A report by the NSW youth advocate reveals some of the problems faced at school by LGBTQI students.
Every NSW school should have an all-gendered bathroom and reference diverse genders and sexualities in sex education classes, a new report recommends.
The NSW Advocate for Children and Young People has also called for all teachers, including those at independent and Catholic schools, to receive LGBTQI inclusion training.
The report released on Tuesday came after a study of queer young people uncovered numerous instances of discrimination and difficulty in education, work and health care.
Some reported that schools had outed them to their parents, most commonly when students had requested to have their preferred names and pronouns used, which required parental approval.
Another said they were expelled from their Catholic school during their first term after a fellow student outed them to the principal.
“I want my sexuality, gender or whatever not be looked not as politics, I just want to be a person,” one young person said in the study.
The report drew on a survey of NSW young people that estimated about 18.5 per cent identified as LGBTQI.
Those youth were statistically less likely to give a positive rating for how they felt about their life as a whole, as well as how they felt about their life “these days”.
The report made 14 recommendations, including that students are offered the option of an all-gendered bathroom at school.
Such a bathroom would avoid trans or gender-diverse youth having to come out to educators to use the appropriate toilet.
Students should still be able to choose to use a single-sex bathroom, the report said.
The report also recommended NSW Health take action including increasing public-facing information on its LGBTQI Health webpage.
The NSW Advocate for Children and Young People, Zoe Robinson, said progress had been made across the state but “there is a lot, still, to achieve”.
“There are confronting findings in this report that talk about the violence some young people have experienced,” she said.
“The safety of young people is above politics; it is a right and it is one we must enforce in all places where young people live, work, learn and play.”
Independent MP Alex Greenwich said the report showed how “heartbreakingly” many LGBTQI young people continue to feel unsafe and unwelcome in the community.
The report was a call to action for whoever wins the state election in March to ensure their safety and wellbeing was protected in law, he said.
“The LGBTIQA+ community has achieved so much over the years, but we need governments to step up and eliminate discrimination and stigma,” he said.
