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Dee Whitnell on Why Sex Is Taboo, Trans Kids & Section 28

The Pieces with Bimini

Tuesday, 2 June 2026 - 34 minutes

Dee Whitnell is a multi-award-winning sex educator, content creator, journalist and activist who is quite literally changing the conversation around sexual health and wellbeing in the UK.

The author of Beyond Bananas and Condoms and founder of Trans Kids Deserve To Grow Up — a campaign born from witnessing the devastation of trans youth loss — Dee is working tirelessly to deliver inclusive, affirming sex education to young people across the country. Dee's work centres on one truth: comprehensive sex education is life-saving, and shame has no place in conversations about our bodies.

On this episode of The Pieces, Bimini and Dee dive into the formative moments that shaped their mission.

They discuss why sex remains so taboo despite literally being how most of us came into existence, the dangerous gap between abstinence-based education and reality, and how Section 28 created a generation of queer people who learned about sex through pornography.

The conversation tackles the myth that queer people are at higher risk of STIs (spoiler: we just test more), the terrifying reality of AI replacing comprehensive sex education, and the moral panic around trans youth that echoes Thatcher's Section 28 rhetoric.

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