SEXUALITY aGENDER TOOLKIT

ONLINE ACCESS TO THIS RESOURCE HAS BEEN REMOVED, THE RESOURCE ITSELF IS STILL AVAILABLE BUT UNDERGOING REVIEW AS AT 24 MAY 2024
THE INFORMATION SHOWN IS FROM SCREEN CAPTURES OR CRITIQUES:

Session 4 features The Dice Game which the class will play sitting in a circle and rolling two inflatable dice. The six-sided dice has a word on each side, Vulva (including vagina), Penis, Anus, Mouth, Hands/Fingers and Object. The game is to roll the two dice and then the group will discuss what sexual activity is possible using the two words that face upwards. There’s a grid to explain what is the activity, say, when anus meets anus (“tricky to achieve…but can be pleasurable”) or when object meets anus. “Every combination is worthy of a conversation” says the text and the risks are downplayed (instructions are to use a lubricant and remember that object “must be retrievable!”) The trainer is reminded “that no judgement is made on whether a certain sexual activity is “normal or indeed not”.

@PedanticPerson on X

BODY PARTS COMBINATION GRID IMAGE

In 2017 the Proud Trust was awarded £99,960 for the project, called Sexuality aGender, from the government’s Tampon Tax Fund, which allocates money from VAT receipts on women’s sanitary products to projects that benefit disadvantaged women and girls.

THE TIMES

GOVERNMENT GIVES PUPILS SEX ADVICE ON THE ROLL OF A DICE

BEN ELLERY – 13 AUGUST 2020 – THE TIMES

Schools are being encouraged to teach children as young as 13 about intimate sexual acts using a dice game.

The government has funded a tool kit written by the Proud Trust, an LGBT charity, which includes dice featuring words such as “anus”, “vulva”, “penis” and “hands and fingers”. Children are encouraged to throw the dice twice and talk about the sexual acts that can happen using the two body parts.

The toolkits can be used by schools to help to meet statutory requirements to teach relationships and sex education (RSE) classes as part of reforms introduced for the coming academic year.

As part of the resource, teachers are told to encourage children to talk about lubrication, drawing criticism from parents that it plays down the risks.

The pack tells teachers: “Hold your nerve! Not all combinations will be easy to discuss and some might seem impossible. The aim is to get people talking and to limit assumptions about what kind of sex people have. Every combination is worthy of a conversation!”

In 2017 the Proud Trust was awarded £99,960 for the project, called Sexuality aGender, from the government’s Tampon Tax Fund, which allocates money from VAT receipts on women’s sanitary products to projects that benefit disadvantaged women and girls.

Jackie Doyle-Price, the Tory MP for Thurrock, said: “I fully supported the introduction of RSE into schools as I firmly believed it would be a force for empowering girls to take more control of their bodies and their relationships against a background of increasingly sexualised behaviour in schools and abuse of under-age girls. It is with horror that I see materials being produced which do the exact opposite. Schools should be teaching about mutual respect and consent and safe sex. That such materials have been funded by tampon tax grants is just appalling.”

Tanya Carter, a spokeswoman for Safe Schools Alliance, said: “This ‘resource’ clearly breaches safeguarding. The tampon tax should be used to educate girls on their rights — not prematurely sexualise them.

“When delivering RSE, teachers must be mindful that there will be children in the class who have been or are being sexually abused or exploited and that the lessons will be traumatising for them. It is important that schools widely consult parents and staff to avoid inappropriate materials such as this slipping through the net.”

The toolkits are one of several similar worksheets made by charities for schools that they can use to help to meet their statutory requirements…

TAMPON TAX FUND EVALUATION: main report

DEPARTMENT FOR CULTURE MEDIA AND SPORT – 6 JUNE 2023 – GOV.UK

NOTE: FUNDING BREAKDOWN NOT SHOWN FOR 2017 – THEME FOR FUNDING, GENERAL AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS – THE GENDER COLLECTION

THE PROUD TRUST: Nothing to be proud of

SHELLEY CHARLESWORTH – 6 JUNE 2023 – TRANSGENDER TREND

SEXUALITY aGENDER TOOLKIT REVIEWED AS PART OF ARTICLE – RELEVANT SECTION BELOW – DICE GAME IS SESSION 4 – THE GENDER COLLECTION

