Comprehensive Sex Education Is a Winning Political Issue

Imagine if our legislators truly knew how women’s bodies work. Imagine if they understood gender identity. Imagine if the most powerful men in the country had been raised knowing how to handle rejection.

This could be the country we live in. All it would take is embracing the transformative power of sex education, an issue fundamental to building the kinds of communities we all want to live in. Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services just announced it’s canceling most of the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP) grants — one of the main federal grant programs funding organizations that deliver sex education.

It’s understandable if you’ve never thought about sex education as transformative. But right-wing leaders and donors have. They’ve been coming for sex education since the Reagan years, using every tool they can invent for decades: spending untold millions replacing sex education with abstinence propaganda and anti-abortion videos, convincing school districts to switch from opt-out models to opt-in, mandating anti-LGBTQ lessons based on lies, demanding "curriculum transparency” so draconian it forces schools to just abandon teaching sex ed altogether, banning books — the works. They do these things precisely because they know how powerful sex education is.

As a result of those attacks, most of the sex ed taught in U.S. public schools is woefully inadequate at best, and actively harmful at worst. And that creates a vicious cycle, because when people get bad sex ed, they have no idea what good sex ed is or how much it can do. So they don’t fight for it.

So let’s set the record straight: The National Sex Education Standards include many essential topics, including things like healthy relationships, body image, consent, and setting and respecting boundaries. The NSES are developed and published by the Future of Sex Ed (FoSE) Initiative, a partnership between SIECUS and Advocates for Youth/Answer, the leading national sex ed policy organizations in the country. They include research-based, age-appropriate education targets for every grade, on subjects from how to identify a trustworthy adult to the impact of technology and social media on relationships.

When students all learn this kind of sex education together, some really beautiful things happen: They become less likely to bully each other, they do better in their schoolwork, and they are more likely to help each other if they see someone is being bullied or abused. That’s because sex ed teaches them how to respect each other across differences, how to manage their own emotions, and how to resolve conflict peaceably — and the better school environment that develops when students have these core skills allows them to focus less on survival and more on their studies.

And it doesn’t stop there: In a meta-analysis of 30 years of studies on the kind of sex education we’re talking about, researchers found that school-based sex ed also reduces intimate partner violence, reduces patriarchal beliefs, and increases students’ appreciation of sexual diversity.

Perhaps the biggest lie the right has perpetrated about sex education is the idea that it’s a “controversial” issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, EducateUS (the sex ed advocacy organization which I founded and run) conducted polling this year with Voss Strategies and YouGov, and found that not only do supermajorities of Americans want sex ed to be taught in schools — they also want it to be explicitly trans-inclusive.

That’s right — fully 72% of Americans, from every background, support trans-inclusive sex education. 56% of people who get their news from Fox. 60% of born-again Christians. Even 52% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 want trans-inclusive sex ed in schools. And when you look at the middle and the left, the numbers get even bigger. 66% of independents. 89% of MS NOW/MSNBC watchers. Fully 90% of people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 support sex education that is comprehensive, trans-inclusive, and school-based.

I’ll put that in even plainer language: Trans-inclusive sex ed is a unifying issue for the center and the left, and a wedge issue that divides the right-wing base.

It’s way past time for supporters of sex education to press that advantage. Because the current regime has been more than clear about their desire to eliminate it altogether. In fact, on page 5 of Project 2025, you’ll find them calling for people who teach sex ed to minors — in or out of school — to be registered as sex offenders. (They call it “pornography,” but they have a long track record of calling sex ed materials “pornography,” so don’t be fooled.) And they’ve been coming for sex ed since just past Inauguration Day in every way they can. In addition to the draconian (and possibly illegal) TPPP cuts just announced by HHS, Trump’s latest budget proposes eliminating all federal funding for sex education, which would be devastating for the field.

And “devastating for the field” ultimately means devastating for society. Instead of the thought experiment above, which envisions a country with universal K–12 sex education, imagine now the converse: a country full of people — from the kid next door to your doctor to all the people who are supposed to intervene when a conspiracy of ultra-wealthy men start trafficking girls — who know even less than the country does now about consent, about their own bodies and emotions and the bodies and emotions of the people they interact with, about how to build healthy relationships and what to do if you or someone you know is in an abusive one, and on and on and on.

The right-wing elites are being so bold because they’re counting on the rest of the country to do what we’ve always done when they come for sex education: barely anything. What if this time we surprised them by acting like the supermajority we already are?

There are lots of ways to do that, starting with the simplest — just start bringing it up with your friends and acquaintances like you assume they agree with you, because they probably do but are too scared to say so. But I want to suggest we do two specific things that could make a big impact.

First, ask candidates and elected officials from school board to Senate where they stand on sex education. Make them take a stand. Get them on the record. You can ask them when they take questions in public forums. You can just call them or email them and ask. If you’re a journalist, include questions about sex education when you interview people who hold or are running for public office.

Then tell them how popular public school sex education is. How powerful. How potentially transformative. And then vote like you care about their answer. Because the wannabe fascists do. And every one of us should care even more.

Watch Jaclyn Friedman in conversation with WMC Board member, Soraya Chemaly, in episode 8 of our social media series WMC Talks.