Things I struggled with a lot as a queer sex educator part wev.

[commodorified]

... Trying to find gentle, affirming, respectful ways to remind people of all orientations and identities that life is always weirder than we think it's going to be and every sexual orientation and gender identity is valid, but none of them are a form of birth control.

Comments

[sara]

Oh babies ouch, this makes me so sad to read. We have GOT to do better about getting sex ed info to kids.

But I have totally done the "if I can just look straight enough everyone will totally stop asking me these questions" thing, so I know where they're coming from, poor little ducks.

[commodorified]

It's partly info. A lot of it, though, is similar to the problem kids who've done the whole "purity ring" thing run into, such kids also having high pregnancy rates:

If you stop having sex to take precautions, your whole "it just happened" story flies apart.

And as for going out to purchase or get a scrip for birth control...

ETA: with queer kids it's almost a reversal of the purity ring situation: a lot of queer women, especially, are so scarred by the whole "you just haven't met the right man" bs that they don't feel safe admitting to having had sex with a man for whatever reason.

[recessional]

the "haven't met the right man" thing, or the "college lesbian/bisexuals aren't real they're just college girls 'experimenting'" etc etc etc - which is all the same thing, which is that your identity is so under attack that you daren't show anything of yourself that might cause people to erase it and impose their own.

And a lot of times the person you're telling the "it just happened" story to is yourself. =\

[commodorified]

Exactly! (Also this is the one time when having chosen to get your healthcare at the awesome womyn-owned mostly-lesbian collective clinic feels like it's going to bite you in the ass hard, although in fact they're probably just going to sigh a bit and they're going to say "Honey, have you noticed how many lesbian mothers there are in the world? Now, do you want to talk about your options, or should I go straight to discussing iron supplements?"