By Yvonne Marquez
As early as middle school, Dr. Laura McGuire found themselves curious about how sex is studied and researched. Their interests expanded in high school to include advocating for LGBTQ rights and sexual violence prevention through The Vagina Monologues. After McGuire graduated college, they taught health education and social sciences to at-risk youth and noticed that most of their students were queer and had sexual trauma. “I was observing how different their lived experiences were from what [was in] the textbooks or the resources that were out there for sex education for people their age,” McGuire says. “So I decided to go to grad school and make that the focus of my education.”
McGuire, who is also the founder of the National Center for Equity and Agency, a writer for Spectrum South, and host of the new Asking for a Friend podcast, focused their doctoral program at Fielding Graduate University on sex education in particular. “I’ve always felt that this was the reason I was born,” McGuire says. “[I was born] to be a sex educator, and it’s also very much my ministry—part of my spiritual practice is educating people and helping them feel empowered about their sexual experiences and reproductive experiences.”
Now the queer and non-binary sexologist is helping parents and teachers of K-12 students navigate conversations about consent in their debut book, Creating Cultures of Consent.
Over the last ten years, since the Obama administration’s 2011 Dear Colleague letter put sexual assault on college campuses in the national spotlight, the concept of consent has become more pronounced in the public consciousness. However, there are still questions for many on how to put consent into practice. Through research, scholarly expertise, and real-world application, McGuire’s book gives adults an understanding of what consent is, how cultures of consent are created, and what teaching consent looks like in and out of the classroom.
McGuire defines consent as “respect for the dignity, personhood, and wellbeing of every living thing.” For most Americans, we’ve grown up in a society that doesn’t prioritize consent. In fact, many of us have learned the opposite through songs, movies, and TV shows. According to McGuire, we’ve learned it’s romantic to force your way into someone’s life or it’s okay to get someone to change their “no” to a “yes.” One of the most important lessons of the book is for teachers and parents to unlearn these types of messages that they have accepted and internalized. “I think some of the biggest work is that those of us who have to lead classrooms, raise children, or be in charge of these spaces, have to learn this first ourselves before we can pass on this knowledge to the next generation,” McGuire says.
McGuire is a parent to two kids, ages 8 and 11, which gives McGuire “a deep feeling of responsibility” and “sense of urgency” to teach them about consent. “When you have children, you think differently about how you were raised and the world that you are living in and what’s wrong with it,” McGuire says. “You don’t want your kids to have to deal with it.”
While it’s important to talk about consent in sex education, consent can be taught separately to young children as an interpersonal skill. Consent education includes how to communicate with each other and how to respect each other’s physical space and emotional boundaries, McGuire explains. “Imagine if you learn that and you have that intentional dialogue as a toddler or as a young child,” McGuire says. “Then, when you get older—and people say this applies when you are dating or when you’re having sex with someone too—and it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s totally right,’ versus ‘I don’t know where that came from, this is really confusing. So that’s why we want to plant those seeds really early.”
When it comes to consent in queer communities, McGuire says they’ve seen, from personal experience and talking to others in the community, both ends of the spectrum of consent—either it’s exemplified really well or not at all. McGuire says it has a lot to do with the sexual scripts we have based on our gender socialization. For example, in their experience when they previously identified as a lesbian, McGuire says people who have been socialized as women hold up consent as a real value because they don’t want to perpetuate the violence they’ve experienced in their own life. However, that sexual violence is still a problem in lesbian, queer women, and non-binary spaces. It’s something we all have to continue to work on, McGuire says. “Sometimes we might think, ‘Oh, this is just a problem that straight people have with toxic masculinity and these men who are really aggressive with women,’ but it is across the board,” they explain.
McGuire offers a training for schools, communities, and non-profits called Evolve 360, which is an additional resource to accompany the book. “Hopefully you leave with more questions than you started,” McGuire says of reading Creating Cultures of Consent. “Because you start thinking deeper, you start saying, ‘Well, if this isn’t this way then wow, that means so many other things probably have to be unlearned or deconstructed.’ I want people to see this as a starting point, not an end point.”
Learn more about Dr. Laura McGuire’s work at drlauramcguire.com.