SEXUALITY aGENDER

At the heart of the successful bid for Tampon Tax funding is The Proud Trust’s Sexuality aGender sexual health toolkit. [9] Sexuality aGender is a training scheme, which The Proud Trust had already developed in partnership with Body Positive, a small Cheshire based sexual health charity. Over the 3 years of the Tampon Tax funding 375 adults will learn how to deliver the toolkit to 2,500 young people. Versions of the toolkit have already been used by The Proud Trust since 2015, in training sessions costing £140 per person. It is promoted on their website as being a potential part of a school’s PSHE education and in line with DfE guidance.

The Proud Trust insists that the toolkit is a sexual health resource for all young people from the age of 13. It’s a bizarre claim as there is very little content in the guide about sexual health, such as STIs, contraception, pregnancy, or sexual problems of an emotional or physical nature. Nor is there much ‘how-to’ guidance for young people.

The introduction begins “there is no such thing as gay sex” and quotes a survey that reported almost one in five 16-24-year-olds had had anal sex in the last year, a statement that appears to be normalising the practice. It starts as it means to go on; anal sex is a constant feature of the toolkit.

Before starting, the trainees (and eventually those young people aged 13 up) are told to think about four things. Pleasure is the first and we are told “Sex should be a nice, positive and consensual act either with yourself (masturbation) or between two or more people” and “some people find ‘risky sex’ pleasurable and the idea of reducing all risks unrealistic”.

Secondly, think about consent; after a purely legalistic discussion about the age of consent, the toolkit says “encouraging young people to consider how they seek and give consent is important.” Thirdly, trainees must think about their assumptions and remember “to use the phrase ‘a person with a vagina’ rather than ‘a woman’s vagina’ and ‘a person with a penis’ rather than a ‘man’s penis’. This is because, as we will learn, not all women have a vagina and not all men have a penis”.

Finally, think about risks: “Unplanned pregnancies can occur if penis-in-vagina sex happens where the penis ejaculates sperm, and the person with the vagina also has a womb” and “Reduction of unwanted pain or discomfort during sex, may be achieved through the introduction of lubrication, to areas of the body that do not produce any, or enough, of their own, such as the anus, and some vaginas”.

This language pervades the document; cold and dehumanising, language that will be bewildering for many young people. “Some vaginas” here is referring to males who have had sex reconstruction surgery and who have had a surgically constructed vagina. Again, it is worth remembering that The Proud Trust says this scheme is for any girl or boy from the age of 13.

The scheme itself is divided into four one hour sessions:

Session 1 Exploring a Range of Identities is a quick introduction to the building blocks of ‘gender identity’ theory, including the Genderbread person, and a word search puzzle to find the words such as cis, intersex, genderfluid, a glossary of 23 words of which only one, “ally”, is accurately defined.

Session 2 The Sexual Body reminds trainers and trainees to “make no assumptions, especially about which types of people have which types of body parts”. A list of body parts is provided, “Vulva (including vagina), Penis, Anus, Mouth, Hands/Fingers”. While placing the word vagina in brackets is curious, the most egregious omission from the list is Breasts or Nipples. The words to describe one of women’s most sensitive erogenous zones is not mentioned once in the booklet.

Next the class is shown 15 black and white drawings of male and female genitalia and asked which ones “you are likely to see in (a) textbooks (b) pornography (c) a doctor’s surgery”. It is not clear why 13-year-olds would be familiar with textbooks or what might be seen in a doctor’s surgery. Or why teenage girls and boys are being asked to confirm if they are familiar with pornographic depictions of genitals.

Several images appear to be illustrations of a DSD, a disorder of sexual development, a very rare medical condition in which external genitalia is ambiguous. This would be in line with The Proud Trust’s and other LGBT groups’ attempts to co-opt intersex conditions for their own political ends [10]. Worse is the drawing showing a partially stitched vulva, the stitching over the clitoris area, the result of female genital mutilation. This is not a “body part” but the result of a crime, based on misogyny.

