More than one in 10 Australian teenagers identify as gay, bisexual, pansexual or asexual, a survey of high school students has found.
Researchers surveyed 6,388 year 8 students between 2019 and 2021, finding that 12% of the teens reported diverse sexualities, while 3.3% identified as gender-diverse.
The findings, the study’s authors say, highlight an “urgent need” for support services in schools and healthcare settings to mitigate against an increased risk of stigma, discrimination and violence.
“We need child health policies that provide inclusion and support of diverse gender identities and diverse sexualities from a young age,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Jennifer Marino, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney. “School and health settings particularly need to be safe spaces for very young adolescents.”
Teens who identified as transgender or non-binary were twice as likely to report having a disability or a mental health diagnosis.
Marino said that finding warranted more research. “We have long known that both sexuality- and gender-diverse … older adolescents and adults have increased risk of various mental health issues relative to their cisgender, heterosexual peers. The evidence all points to minority stress as being the principal driver of that – discrimination and stigma that affect health and social standing,” they said. “I don’t have any reason to think that younger adolescents would be any less vulnerable than their older peers.”
The last National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, released in 2023, found that 58.7% of people who identified as non-heterosexual had a mental disorder in the previous year, compared with 19.9% of those identifying as heterosexual.
In the new study, the proportion of teens identifying as gender-diverse was slightly higher than previous research conducted in New Zealand and the United States.
“There’s an association between younger age and gender diversity,” Marino said, suggesting that the findings could be due to the researchers surveying a younger cohort than previously studied.
Existing research suggests “most children understand from a really young age who they are in terms of their gender”, they said. “The evidence suggests that regardless of how they’re actually interacting with other young people romantically, young people are thinking about … their identities early in adolescence.”
Citing overseas research with similar findings, Marino said the proportion of young teenagers identifying as sexuality diverse seems to have “stabilised in this 9% to 12% range in earlier adolescence”.
Dr Jonathan Hallett, a senior lecturer in health promotion at Curtin University who was not involved in the research, said such studies were important for adequate healthcare resourcing for LGBTQIA+ people.
“We measure what matters, and for so long our communities have been invisible in so much Australian data,” Hallett said.
“There remain significant health disparities affecting LGBTQIA+ people across a broad range of health outcomes and this has been linked to experiences of discrimination, stigma, and exclusion,” he added.
“Research has demonstrated a lack of cultural competency of health care providers and cis-heteronormative assumptions in Australian care environments which creates barriers for access.”
The study was published in the journal Jama Network Open.
