by Lucy Webster

You can read this newsletter online here – http://lesglorieuses.fr/sex-education

It’s 2010, and at an all-girls’ school in North London, some 20 girls are being instructed on the matter of sex. Each girl has been handed a slip of paper on which to scrawl a question—ostensibly to grant anonymity—and heads are quietly bent over desks. There’s silence other than the scratch of pen on paper and occasional muffled giggle. We are 14.

I too have been handed a paper and a pen. But pens don’t work for me. I am disabled and, among other things, I can’t grip a pencil, let alone write my most private questions on paper. I get around using a wheelchair and, at school, I stick out like a sore thumb.

In the sex ed classroom, no one thinks to hand me a laptop like I use for my other classes. The woman who helps me get around and participate at school—kind, but twice my age—gestures to show she could be my scribe. I shake my head. Not only do I not want to tell her any of my million and one questions but the silence in the room means I would, effectively, be announcing them to the whole class. She raises an eyebrow at me, as if to say, “Go on…”

“I don’t have any questions,” I mumble back. She takes me at my word.

It’s been 15 years since that class, but I think about it often, both in my personal life and in my work as a disability activist. The sexual disempowerment of disabled women is a persistent issue that crops up again and again. For many of us, it starts with a lack of relevant, appropriate and accessible education during our teen years.

It’s true that far too often sex ed classes gloss over the really important stuff and centre instead on things we already know. (Yes, of course we know how babies are made, we’re 14, thank you very much!)

But school-based sex ed also opens the door to conversations that otherwise might not happen at all, between children and their parents, or even their peers. It also gives us some of the language we might need to talk about sex when we’re adults. So, when sex ed doesn’t include disabled people, we are robbed not only of basic knowledge but also the ability to ask for information years later. 

Looking back, I can recall some (admittedly brief and awfully awkward) discussions about different sexual orientations. But no mention was ever made of different abilities or needs. Many of the disabled women I speak to — now in their 20s, 30s, 40s — report similar experiences. 

Jennie Williams, the CEO of the disability and sexuality charity Enhance the UK, told me that, while sex education is now compulsory in UK schools for disabled children (having historically been almost completely absent), the failure of those lessons to be inclusive leads some disabled teenagers, particularly those in mainstream schools, to switch off and conclude that sex isn’t for them. The long-term effect of this silence is that disabled people, particularly women and girls, are left disempowered, without the knowledge our peers seem to wield, undermining our confidence and our ability to make informed decisions. It can certainly compromise our safety.

It’s 2024. I am in a bar with friends. We are in our late twenties and I am belatedly discovering the joys of queer nightlife. Fuelled by the new-found confidence of finally coming out, I am chatting to a sweet, very pretty girl while my mates queue for our next round of drinks. One catches my eye and grins, telepathically sending me some encouragement. But already, I can feel the panic starting to rise in my chest. Because I have no idea what I’m doing.

I spent my late teens and early twenties attempting and failing to date, held back by society’s ableism but also, at times, by my own fears about how sex and relationships would be for a body like mine. Questions rattled around in my brain. Would anyone ever like me? How was I supposed to flirt, when using body language is off limits? Would I go on a date with a personal care assistant in tow? What would an accessible date even look like? And if I had a successful date or two, what then? Would a new partner know how to undress me? How would I, unable to move once I am out of my wheelchair, keep myself safe? Fundamentally, who did I even like anyway? (Perhaps this is why it took me until I was 28 to realise I am gay.) None of the sex ed I had at school had come close to addressing these questions, and neither did any of my panicked Googling. 

It was often easier to just deny that I had any interest in dating than it was to look for answers. But this meant that not only did I remain steadfastly single, I increasingly felt like an outsider, even among my closest friends. I felt like a perennial preteen, trapped in a world that refused to see me as sexual, while my friends ventured into adulthood. 

But the social isolation stemming from poor sex ed that I experienced is just the tip of the iceberg for many disabled women and girls. 

A 2020 academic review found non-inclusive sex ed contributed to significantly higher rates of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases among disabled women. The review also pointed to a clear link between a lack of knowledge and alarmingly high rates of sexual abuse, both in disabled women’s own homes and institutional care settings. Some disabled women endure physically painful sexual experiences because they don’t know that sex shouldn’t or needn’t be painful. Poor sex ed also denies disabled women the tools they need to explore their sexuality or gender identity. 

Williams told me that a lack of appropriate sex education can create complex issues around consent. “You can only consent if you know what you’re consenting to,” she explains, but there can be difficulty when an adult appears (and is obviously entitled) to give willing consent to something they don’t understand because they don’t have access to information. This can leave people open to abuse but can also, conversely, lead care providers to deny their clients the chance to explore their sexuality because they don’t believe any consent is valid. Much of Williams’ work focuses on opening up conversations between disabled people and care providers to enable safe exploration. 

At several points in our conversation, Williams emphasised that, while inclusive and accessible sex education in schools is desperately needed, more needs to be done to provide this sort of sex education throughout people’s lives, by medical and care staff but also by advocacy groups and the media. “People’s bodies — especially women’s bodies—change as they age,” she said, “and anyone can become disabled at any time, so we need continued education.”

In other words, making something accessible or inclusive for disabled women almost always benefits nondisabled women too — not just because they might become disabled later but because we all face similar preconceptions and issues. Disabled or not, all of us experience our bodies, sexualities and sex itself differently. All of us are subject to sexist and ableist norms that affect everything from how we feel about ourselves to how we date and form relationships. 

Sex education that emphasises the normalcy and value of disabled bodies, or even acknowledges them as sexual in the first place, would benefit everyone whose body falls short of the mainstream ideal. And, really, isn’t that all of us?

Lucy Webster is a journalist, author and disability activist. Her work focuses on demystifying disability and dismantling ableism. Her debut book, The View From Down Here, is a memoir about life lived at the intersection of ableism and sexism.

This article originally appeared in The Persistent.

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