The session ends with an exercise to “design a random set of genitals” from more badly drawn body parts that can be cut out, stuck on to a body outline, even coloured in and put into a “genital gallery”. Included in the parts to cut out is what appears to be an almost wholly stitched vulva. This is sometimes called infibulation, and it is the most severe form of female genital mutilation. The session ends with the question “How well does the genital gallery that has been created, reflect the variation that exists in human genitals?”

FGM is not a genital variation. It is a criminal assault on the bodies of young girls. In their desire to be inclusive and argue that sex is a spectrum The Proud Trust has included images of a rare form of developmental disorder and of FGM. It is exploitative in the extreme and impossible to justify in a training scheme that is supposed to be for all young people from the age of 13.

Sexuality aGender should be withdrawn from use on this basis alone. 

Session 3 asks What Is Your Normal? Various activities are suggested and the group is asked to place them on a quadrant of normal, harmful, not normal and safe. Among the activities are “Having anal sex”, “Receiving a gift from someone in exchange for sex” and “Watching pornography”. The booklet advises using ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’ or ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’ instead of the more value laden ‘normal.’ Suggested supplementary questions about anal sex are “Is this usual? Who can have anal sex? Is this activity pleasurable? What might you need to consider if having, or thinking about having, anal sex?”

Session 4 features The Dice Game which the class will play sitting in a circle and rolling two inflatable dice. The six-sided dice has a word on each side, Vulva (including vagina), Penis, Anus, Mouth, Hands/Fingers and Object. The game is to roll the two dice and then the group will discuss what sexual activity is possible using the two words that face upwards. There’s a grid to explain what is the activity, say, when anus meets anus (“tricky to achieve…but can be pleasurable”) or when object meets anus. “Every combination is worthy of a conversation” says the text and the risks are downplayed (instructions are to use a lubricant and remember that objects “must be retrievable!”) The trainer is reminded “that no judgement is made on whether a certain sexual activity is ‘normal’ or indeed not.”

After four hours of Sexuality aGender training what will young people have learned about sexual health? Very little about sexual health per se, nothing useful about consent, STIs, erectile or menstrual problems, or how to be safe and confident in their most intimate and emotional relationships. They will have learned there are no specific words to describe their sexed bodies because anyone can have any “body part”; that there is no such thing as normal; that there are no risks attached to anal sex that enough lube won’t solve; that rare intersex cases and the results of FGM are examples of the diversity of human genitalia.

The ideas promulgated by Sexuality aGender are particularly harmful to girls and women.  The growing pressure on them to agree to anal sex [11], its normalisation via pornography and some magazines such as Teen Vogue, and the physical harms that can result are all well documented. Without the language to talk about sexual inequality, sexism and male violence, girls will be left unable to make informed decisions about consent, harms and boundaries.

No school should be considering using this guide, which, it needs repeating, is marketed as a training scheme for all young people from 13 and as a useful tool to meet a school’s statutory duty under the new RSE guidelines.

A GOOD USE OF TAMPON TAX FUNDING?

What does Sexuality aGender have to offer a group of disadvantaged young lesbian and bisexual women?  The application for Tampon Tax funding stated that this group was its main target audience; the fund itself is earmarked only for projects that help disadvantaged women and girls. The Proud Trust were clear at the outset that this group included male people (“assigned male at birth, but who now identify as women”) and that Sexuality aGender would be used.

The toolkit disappears girls and women as a sex class because it cannot admit to the reality of biological sex. It asks young women to consider their bodies as pornographic images, it normalises anal sex. The Department for Culture Media and Sport failed in its assessment of this funding bid and could not have looked closely at the detail. If they had they would have seen an organisation which promotes an unverifiable belief in gender identity, and the idea that it is possible to be born in the wrong body.

Gender ideologists have nothing to say about sexual health because they are not really interested in it as such. They believe sex is a spectrum, that gender, a feeling or belief based on sex stereotypes, is the only marker as to who you are, that anyone who says they are a woman is one and that disembodied body parts can be attached to anyone because “not all women have a vagina and not all men have a penis”.

This guide is a perfect example of this thinking. But it’s surprising that it is being peddled by a group claiming a majority female and lesbian leadership. And it’s reprehensible that money raised from sanitary products for women and earmarked for disadvantaged women and children is being handed out by the government and civil servants for such a project.