behavioural differences between men and women are purely down to socialisation. Here, they provide a briefing on how, more generally, politically correct ideas are limiting research and helping to undermine the very idea of modern science.

Biology faces a grave threat from ‘progressive’ politics that are changing the way our work is done:

• delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals;

• stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing; and

• decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press.

We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it.

The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding – from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines – is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication.

And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

Apart from the ‘sociobiology wars’ of the seventies and our perennial battles against creationism, we biologists always thought that our field would avoid such struggles.

We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths.

Read the full article here: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/

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Sex positivism: what is it and why is it important?

Colin Smith is principal teacher of English at an independent school in the West of Scotland. He is concerned about the methods and aims of the RSHP curriculum.

I’ve been working my way through the Safe Schools Alliance’s Comprehensive Sexuality Education: A Review of UNESCO and WHO Standards (2023), a review which unpicks the research and ethos behind sexuality education promulgated throughout much of the world, including here in the UK. The global initiative for comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is currently promoted by UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) Foundation for Life and Love Campaign. Safe Schools Alliance’s analysis focuses on the following two documents which form the technical and ideological backbone of the initiative:

• World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe and the Federal Centre for Health Education in Germany (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung, BZgA)’s Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe: A Framework for Policy Makers, Educational and Health Authorities and Specialists (2010)

• UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education: An Evidence-Informed Approach (2018)

My intention in this article is to attempt to come to an understanding of the ideology of ‘sex positivism’ or ‘sex positivity’ that drives UNESCO and WHO’s sexuality education. (You’ll have noticed that it’s ‘sexuality’ and not ‘sex’ education; this is an important distinction as ‘sex’ education teaches about the mechanics of sex, whereas ‘sexuality’ education encourages children to form sexual identities and to celebrate the sexual identities of others.)

Before we look at the purported solution that sex positivity claims to be, we should first consider what the purported problem is; to whit, what is sex negativity? A discussion of this quite nebulous term is provided by Psych Central in their article Sex Positivity: What it Means and How to Practice it. The outline the article provides is representative of the overall supposition:

Sex negativity is taught in abstinence- and fear-based school sex education programs. It’s preached by religious leaders and instilled by many parents. It’s in the shows and movies we watch and policies our governments pass. And it’s harmful at every level.

The article goes on to quote an advocate for sex positivity:

‘Historically, it was common for sex to be viewed from a moralistic (based in sin) or medicalized (based in sickness or disease) framework. Through these lenses, otherwise natural and healthy sexual desires and behaviors are something to be repressed, controlled, or cured,’ explains sociologist and certified sexologist Sarah Melancon, PhD with The Sex Toy Collective.

From these statements you can glean that sex negativity is, essentially, anything that might deter a child from having sex – something you and I might consider to be a good thing. Consider the pejorative phrasing: ‘abstinence- and fear-based’; ‘based in sickness or disease’; ‘repressed, controlled, or cured’. In my opinion, children should be abstinent, and that’s hardly a reactionary sentiment; as a society, we understand that children need to be protected from experiences they aren’t ready for – either physically or mentally (which is why, in the UK, under-16’s cannot legally consent to sexual activity). Sexual activity does come with medical and psychological risks, particularly for young children (in which case a child protection referral is required). Children’s sexual activity should be controlled, and the best way to do this is not to sexualise them by teaching them about sexuality. Safe Schools Alliance is very clear that, in their analysis, the overarching aim of CSE and the sex positivism that drives it is to:

...sexualise children from their early years via classroom instruction and by forcibly changing widespread public opinion towards the mixing of children and sex.

(Comprehensive Sexuality Education: A Review of UNESCO and WHO Standards (2023), p. 23)

It is interesting that certified sexologist Dr Sarah Melancon takes a negative view of a moralistic approach to sex education, without considering the morality of the approach that she champions. Who should be the arbiter of morality in a child’s life? Should it be Dr Melancon of the Sex Toy Collective? Or should it be parents? (Note that parents and faith leaders are fingered as guilty parties in the Psych Central article.) To be fair to Dr Melancon, she makes no mention of children specifically; but the UNESCO and WHO standards, drawing from the same spurious and broad assumptions, are explicitly about sexual education from birth:

Their [UNESCO and WHO’s] matrices cater for the age ranges 0–15+ and 5–18+ respectively. Within these age specifications the child is considered to have a right to sexual ‘pleasure’ and the same sexual knowledge as adults.

