Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair, the committee and my fellow witnesses.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today, and I would like to thank the committee for undertaking this important study.

My name is Lauren Pragg, my pronouns are they/them, and I'm the executive director of LGBT YouthLine. YouthLine is a youth-led, anti-racist organization dedicated to supporting 2SLGBTQ+ youth 29 and under across Ontario through peer support, resources, comprehensive training, advocacy and referrals.

YouthLine began in 1993 as a community-based solution to offer support to 2SLGBTQ+ young people who needed someone to talk to who understood what they were going through. Even 30 years ago, our founders recognized the need for support outside of major cities, so we aim to have a presence in rural, remote and underserved communities across Ontario and, at times, Canada, ensuring that even in regions where services are scarce, youth have one place to turn to for support.

At YouthLine, we're on the front line six days per week, connecting with approximately 3,000 queer and trans youth every year. Through our helpline, our peer-support volunteers provide support for youth navigating the real and pressing challenges they face, including discrimination and marginalization in their schools, families and health care systems. These conversations offer sobering views of how policies and inaction directly contribute to the barriers and harmful experiences shaping young queer lives.

At YouthLine, we do this work while also living its impact, with staff and volunteers who are themselves 2SLGBTQ+ youth and adults working tirelessly to create safe and affirming spaces. Our experience tells us that youth know who they are and have a strong sense of how they might identify. However, what we're seeing, especially with the rise of the parental rights discourse, is that young people must negotiate whether school is a safe place for them to be themselves when home may already be unsafe for them.

When service users ask if schools will out them to their families, we can't provide a definitive answer or reassure them because of the vast differences in not just policy but also the application of policy and enforcement.

The truth is that there's always a risk of being outed, regardless of policy. For our service users, this means that we cannot tell them that they will not be in danger if they choose to come out. Even in school boards that are inclusive on paper, safe school policies are not being enforced. Queer and trans students are dealing with daily homophobia, transphobia and harassment from their peers and sometimes the adults in their school.

One service user told us that they're constantly just being given dirty looks or harassed in the locker rooms and bathrooms. They and their friends always get comments at lunch or straight up get called slurs. They and another student told the principal about them, but she hasn't talked to them.

We've also heard about harassment from school staff. Another chatter told us about one such figure saying that she'll come into their other classes and out them to everyone, that it feels like she misgenders them on purpose, that they feel like such a failure and want to cry. They told their vice-principal, but it still hasn't stopped.

We also have service users whose parents have been radicalized by the far right and espouse opinions echoing popular figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. We get service users whose parents are against the so-called “left agenda” and think schools are “transing” kids, but for these youth, school is actually the only safe place they have to be themselves.

Anti-2SLGBTQ+ violence also impacts students who aren't out. Since the lockdowns have ended, we've noticed that young people are having trouble making and keeping friends, and a lot of our chatters feel like their options are to put up with homophobic friends or to be alone.

Beyond schools, protests like the 1 Million March for Children and the rise of transphobia in general have trans people worried about their safety, at minimum, and at worst, have some of our community members feeling hopeless about being queer or trans entirely. Youth have also expressed the intense hatred that's facing them externally as being turned inward on themselves.

November was our busiest month of this year; specifically, the day after the U.S. election was one of our busiest days of the year. Of the service users who shared their gender, all were either trans, questioning or cis women. Of those who shared their age, all of them were 18 or under.

In one week's time, half of the chats that mentioned the election explicitly named being worried about trans rights or anti-trans legislation. On the night after the election, half of the chats that mentioned the election were from chatters from other provinces who were worried about the influence that the U.S. election will have on their own rights. Some of those chats have come from provinces that have stripped trans youth of their rights, such as Alberta, with chatters expressing absolute desperation. One chatter felt that they were forced to leave their province because they felt so unsafe; they felt there would never be a place for them.

YouthLine's recent advocacy campaign, Write for Student Rights, focused on school safety and inclusion for 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Ontario. The campaign was developed in response to anti-trans legislation in other provinces and the recent nation-wide anti-trans protests. The campaign was also motivated by comments to the media from Premier Doug Ford—

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