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… Turner points to specific laws targeting abortion rights throughout Appalachia and the South, including Georgia and Alabama. According to Planned Parenthood, states have adopted 37 new restrictions on abortion rights and access since the beginning of 2019 alone.
Turner began taking her work even more seriously after the 2016 election, reaching out to a wide variety of organizations that might benefit from her services, and teaching “just about anywhere that I could get in,” she says, including churches, community colleges, youth drop-in centers, and basements. She’s reached out to private foster agencies in an effort to provide inclusive sex education to foster families and regularly cold-called community spaces that seemed potentially amenable to hosting Sexy Sex Ed.
According to Turner, after 2016, the majority of people who showed up to her trainings were queer kids. At a recent workshop at a youth clinic, for instance, she says that over half of the kids in the room identified as trans. Now—almost 10 years into running Sexy Sex Ed and having aged out of STAY—Turner is expanding Sexy Sex Ed in an attempt to make LGBTQ-inclusive sex education accessible to queer youth living all throughout Appalachia.
Last month, she trained 20 new sex educators who will take Sexy Sex Ed programming to folks living all across Appalachia and the South, a massive expansion from running the trainings previously on her own. This cohort of trainers will exponentially expand the reach of Sexy Sex Ed, providing young, LGBTQ people living in remote areas of Appalachia with the ability to both access information and cultivate community.
“Appalachia covers many states and miles of curvy roads to small towns that feel isolated from one another,” Turner says. “We have a lot in common culturally and economically, but we live in unique places with diverse people. It felt important to have educators in many states to cover more ground, but it’s also important that educators know the people and places they’re bringing Sexy Sex Ed to. The educators create a safe and inspiring space, and elevate conversation. That works best when you know the community you’re in.”
In conjunction with the organization’s expansion, Tuner and her team launched a new website with an interactive map of health care providers all throughout rural Appalachia. According to Tuner, the majority of resources about reproductive justice leave Appalachia mostly bare, focusing on cities and not covering rural areas. This interactive map—and the strategy of these 20 organizers working across the region—seek to fill those gaps and reach the LGBTQ youth living in the most remote corners of Appalachia.
“These are life and death conversations,” Turner says. “Sexy Sex Ed is a small step in the direction of righting wrongs and connecting people to one another and resources, rather than further isolating them.”