Australian Educational Materials Remove Sex from Biology Lessons — and Call It Inclusive

In the picture book What Makes a Baby, intended for children aged four to eight, neither men nor women appear. Reproduction is explained with the sentence: "When grown-ups want to make a baby, they need to get an egg from one body and sperm from another body." In the puberty guide You-ology for older children, it does not say that boys' voices break because their testicles produce testosterone. Instead, it says that "hormones tell your breasts or testes to grow" — without ever explaining whose body has which glands. And in the "inclusive language" guidelines that Australian states such as Victoria and Queensland provide to schools, "boys have penises" is replaced with "bodies with penises."

Who is raising the issue

It is Dr. Sandra Pertot who brings these examples together. Pertot is a retired clinical psychologist with fifty years of experience in sexology and published her analysis on October 5, 2026, in the newsletter Gender Clinic News, under the title "Where did I come from? Don't ask". Her argument is that whereas sex education once struggled with the subject of reproduction, it now struggles with something more fundamental — acknowledging that bodies have a sex. "The first requirement is to deny any association between a person's sex and their stated gender identity, which makes any discussion of sex rather difficult," she writes.

From education to avoidance

The difference from earlier reticence about sex education is substantial. In the past, the question was how explicitly to talk to children about reproduction; that was a matter of tone and timing. What Pertot describes is something else: educational materials that blur the biological facts themselves, not out of prudishness but to avoid presenting sex as an established fact. In What Makes a Baby, an egg and a sperm cell are no longer assigned a body with a sex — they "just come from somewhere." For children who are just learning how their own bodies work, this is not neutral wording but a gap: they are not given the language they need to understand why their bodies change in the way they do.

What exactly is being claimed

Pertot quotes the Australian parent group PAGD (Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress), which points out how gender identity is presented in these educational materials: as a "complete state of being that needs no explanation other than a feeling." Sex — something biological and externally verifiable — and gender identity — a self-reported feeling — are not presented side by side in this education; instead, the former is silently replaced by the latter. This is precisely where the role of parents and schools when young children have questions about gender becomes problematic: a child struggling with their body is not given the vocabulary in class to understand that body, but is given a ready-made framework for interpreting their own discomfort as evidence of a separate identity.

Not an isolated incident

These educational materials do not stand alone. They fit into a broader Australian movement: while states such as Victoria and Queensland are imposing these kinds of guidelines on schools, a national review of the guideline for puberty blockers for young people with gender dysphoria has just begun elsewhere in Australia — a sign that the medical side of the debate is being reconsidered, while the educational side of those same assumptions remains untouched for now. How gender is addressed in schools in the Netherlands is covered in a separate article. Dutch parents and teachers who want to know what is being taught in their own classrooms can find a comparable overview of educational materials and school policies at genderopschool.nl.

Our analysis

Pertot describes what the educational materials say; the conclusion that this is harmful is her own interpretation — and, in our view, a justified one. Respect for transgender people does not require biological sex to be erased from the classroom. In fact, children who later struggle with their own bodies particularly benefit from clear, factual language about them — not from education that treats sex as an avoidable detail. A teaching method that refuses to say that boys have a penis does not send an inclusive message; it deprives children of the concepts they need to reflect on their own development.

Sources

• Sandra Pertot, "Where did I come from? Don't ask", Gender Clinic News, October 5, 2026. genderclinicnews.com