Our bodies allow us to live. Through them, we experience the world. Medicine, as a science and discipline, has been increasingly successful in treating and preventing disease and prolonging life.
For a long time, Western medicine has focused on how our organs and systems function, which sustains our bodily viability. Although it was long reactive to disease, it has progressively shifted toward prevention.
As an extension of what health professionals do, society has incorporated these narratives into everyday life in search of prevention, anti-aging, and body optimization: more fitness, more energy, optimal supplementation, and indicators that measure our efficiency during sleep and exercise.
This current narrative – which exists only in some bubbles – burdens us with individual responsibility and, at times, with disproportionate moral overtones. It is time to approach it critically, because this notion of the apparent evolution of health can obscure gaps: it can leave out the complexity of each person’s health and, definitely, exclude many people.
If we look for clues, we find other signs of progress in the collective understanding of what shapes health and well-being; these notions have not been as popular: they do not plague algorithms, they do not necessarily produce profits, and, above all, they require a more complex understanding.
Two decades ago, the focus on the social determinants of health received a decisive boost internationally, challenging the exclusively biological paradigm. Finally, a perspective emerged that integrated the ways in which education, gender, body types (corporeality), social class, air and water quality, the socio-political context, and many other factors influence our chances of getting sick. In a second round, these determinants again drastically shape our ability to access health care and the quality of that care. It is not only genes that dictate our destiny; everything else can also influence how those genes are expressed, or what happens to us independently of them.
A few years ago, we had another opportunity to reflect when the pandemic made unavoidable a conversation that had already been brewing: Mental health is health. Little by little, we have chipped away at stigmas, normalizing visits to psychotherapy and speaking more openly about neurodiversity.
In these successive approaches, we must add the next layer, one that lets us integrate something that may still seem revolutionary: Sexual health is health, and it has everything to do with social determinants.
For a long time, in the light of the biomedical paradigm, sexual health focused mainly on preventing sexually transmitted infections and, of course, unplanned pregnancy. This notion can lead us to assume that talking about sexuality means only talking about sexual relations.
This limited understanding has not allowed sexuality to be fully incorporated as a central aspect of the human condition, present throughout life and which, in addition to its biological dimension, includes psychological, affective, social, and cultural components experienced through the body.
To speak of corporeality, then, implies recognizing that these experiences do not occur under the same conditions for all people. The possibilities of living sexuality, exercising autonomy, experiencing well-being, and making our rights effective are embodied in concrete corporalities, shaped by our history, our relationships, and social and cultural conditions that can expand or limit these possibilities.
This view helps us understand the motto of World Sexual Health Day 2026, Every Body, as more than a call to represent the diversity of bodies. It invites us to ask ourselves about the conditions under which each person can live their sexuality and relate to their body with dignity, autonomy, and well-being.
This question has profound educational implications: are we teaching only to protect our bodies from what can go wrong, or are we also offering tools to know them, understand them, and live our sexuality in a way that is consistent with our dignity, autonomy, and well-being, and with respect for the dignity of others?
Educating for sexual health
Broadening our view of sex education does not mean abandoning prevention: prevention is still indispensable. In Mexico, data from ENSANUT 2022 show that, although 88.1% of adolescents knew that condoms should be used only once, only 60.4% recognized their dual function in preventing pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (Hubert López et al., 2023).
The data remind us that gaps remain even in fundamental knowledge. The challenge is not to stop educating to prevent risks, but to stop confusing the absence of harm with the presence of sexual health.
Comprehensive education should allow us not only to know how our body works, but also to develop capacities to understand it and make decisions about it; recognize our limits and respect those of other people; build relationships based on consent; recognize bodily, sexual, and gender diversity; identify situations of violence or inequality; access reliable information and ask for help when necessary.
In other words, being informed is not the same as developing autonomy. Preventing risks is not the same as promoting well-being. Moreover, an additional transformation makes this conversation especially urgent: how, and by whom, is sex education happening?
We regularly learn from our families and friends, from health services, and from what our communities say—or keep quiet—about sexuality. However, today we also learn from search engines, social networks, influencers, series, pornography, digital communities, and artificial intelligence systems. When families and educational and training institutions decide not to talk about sexuality, the space they leave does not remain empty.
Markets and digital algorithms select which bodies we see; social networks amplify specific ideals of beauty, youth, and desirability; and artificial intelligence raises new questions about intimacy, privacy, consent, bias, and image generation and manipulation.
Therefore, comprehensive sexuality education today also requires incorporating literacy and digital safety: it is not enough to find information; we need to evaluate its sources, recognize misinformation and stereotypes, understand how digital environments influence our expectations of bodies and relationships, and protect our privacy and that of others.
The recent Porto Proclamation on Sexual Health, Rights, and Justice recognizes, among its priorities, the need to confront misinformation through research and education, as well as to develop digital strategies that expand access to reliable information on sexual health (El Kak et al., 2026).
From Every Body to Sexual Justice
If we recognize that sexuality is experienced from concrete corporalities, an integral education cannot assume that there is a universal bodily experience.
What body do we imagine when we design sex education?
Often, a young, heterosexual, cisgender, disability-free body that is understood mainly from its reproductive capacity is implicitly assumed. However, sexuality spans a lifetime and is experienced in diverse bodies, identities, relationships, and circumstances.
Education that aspires to be for every body needs to ask not only whether it offers information to all people, but whether everyone can recognize themselves in that information and use it to make decisions about their own lives. Offering the same content does not guarantee that everyone can access it, understand it, feel represented, or have the conditions needed to act on what they have learned.
Moreover, here inclusion meets justice. If all people have sexual rights, but not all have the same conditions to exercise them, the problem cannot be solved only by providing more information. Gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, age, socioeconomic conditions, and social context can all affect exercising autonomy, accessing services, setting limits, experiencing well-being, and living sexuality without violence or discrimination.
Sexual justice invites us precisely to move from the formal recognition of rights to asking ourselves about the real conditions for exercising them.
From this perspective, comprehensive sexuality education takes on another dimension. It is not only a strategy to transmit information or an intervention to prevent risks. It can also be a tool for inclusion and a condition for sexual justice.
Perhaps that is why Every Body is a particularly pertinent motto for our time. It invites us to broaden our perspective to recognize that promoting health also means expanding people’s possibilities to know their bodies, make decisions about them, build respectful relationships, and live their sexuality free of violence and discrimination.
Sexual health is health, and sexual and reproductive rights are human rights. We need to create the conditions for access to comprehensive sex education and the possibilities of living sexuality with dignity, autonomy, and well-being to truly reach every body.
About the Author
Pilar González Amarante is a physician and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Tecnológico de Monterrey, as well as a master’s degree in Ethics for Social Construction. Her work focuses on medical education and healthcare at the intersection of sociology and the humanities, through research and teaching. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and currently leads Preventive and Educational Strategies at the Center for the Recognition of Human Dignity at TecSalud and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Tecnológico de Monterrey. From this position, she promotes initiatives aimed at preventing violence, discrimination, and all forms of violations of human dignity, with the goal of creating safe, violence-free spaces for everyone.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
