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Gender and sexuality in education and health: voices advocating for equity and social justice

In Australia, sexual health and sexuality education in relation to young people are not well integrated and education and health systems appear to function, in the main, independently of each other. This is perplexing, considering the known benefits of cooperative work for young people’s sexual health and relationship knowledge, critical understandings and practices. Despite the apparent disjuncture, pockets of innovative, inspirational and integrated perspectives and programmes that pursue equity and justice in relation to these areas do exist across public, private and community spheres.1 This themed issue of Sex Education, entitled Gender and Sexuality in Education and Health: Advocating for Equity and Social Justice, derives from the Australia Forum for Sexuality, Education and Health2’s inaugural conference, Equity and Justice – in Gender, Sexuality, Education and Health, held in Sydney, Australia in 2015. The conference sought to stimulate greater national and local connections between the education and sexual health sectors and to provide a rallying point for the formation of strategic alliances for positive sexual health outcomes among young people. The peer-reviewed papers arising from the conference and available in this special issue have been developed and published at a time of mounting conservatism globally, when broader issues of equity and justice around sexuality and gender in education and health have come under attack. Archaic patriarchal and conservative discourses position thinking and approaches that advocate for equity and rights, as radical, leftist, and a threat to traditional family values and ‘the way things should be’. As researchers and tertiary educators with a combined 30 years of experience in the fields of equity and diversity in relation to gender and sexuality, it is alarming to witness how understandings about sexuality, sexuality and gender diversities, and sexual health and relationships, have been at the very least stalled and, in many cases, regressed at the national level in many nations. Internationally, for example, this is demonstrated by the recent decision of the Russian parliament to decriminalise domestic violence (Stanglin 2017); by US President Donald Trump’s recent revocation of guidelines on transgender toilets in schools that permitted ‘students to use the bathrooms matching their chosen gender identity’ which had been enabled by the previous administration (ABC 2017); and by the same president’s reinstatement of a ‘global gag rule that bans US-funded groups around the world from discussing abortion’ (ABC 2017), impacting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights across many nations that rely on international funding to survive. Such retrograde measures not only undermine the rights, education and sexual health of individuals who are already highly vulnerable, they constitute discourses that convey regressive messages about sex, gender and sexuality impacting young people’s