The evidence says you’re wrong. Age appropriate sex education has huge proven benefits. Although sex education has basically nothing to do with gender identity, despite your conflation of the two.

And you are absolutely not for letting people live how they want with this position. You are for enabling the government to violently intrude on and control people’s lives about some of the most crucial and intimate aspects of their lives.

Shame on you.

And that is how you end up with pregnant teenagers.

I’m all for people living how they want to. But school and childhood years are not fit to teach people about sexuality, especially before teenage years.

That is an unbelievably stupid proposal. By age 13 boys, and especially girls (because they start sooner) are well into puberty. They've already had sexual questions and feelings for years by that point. In the absence of any teaching on what is happening to their bodies and what the consequences are of engaging in intercourse too early, many of them will make minor to catastrophic choices simply because we wouldn't have given them normal human knowledge.

If I had a kid, I wouldn’t want them to be subject to these topics until they’re at least 13-14 and that’s a teenager at that point.

How do you not remember what your own childhood was like? On your 13th birthday did you, for the first time, look at your genitalia and wonder what it was for or "where babies came from"? No, of course not. You asked some of those questions likely when you were 6 or 7 years old. If nothing else you are leaving your child vulnerable to sexual abuse because you haven't told them what healthy boundaries are or at worst, sexual abusers themselves again because you haven't told them what healthy boundaries are to be respected.

Most children have no idea how sexuality or genders work anyway and saying that a child can be transgender is such a wild concept to me. It’s the same as claiming a child is totally straight or gay. They’re children, what the fuck do they know.

Seriously? Do simply you dismiss any idea or notion a child has about themselves in any capacity until they magically turn 13? If they tell you their favorite color is blue, do you tell them they can't possibly know their own mind?

Most children have no idea how sexuality or genders work anyway

So all the kids who make fun of the "fairy boy" or "butch girl" don't have pre-existing knowledge of gender and sexuality expectations?

Then why aren't bullies targeting girls for dressing up in boas and singing pop? Why aren't boys made fun of for cutting their hair short and liking sports? Put a boy in the first scenario and a girl in the second, and other kids will point them out as being "different."

If kids have "no idea how sexuality or genders work" then what, exactly, makes this type of discrimination possible?

On an unrelated note, your understanding of children in general is absolutely baffling. It's clear you aren't around kids much, don't remember your own childhood, and know diddly squat about child development. Kids are much smarter than you ~~think~~.

Are you aware that girls can have their first period years before that?

In fact, there was a girl in my elementary school class who had her first during class earlier than most. She freaked out and thought she was dying, as she had not received any education regarding it. It was a horrible, embarrassing, and traumatic event for her that could have been easily prevented with proper education and preparation. This kind of thing is not uncommon for young girls to go through and it's incredibly sad the way we view sexual education and our bodies.

And yet some kids do know they're totally straight, or gay, or transgender, before they even turn 12, or 11, etc.

They might not have the vocabulary to express it, and others might not know how it works or how they feel, so that's just all the more reason to teach them.

Imagine if we treated any other subject like this: "oh the children have no idea how it works, lets not subject them to it". It doesn't make sense, of course they don't understand if they've never heard of it.

If a kid happens to have two dads, then what the hell are you going to hide from them until they're friggin' 13 years old? And WHY?

I had my first sex ed class 8 and I was fine with it. My parents didn't like talking about those sort of things and without school teaching me about it my knowledge would have been very lacking.

I've done stereotypically male and female things since I was 3. I didn't understand what feeling like a gender was until recently and I have felt a lot better getting to explore my gender whenever I have one. If I had been taught more about it when I was young I don't see how that exploration would have been different then from how it is for me now, except that I now am stuck with some permanent marks from pubery, some of which I do like tbh but some I really don't like but could have probably avoided if I had known in advance.