“LGBTQ adolescents face well-documented health disparities in suicide risk, substance use, and sexual health. These disparities are known to stem, in part, from stigma directed toward LGBTQ youth in the form of minority stressors such as violence, discrimination, and harassment.

Given the proportion of time that LGBTQ students spend in school, schools provide a critical context within which protective factors may be developed and leveraged to improve the health and wellbeing of these populations.”

US National Library of Medicine:
National Institutes of Health

It was about two years ago when the itinerant health teachers Naa Lomoley Sahin and Hannah Malcolm saw the first signs that LGBTQ issues needed to become part of the health curriculum they teach.

There were students who emailed Sahin asking her to call them in a certain way; some students were making suggestions to the lessons that would imply that they were interested in more gender inclusivity.