Getting dirty and coming clean: Sex education and the problem of expertise

Abstract

This article recounts my experience serving as an expert witness at a Human Rights Tribunal. In 2018–2019, a grade six trans girl, known only as AB, sued the Ontario provincial government in Canada for revoking a progressive sex education curriculum that addressed gender and sexual identity. While working as an advocate for AB, I wrestled with my own relationship to expertise both within the university and beyond its walls. While describing the process of preparing and testifying before the Tribunal, I focus on two points of tension. First, I draw on Irvine’s (2014) study on “dirty work” to consider the ways sexuality and gender scholars clean up their research to remove the stigma of sex. To be a sexuality and gender expert requires that I negotiate my proximity to the uncertainties of sexuality—a process complicated for the queer researcher. Second, I consider how the curriculum becomes part of this clean-up effort. In controversies surrounding the sex education of children and youth, progressive advocates counter the moralistic and often religious rhetoric of conservative activists by sterilizing the sex education curriculum through discourses of health and well-being. While I recognize the power of this position, I raise questions about how this strategy neglects the ways youth make and remake the curriculum, exceeding the intentions of teachers, parents, and politicians.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• expertise
• trans youth
• sexuality and gender
• sex education
• health
• education
• knowledge mobilization

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to those who helped me think through parts of this article including Jessica Fields, Chloë Brushwood Rose, Sue Winton, Janet Miller, Deana Leahy, and Julia Sinclair-Palm. Thanks as well to the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

I am reporting that I was compensated for my time as an expert witness in the case I discuss in this article.

Notes

1 Quinlivan (2020) went one step further and argued that the media and governments too often only consult teachers and parents instead of reaching out to university-based researchers who devote their lives to understanding education from as many sides as possible. She saw this as evidence of an ironic and pervasive anti-intellectualism in educational policy, especially in her home, New Zealand.

2 The 1998 curriculum was thin on details and did not include any mention of queer or trans sexuality or gender. However, it’s worth noting that most curricula documents at the time were thin. The rage for accountability and the arrival of an audit culture in schools that would swell curricula with lists of outcomes and benchmarks and rubrics would not happen until the early 2000s (Taubman, 2010). When we, as sex education researchers and advocates, insist on packing the curriculum with more and more lists of content areas, outcomes, and performance indicators, we align ourselves with the audit culture and managerialism of educational policy that we might, in other contexts, vociferously critique.

3 Slovin (2020) argued that, as a non-binary researcher, they appear young, what they call a “non-adult,” a figure somehow outside the economy of age stratification in the school. Slovin mined this position for the methodological insights it might open up in fieldwork with young people, including an askance relationship to school authority—the non-binary researcher is neither youth nor adult and, therefore, available to students as a resource to navigate relations with authority.

4 Consider instead the experience of Ore (2017), an African American professor who boards the elevator in the university and meets an insulting question from a white, male student: “do you work here?” and a complicit response from her white, male colleague, “She’s the one who’s supposed to teach you how to write” (p. 11). In her beautiful essay, she unpacked this exchange—she is a scholar of rhetoric—to show the toll it takes on women faculty of color who must find a “balance between serving the needs of my students and combating their adherence to white racial privilege” while, at the same time, dealing with “the burden of accounting for and managing the stereotypes of black womanhood that are consciously and unconsciously assigned to me” (p. 11). Misrecognitions of expertise may be unintentional, Ore argued, but they point to long and continuing histories of white supremacy in the university.

5 These questions have been culled from various controversies about sexuality and education: (1) in the Bigots Ban Books case in 1997, lesbian and gay themed children’s books were banned from classrooms in Surrey, BC (Gilbert, 2014); (2) in the abstinence-only vs comprehensive sex education debates during the late 1990s and early 2000s in the US, conservative critics worried that discussions of contraception would inspire teenage sexual activities (Fields, 2008; Kendall, 2013); (3) in the controversy in Ontario this article is discussing the mention of gender identity as an “invisible difference” in grade three sparked outrage amongst conservative parents; and (4) in progressive efforts to make sex education LGBTQ-inclusive, like the Safe Schools Coalition in Australia (Thompson, 2019).

6 We are witnessing another shift in progressive discourses in sex education. As the topic of consent has become a litmus test for whether a sex education curriculum is indeed progressive, the field is increasingly steeped in the language of law and justice. If, under the regime of health and well-being, sex education cures depression, alienation, and suicide, as well as STIs and unplanned pregnancies, under the regime of consent, sex education cures sexual assault, gender-based violence, and inequality (Gilbert, 2018a).

7 As it turns out, when the Ontario government released their “new” curriculum in the summer of 2019, it remained largely unchanged from the curriculum they had previously declared inappropriate for children. Consent and online bullying had been moved a few years earlier, gender identity and expression a few years later. As a concession to conservatives, the government promised parents they could remove their children from sexual health lessons, but in reality those policies were already in place across the province.

8 I wish I could offer you a victory narrative where AB steps into the Tribunal and with the support of her mother, her friends, her lawyers, and the expert witnesses, convinces the Adjudicators to intervene on her behalf. But instead: AB lost. Like a punch to the gut. The details are painfully banal: AB’s human rights case was taking place alongside a case involving the elementary teachers’ union and their opposition to revoking the curriculum. The decision on their case arrived before AB’s case had been decided. The Adjudicators noted that both cases were substantially the same, drawing on many of the same witnesses and relying on the same defense from the government; therefore, the HRTO declared, “The Application is dismissed as moot” (AB v. Ontario, 2019).

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Jen Gilbert

Jen Gilbert is a Professor of Education at York University. Gilbert is author of Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and collaborator on The Beyond Bullying Project, an LGBTQ+ storytelling and research study in high schools. Gilbert’s research focuses on LGBTQ+ students, teachers, and families; sex education; and youth studies.