Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Several hundred of those cheerful and unembarrassable souls whose calling it is to teach about the birds and the bees found, at the Center for Sex Education’s recent national conference, that there was something for everyone. There were sessions on sex for old people and sex after weight-loss surgery; sex ed in Sweden and sex ed in Mauritius. In the ballroom, authors signed books—“When Kayla Was Kyle,” “Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf.” Outside in the hallway, the inventor of the Wondrous Vulva Puppet peddled her satiny wares.

In a room on the third floor, a workshop on communication with trans*- and queer*-identified individuals was taking place. (“Trans” with an asterisk means someone who identifies with any of a welter of finely honed descriptions—genderfluid, genderqueer, two-spirit, agender, third-gender, etc. “Queer” with an asterisk indicates someone who isn’t straight but may not be exactly gay, either.) The workshop was led by a pierced young man named Simon Pedisich, who teaches sex ed to the deaf, and Al Vernacchio, a friendly man wearing a pink shirt, a striped tie, and a blue sweater vest, who taught sex ed at a Quaker school in Philadelphia.

As an icebreaking exercise, Vernacchio had the participants pronounce a sexual term, in a tone of voice indicated by a word on a card. The others then had to guess what that word was. “Pubic hair!” one yelled (the correct answer was “drill sergeant”). “Vaginal fluid,” whispered another (“embarrassed”). “Rectum!” scolded a third (“annoyed”). It proved to be challenging to guess what the card said, and that was the lesson: even when you are a sex-ed teacher, communication of feelings about sex ed is very difficult.

Having warmed up their audience, Pedisich and Vernacchio issued a series of tricky relationship conundrums written on index cards. “You and your partner have very similar genders,” one began. “It’s one of the things you first bonded over, and has continued to be a really important part of your relationship. Neither of you has had or wanted to have surgery, but you recently realized it’s something you want to pursue.”

“You were assigned female at birth and identify as trans, and your partner is a cis female,” read another. (“Cis female” means a woman who was declared female at birth and is fine with that.) “Your partner’s dyke identity is really important to her, and she is uncomfortable with being seen as straight and has outed you on occasion because of it.”

Over lunch, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the famous sex therapist and former sniper for the Haganah—four feet seven inches tall, eighty-six years old, in a bubble-gum-pink blazer—held forth from a step stool. She told about the time she was on “Letterman” and talked about a man who said that his partner liked putting onion rings on his penis, and Letterman walked right off the set. Then there was the time Diane Sawyer interviewed her and her husband, and Sawyer asked her husband how their sex life was, and he said sadly, “The shoemaker’s children don’t have any shoes.”

Late in the afternoon, there was a session on sexual myths, led by Brian Flaherty, a legal reference librarian, and Megara Bell, who teaches sex ed to kids with Asperger’s syndrome. Some sexual myths, they had discovered, were at least partly extinct. The one about green M&M’s making you horny, for instance—while that one was well known to old white people from Boston, it had been met with incomprehension by young nonwhite people from the Bronx.

Flaherty and Bell had put together experiments to dispel mistaken information. For instance, vodka tampons: there was a rumor that you could get drunk and avoid alcohol breath by soaking a tampon in vodka and inserting it. A quick fact check proved that getting drunk by this method would require a frightening number of tampons, not to mention tolerance of considerable discomfort. “It burns like crazy,” Bell said. “I mean—for science.” Vodka enemas, she conceded, were quite effective (this fact was not demonstrated), although they could kill you.

Yet another rumor they had encountered: that you couldn’t use a silicon-based lubricant on a latex condom. Flaherty and Bell summoned five volunteers to the stage to test the suitability of various types of lubricant on latex condoms. Each volunteer blew up a condom, applied lubricant to it, and then started to rub it—friction was necessary. The Vaseline condom broke first with a loud bang, then the baby oil, then the vegetable oil. But the silicon- and the water-based Astroglide, Bell said, could last all day. ♦