I would like to address an objection repeatedly raised at the Battle Ground Public Schools’ June board meeting, at the first reading of the HealthSmart curriculum adoption recommendation for middle school sexual health. Several citizens’ comments and a board member’s comments claimed that HealthSmart’s usage of the term “sex assigned at birth” is a fundamental biological error.
I took high school biology decades ago and only understood a simple binary system of sex. XX was female and XY was male. So, when I first encountered the term “sex assigned at birth” a few years ago, it rubbed me the wrong way.
However, when I read up on modern scientific findings, I came to realize that sexual development is a complicated multi-stage process that can and does yield a wide variety of outcomes. These outcomes include people born with ambiguous genitals or whose external organs that do not “match” their internal organs, or those with matching internal and external organs but with different brain wiring. In the case of ambiguous external organs, for decades doctors have assigned a sex and surgically conformed the shape of the genitals to agree with the assigned sex, sometimes to find out after years of painful operations that the internal sense of the person turned out the opposite of the sex that they were assigned, conformed to and raised to be. And, if a person’s internal and external reproductive organs don’t match, which is their real “biological” sex? What about the mismatch between the reproductive organs and the way a person’s brains are structured and wired? Learning these things expanded my binary box to embrace and celebrate diversity. It helped me see that “sex assigned at birth” is the most accurate term that covers all cases, respects both the body and the gender identity of each person. We should all learn to use this term as a part of our strategy to help every student thrive.
Diversity is real in Clark County. The most recent Healthy Youth Survey (2018) revealed that just about one in five students in Clark County identifies as LGBTQ+. It is high time for our sexual health education to be inclusive and applicable to our LGBTQ+ students, too.
I urge the Battle Ground School Board to set aside the objection of biological error, and to adopt the HealthSmart curriculum, to give all our students the information and skills they need to make wise decisions for their health and safety for now and long term.
