IDAHOBIT 2025: LGBTQIA+ Visibility In Schools Is Important, Now More Than Ever

As we celebrate IDAHOBIT for another year, it’s important to reflect on the importance of this powerful awareness day, and what it brings to our community.

Most importantly, I believe, is the visibility, comfort, support and allyship that it provides for our LGBTQIA+ youth.

With so much negative discourse towards our community, especially our trans and gender-diverse family, this year is more important than ever.

IDAHOBIT is vital for our LGBTQIA+ youth

IDAHOBIT is celebrated internationally as a day of visibility, support, and unity for the wider LGBTQIA+ community, a day to highlight inclusivity, progress and hope in our world.

It is officially marked as May 17 to coincide with the day the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from the Classification of Diseases.

While many organisations get behind this colourful day of celebration, it’s important to understand the power and impact a day like today has on our young people.

As a high school teacher, I can tell you that our IDAHOBIT and Wear It Purple days are beautiful, empowering and uplifting days in our annual school calendar.

Our students, queer and otherwise, rally behind the day as we celebrate with games, activities, flags and of course: cupcakes!

But despite 2025 offering a lot of goodness that comes with living in a relatively progressive society — that those who came before us fought for for so long — there is no denying this is tumultuous climate and has been a particularly challenging year for the LGBTQIA+ community, especially for the transgender people.

As Donald Trump and his supporters in the US rally against the trans community, drag queens, queer visibility and LGBTQIA+ visibility in schools, their counterparts and supporters in Australia and around the world are following suit.

Transphobia, biphobia and homophobia are slowly starting to creep back, becoming an ever-present narrative.

Social media is flooded with it; Tiktok and Instagram are overrun with far-right videos, full of harmful misinformation and untruths about us.

The lives, identities, and just the existence of the LGBTQIA+ community, including our young people, is again becoming something that is up for debate by all and sundry, from right-wing commentators on TV, to misogynist, homophobic and transphobic influencers like Andrew Tate.

Our young people are resilient, but they are not immune for the slings and arrows of social commentary.

I’ve seen firsthand the troubling and harmful comments that are passing as the standard these days in the school yard. I see the sting inflicted by their words and I feel our LGBTQIA+ youth shrink back ever so slightly, in a way that was not the norm just a few years ago.

For queer teachers as well, we are also under attack.

Narratives about indoctrinating and brainwashing children with “dangerous woke gender ideology” are swung around harder than a handbag on Oxford Street, and as educators, we too feel the sting.

All eyes are on us. For queer educators, the pressure mounts even more — not just from the newly anti-LGBTQIA+ lens we are being seen through, but also because of the profound need we feel to protect our LGBTQIA+ students.

In a very short time, being visibly queer in schools, for students and for teachers, has stopped being as easy as it once was — and that is not okay.

So now more than ever, it is important to show our support and love for one another as a united community, and to be there to support our youth. Remember our young people still need us — and there is strength and power in our collective visibility.

So this IDAHOBIT, remember to wear your colours proudly. Don’t hesitate to speak up, and spark conversations that engage and educate people, and ignite their passion for social justice, equality, fairness and kindness.