(Comprehensive Sexuality Education: A Review of UNESCO and WHO Standards (2023), p. 3)

There is here a direct equivalence drawn between the adult world and the world of the child, an equivalence which should make any parent very nervous. What should also make parents nervous is being considered part of the problem, the reason why sex positivity is needed:

WHO assert that relying on parents to educate their children about sex, sexuality and gender is ‘insufficient’ ... and that shame associated with sexual activity is often the result of ‘family background’ and ‘moral development’... It is therefore evident that moral abandonment is also core to the standards, a feature consistent with sex positivism’

(Comprehensive Sexuality Education: A Review of UNESCO and WHO Standards (2023), pp. 22–23)

The abandonment of morality is a ‘feature consistent with sex positivism’. When you do a little research on the subject, it’s hard to disagree. G. K. Chesterton said that ‘Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere’. Suggesting that children have a right to sexual pleasure and the same sexual knowledge as adults? I can’t see any line. So who are the people responsible for the sex positivism ideology that is dictating what our children are exposed to and where the moral line is drawn, and where did this ideology originate?

The BBC, in its article What does ‘sex positivity’ mean?, traces the germ of the ideology to several groups and movements:

‘In the 1920s, there were already communities like ballroom culture in Harlem, New York, and feminists of the Village who were part of sex positive and queer communities,’ says Swedish erotic filmmaker Erika Lust.

Sex educator Goody Howard remembers first hearing the term sex positivity used in the late 1990s ... likening it to ‘the free love movement and flower children of Woodstock’. Around this time, groups focused explicitly on sex positivity had formed, like in the basement of a Seattle, Washington restaurant called Beyond the Edge Café, operated by Allena Gabosch. Gabosch hosted a ‘safe place’ for people exploring kink and LGBTQ+ identities, says Larry Grella, a board member for the Center of Sex Positive Culture, the organisation born out of Gabosch’s efforts in 1999.

Exploring kink is fine ... for adults. It’s SUE’s position that adults are free to express themselves sexually anyway they please ... with other adults. We only ask that children are left out of it. In a sane world, the idea that movements born in underground sex clubs would inform children’s teaching would be preposterous. Yet powerful organisations, such as the WHO, can bring ‘legitimacy’ to ideas by propagating them with its imprimatur; this from the BBC article:

...a global shift in attitudes towards sexuality can be traced back to 2002, says Prior, when the World Health Organization updated its definition of sexual health to include pleasure, safety, a lack of coercion and freedom from violence and discrimination – an approach that acknowledged the positive aspects of sex, as opposed to focusing on the risks.

At base, sex positivism is a solution in search of a problem. It uses the fallacious straw man of sex negativity to make claims of oppression and persecution in order to propose a cure. The cure, like many so-called solutions, is much worse than the disease. Our children weren’t sexually repressed before; they were sexually innocent. Our children weren’t refraining from sex because they’d been terrified by the idea of sexually transmitted infections; they weren’t having sex because they’re children, and children aren’t interested in sex, regardless of what the sexologists say.

I’d encourage you to read the Safe Schools Alliance review as it is sedulous and highly informative; I’ve addressed only a small part of it here. It’s hard to come away from it without agreeing with their assessment that CSE seeks the creation of sexualised and promiscuous children, and that it aims to make the notion of children as sexual actors on the same level as adults more mainstream and palatable.

Sex positivism as a tool to fight oppression and hate is invested with the authority to bring anything into the classroom: all sexual practices and predilections are seen as valid and natural, all worthy of celebration and endorsement. It uses the modern shibboleths of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ to legitimise itself, while deterring dissent and making an out group of concerned parents.

In researching this brief article, I emailed the site contact for the Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood (RSHP) resources which are used here in Scotland. I asked if the UNESCO and WHO documents had informed the creation of the RSHP curriculum and was told that they hadn’t. I also asked for a list of people involved in the development of the resources, but the contact was unable to provide the information. I was put in touch with a company called TASC Scotland, who created the resources and, I was told, would have the information I was looking for. TASC didn’t have the information and referred me back to the original contact. So it goes. I also asked the RSHP contact if the resources were written using a sex positive approach; the reply was that ‘evidence’ and ‘consultations and research’ were used; my question wasn’t clearly answered. Yet even a cursory reading of the RSHP resources show that sex positivism is evident, even if this is not overtly stated.

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