Sen. Joan Lovely Touts Sex Education, Gender Identity Bills

SALEM, MA — Sen. Joan Lovely (D-Salem) touted bills that passed the state Senate on Thursday providing for age-appropriate inclusive sex education in schools, a non-binary option for birth certificates and driver's licenses and access to nutritious school meals.

"We took a stand for our commonwealth's most vulnerable populations and advanced the Senate's mission of promoting equity and inclusivity for all Massachusetts residents," said Lovely said. "We made great strides towards addressing student hunger, ensuring our youth have access to comprehensive and medically accurate education in schools, and ensuring all constituents have the ability to express their gender identity on state identification forms."

The Act Relative to Healthy Youth would ensure that schools choosing to provide sex education do so with an "age-appropriate and medically accurate curriculum" that is comprehensive and inclusive.

Lovely's office said currently schools can still offer strictly abstinence-only or abstinence-centered curricula that exclude information on LGBTQ+ youth and lessons on consent. The bill passed would require schools to include information on the benefits of delaying sex, effective contraception use, pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention, healthy relationship and communication skills, what consent means in a sexual situation and information on gender identity and sexual orientation.

This legislation does not require schools to offer sex education and also protects parents' right to remove their children from all or part of sex education if they choose to do so. Districts will also have guidelines on how to inform parents of sex education curriculum.

The Act Relative to Gender Identity would provide an option other than male or female on birth certificates and driver's licenses where a gender choice is required. Adults, parents or guardians and emancipated minors would be able to make the changes.

The gender on a birth record could be female, male or "X" on a birth certificate indicating a non-binary or undesignated gender. The change would only be subject to the desire of the person making the change and not medical records.

Those who change their gender on their birth certificate will also be allowed to change their name on a birth certificate once they have gone through and legally done so.

The Act to Promote Student Nutrition would require districts where a majority of students are low-income to enroll in federal programs that allow for free breakfast and lunch for all students.

It would also prohibit districts from targeting students who owe meal-related debt by withholding report cards or transcripts as well as prohibit preventing them from attending field trips, taking part in extracurricular activities and participating in graduation.

All three bills now go to the House of Representatives for further action.

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)