The alarming rate of bullying, homelessness, HIV and suicide among LGBT youth should be an outrage: Nearly a fifth of students are physically assaulted because they are LGBT; among homeless children, 25 to 50 percent are LGBT; the CDC reports among youth aged 13 to 24 diagnosed with HIV in 2014, 80 percent were gay and bisexual males; and gay teens are also eight times more likely to report having attempted suicide.
Instead, the outrage swirls around who gets to use whose bathroom. Sparked by North Carolina’s “bathroom bill”, the legal battle over transgender rights recently escalated to include over a dozen states suing the federal government in response to the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy. What if all the time, energy and taxpayer money spent on litigation were invested toward providing comprehensive LGBT inclusive health education for all children?
