MTSE Co-Founder Emmalinda MacLean Trains Sex-Ed Teachers for a New Texas Organization
/I’ve been joking for years that my life’s mission is to raise an army of sex educators. Well, the joke is on Texas, because last month we started the Dallas branch.
WISE, Wholly Informed Sex Ed, a new nonprofit housed at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, is working to bring the Our Whole Lives curricula—the same comprehensive sexuality education program More Than Sex-Ed uses—to their community. The national O.W.L. program managers connected WISE and MTSE this past spring, and they contracted with me to lead their first sex-ed-teacher training in July.
The Wholly Informed Sex Ed facilitator team in Dallas TX at their training in July
I couldn’t be prouder to support a like-minded startup taking flight in another city, and I am in deep admiration of the courage of the Texan sex-educators I met there. Several are also members of the church, which has a very proud legacy of standing up for sexual health and equality: the women’s group there in the 70’s was instrumental in organizing to support the legal fight that ultimately became the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v Wade.
Two of MTSE’s co-founders, myself and Beth Rendeiro, lead Our Whole Lives facilitator trainings around the country, or did until the pandemic began. Dallas was the first in-person training I’ve done since Covid hit, but in the before-times I had the honor of training new sex ed teachers in northern and southern California, Washington, and Arizona. And this month I’ll be going to Salt Lake City, Utah to add even more recruits to the squad!
If you’re wondering what qualifies a person to be a comprehensive sex-educator, or how we can teach someone to do it in a weekend, think about how people become parents. There’s a lot to know and to learn, it’s the work of a lifetime to get good at, but you don’t have to be perfect or know everything to be a great parent to a child who needs you. And O.W.L. classes are written to focus on personal values clarification and interpersonal skill-building: connection and communication are much more important than memorizing detailed medical info.
Of course, Texas is a very different setting than California, and WISE still has the same challenge MTSE has, to attract enough clients and funders to survive and thrive. There are parents everywhere ready to get down on their knees and kiss the ground their kid’s sex-ed teacher walks on, but there can be both laws and attitudes that make those families harder to reach.
Here’s one example of a legal difference that blew my mind: did you know that in Texas, an adult working with youth may decide to keep the confidentiality of an underage client engaged in a consensual same-age sexual relationship, if that relationship is heterosexual, but consensual sexual activity between minors of the same age and gender falls under mandated reporting, and the adult would be required to report it? Story linked here.
Emmalinda MacLean leads a facilitator training in Dallas with stupendous flair as only she can!
Talk about harming children: all this kind of policy does is deny LGBTQ youth access to resources and support. It prevents a caring, trusted adult from providing accurate health information, and it increases the likelihood that these youth will be subjected to harassment and discrimination. The heartlessness and hypocrisy make my brain boil to think about. I don’t even have the column-inches to get into Texas’s anti-abortion legislative circus, but let’s just say that if you’d like to light something on fire about it sometime, please invite me.
Blessedly, there are gifted and compassionate people working their butts off to change that: many I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with, and many more I haven’t, yet. Coaching and collaborating with other sexuality educators is a dream come true for me. What’s always fascinating are the shared doubts and insecurities: the impostor-syndrome voice hissing that you’re not qualified to teach this, that someone is going to come at you with a “gotcha” and make you look foolish. I get it. Sorry to tell you—I get paid to fly places and be an expert on a thing, and I still hear that horrible self-doubting critic voice. But I also absolutely know that it is a lying liar telling lies.
You, whoever you are, you reading this, yes, you—you are absolutely qualified to be a hero-status sex ed teacher, just the way you are right now, and there is probably already a kid in your life or your community who needs you, exactly you. The medical facts you can look up online, I don’t have most of that stuff on perfect recall either; what young people need is affirmation and support and a safe place to practice social skills that will protect and empower them in future relationships. I don’t know you, reader, but I’m going to confidently guess that you are better qualified to offer that support than the anti-sex, anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-trans ideologues who have been allowed to set entirely too much public policy in our country in recent decades. Those policies are discriminatory and wrong; they hurt people; you know better; that makes you qualified. The self-doubting hypercritical voice in your head wants to keep you silent. It’s a trap. Don’t let it.
Not to say that educators don’t benefit from further training and education. Of course, we all do. I know I have plenty still to learn, and it keeps me excited to continue working in this field. And I can also honestly say that I’ve never felt threatened by the work of other sex educators; I don’t see there being any competition; there’s no shortage of need; there will always be young people figuring out how to be human and in need of caring adults to hold space for that journey. It is a thrill and a profound honor to help adults discover what a gift they can be to the rising generation.
Check out whollyinformedsex-ed.org, @whollyinformedsexed on Instagram, or @whollyinformeded on Facebook to learn more about our Dallas sister org and show them some love. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you do to help young people feel supported, empowered, confident, worthy, loved, and joyful. Remember, you’re absolutely qualified for the job. I believe in you. Let’s do this.
