I had my human biology class in a San Francisco public junior high school around 45 years ago. We learned that girls made eggs and boys made sperm. We even got some rudimentary, purely biological, information about how the sperm and egg came together to make babies. Pictures were drawn in discrete, charmless outlines. It was a class about science. Fast forward to 2023, and schools offer “human biology” books that have graphic pictures of “women” with penises and breasts, “men” with neither breasts nor penises, and “bearded ladies.” And that’s not even the worst of it.

The book, written by the husband and wife team of Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan (neither of whom is a biologist), is called Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human (A Graphic Novel):

Is what I'm feeling normal? Is what my body is doing normal? Am I normal? How do I know what are the right choices to make? How do I know how to behave? How do I fix it when I make a mistake?

Let's talk about it.

Growing up is complicated.

How do you find the answers to all the questions you have about yourself, about your identity, and about your body? Let's Talk About It provides a comprehensive, thoughtful, well-researched graphic novel guide to everything you need to know.

Covering relationships, friendships, gender, sexuality, anatomy, body image, safe sex, sexting, jealousy, rejection, sex education, and more, Let's Talk About It is the go-to handbook for every teen, and the first in graphic novel form.

That synopsis description doesn’t give any indication of how graphic this book really is. (And it’s not a novel; it’s non-fiction. Apparently, “graphic novel” applies to any book that relays most of its content via images.) Parents looking to buy a book to help their teens or tweens navigate changes in their bodies, relationships with their peers, and the never-ending deluge of information about sex, wouldn’t realize that the book is not just pornographically graphic, but it also encourages deviant behaviors.

Image: Human biology class 1953. YouTube screen grab.

Let’s Talk About It has pages and pages celebrating abnormal sexuality (that is, sexuality untethered to the male/female, procreative model). This alternative sexuality is treated as if it is normal stuff. Within this “deviant is normal” framework, children are exposed to endless pictures that are so graphic that I’m not going to embed here the tweets that Right Side of History posted. You can find them here. I’ll try, instead, in as decent a way as possible, to describe some of them.

As noted in the first paragraph, there are lots of pictures, on many pages, showing surgically-created hermaphrodites—that is, bodies with external sexual characteristics that are both male and female. These are the kinds of images that used to be found only in fetish magazines.

There are chapters promising to explain “masturbation,” “sexting,” “kinks, fantasies, and porn,” and something called “aftercare.”

The two biological genders are illustrated with a picture of a football player and a frilly Regency-era woman:

This male/female gender binary works for some folks but leaves a ton of others out.

It’s an obsolete viewpoint based on a lack of understanding of just how diverse and nuanced people can be.

Humankind fully understands the nuances of human behavior. People have always known about homosexuality, masculine women, feminine men, biological hermaphrodites, etc. They’ve always understood, though, that there are only two biological categories: Male (the seed) and female (the egg) which, when added together, make the next generation of males and females.

Instead of male and female, the book opts for “Generally Testosterone-Rich Body” (showing a woman without breasts) and “Generally Estrogen-Rich Body” (showing a creature with breasts and a penis)—once again illustrated with people from fetish magazines.

There’s a surprisingly delicate picture of heterosexual sex, but that’s offset by a very graphic picture of butt plugs and anal douching, along with a carefully drawn, willing derriere.

STDs are placed in the “not to worry” category. Indeed, the reader is told, “that’s not the end of the world…” This cavalier attitude is because, according to the book, “the majority of STIs are treatable and, if caught early, no biggie.” There’s no mention of the fact that chlamydia is usually asymptomatic in women and, if not treated early, leaves them infertile.

HIV is also downplayed big-time: “Even that can be treated with antivirals to the point where it becomes undetectable.” You’d think that someone would be worried about a supply-chain breakdown (they’ve happened before, right?), at which time there are no antiviral treatments. I remember the 1980s and 1990s quite vividly, when gay men in San Francisco were dying, miserably, in droves.

As if the book isn’t nasty enough, it encourages children to get on the internet to “research fantasies and kink.” That’s what pedophiles do. There are accompanying illustrations of anal sex and oral sex. If I were in a room with someone telling my 13-year-old to search for online pornography, I would punch that person’s lights out.

Parents must understand that the refined introduction to human biology that was part of our childhoods is gone. Leftists understand that, if you get people hooked on sex at the wrong time of life and in the wrong way, you own them. Their family fades into insignificance compared to the need for endless affirmation of their sexuality and, as their brains become jaded and no longer get excited by last week’s fetish, they constantly need new, more extreme forms of sexual deviance. If you’re a parent and you’re not scouring your library for these books, reading the riot act to the school boards, and, if those school boards resist you, making criminal referrals and then voting in new school boards, you are failing your children.

We don’t need more Let’s Talk About It. We need more parents like this man, who shames a school board by reading aloud from another of the new generation of “biology” books for tweens and teens:

Pastor confronts a board with sex education material available in schools. pic.twitter.com/QO3ekGQEoG

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) May 18, 2023