University of Pittsburgh student Shane Taylor grew up in a small town. He says the only other transgender person he knew didn’t come out until age 25 or so.

Today, you can’t tune into the news without hearing debates about transgender men and women having the right to use the bathroom of their choice. But Taylor says when he was in high school, he did his best to avoid the subject.

“I pretty much just tried not to go to the bathroom when I was at school,” Taylor says. “That’s pretty much how I got through it in high school — just tried to avoid it.”

But Taylor says the issue doesn’t go away when you become an adult. For trans men and women, unequal access to bathrooms can have dire health consequences. A 2013 study by the Williams Institute found that bathroom discrimination can lead to health issues such as dehydration, urinary-tract infections, kidney infections and other kidney problems.

“A lot of us just avoid using bathrooms in public, which can lead to a lot of health problems,” says Taylor. “If we felt more comfortable going to a bathroom in a public place, that could be easily avoided. Especially if you’re in high school, you’re in school seven or eight hours a day, that’s not healthy.”

But while lawmakers around the country are fighting to punish transgender men and women who use the bathroom aligning with their gender identity, some school districts are crafting policies to protect the rights of their trans students. Pittsburgh Public Schools is one of many districts in Pennsylvania working to prevent students from having experiences like Taylor’s.

“We’ve been really telling school districts, it’s important to get in front of this,” says Aimee Zundel, an attorney who is working with the city school system. “We think of it as beneficial to have a set of guidelines in writing so everyone in the community knows what’s going to happen. Just because this has come to the forefront — it’s in the national news — there’s a need right now for districts to take a stand and put that in writing.”

Unlike the debate that’s raging on news broadcasts and headlines nationally, PPS officials realize that the issue is much broader than that. That understanding is obvious from their proposed transgender-student policy, which includes training for school staff and directives to create an all-around safer learning environment for trans students.

“This is a very critical moment that is ripe for us to address these issues. Hopefully we’ll see more school districts like Pittsburgh take the lead and enact policies and education to make sure their school is open to all students,” says Jason Landau Goodman, executive director of the Pennsylvania Youth Congress, an LGBT youth organization. “The national conversation seems fixated on bathrooms and locker rooms. But this is about so much more.”

The district’s nondiscrimination policy was modeled after a policy implemented at Brashear High School two years ago. It includes directives for respecting trans students’ preferred names and pronouns and allowing them to dress and use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identities.

“It’s been implemented successfully over at Brashear,” says Zundel, who’s been working with the district’s policy committee since February. “The written guidelines Brashear has had in place for two school years align with what we believe the [U.S. Department of Education] Office of Civil Rights is telling schools across the country we really need to do to protect the rights of transgender students.”

Despite initial concerns from trans advocates, the district says it’s received overwhelmingly positive feedback about the policy. The school-board office has received more than 250 letters about the policy, and district spokesperson Ebony Pugh says the majority have been positive. At the district’s public hearing last month, four people spoke in support of the policy and one spoke against it.

“Given the topic, we knew we were going to have to account for the rights of transgender students, but also the students who might present a challenge to the policy,” says Zundel. “One of the challenges we tackled was how do we write the policy for everyone and keep everyone in mind.”

The proposed policy includes training for school staff and education for students. It also mandates that transgender students be allowed to participate in physical-education classes and sports that align with their gender identity. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, Inc.’s policy leaves decisions about what teams students can play on up to the school’s principal, based on district policies.

In addition, the policy also includes privacy provisions that protect student records and a student’s transgender status.

“If a student is seeking help from a counselor, those kinds of things should be kept private,” says Goodman. “If a student doesn’t feel like they have support at home, it’s important for students to feel like they can be themselves in school if they’re going to learn. Having a layer of privacy and confidentiality between school life and home life is important. As long as it doesn’t cause any issues, there shouldn’t be any concern with a student being able to use certain pronouns in schools or a preferred name in school and not have that get back to a family that may not be supportive.”

Similar efforts are occurring around the state. Last month, Great Valley and Springfield Township school boards, both near Philadelphia, were the first to adopt transgender-student policies in Pennsylvania. This week PPS and Pine Richland School District held meetings on their policies. Philadelphia is also working on a policy.

“It’s absolutely critical to codify the support systems for trans students,” says Goodman. “We need the policy to ensure transgender students are in a position to assert their rights, and it establishes a baseline for support and affirmation from the school district. We can say we support trans students in the district, but if it’s not written down in policy, it’s hard to exactly say what that is. This gives guidance to teachers and school staff about all kinds of different areas of school life that are important to qualify.”

Pine Richland’s efforts have placed the district at the center of controversy. Even though schools in the district had maintained a practice of letting trans students use the bathrooms of their choosing, the recent decision to put the policy in writing drew the ire of conservative organizations nationally.

“No child should be forced into an intimate setting like a restroom or locker room with a person of the opposite sex,” said Alliance for Defending Freedom legal counsel Kellie Fiedorek in an April 26 news release. “Letting boys into girls’ restrooms is an invasion of privacy and a threat to children’s safety. The school district is subjecting itself to potential liability if any of these children encounter any harm.”

But Katie Horowitz, vice president for education at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, says policies like the one being proposed in Pittsburgh are important for ensuring trans students have the same learning opportunities as other students.

“It puts in place system-level protections for these youth. Everybody deserves to feel safe and everybody deserves to have a learning environment where they feel comfortable and where they’re able to learn,” says Horowitz. “The more visible the support is in the school for these students, the more adults they know they can safely go to to discuss any issues they might be having, the more effective the policy is going to be and the more comfortable and safe those students are going to feel.”

These policies, Horowitz says, also help districts meet the requirements of the U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded education programs and activities.

“Title IX protects transgender students,” says Horowitz. “The Office of Civil Rights made a very clear statement on that. I think it’s really important to be in compliance with that and to make it very clear our district supports all youth. We support all students, and we want a safe learning environment for everyone.”

Horowitz was especially impressed that Pittsburgh’s policy begins by outlining definitions useful for discussing gender identity and that it includes provisions mandating training for school staff.

“This is something that requires training. It requires people to understand the difference between biological sex and gender identity. People need a little help to come to a place where they can understand how to be respectful of trans students,” says Horowitz. “This is an issue I think people are starting to have more language around, but it’s something not everybody’s comfortable with, not everybody knows how to talk about it. So I think it’s great the way they really laid out gender identity and gender expression and really did a good job of explaining all of that terminology.”

Advocates say more education about the effects of trans discrimination is necessary. A recently released Georgia State University study found that a high proportion of the transgender individuals participating in this study — 46.5 percent — had a history of attempted suicide. And that number jumped to 60.5 percent for those denied access to bathrooms.

“The research has been pretty clear that transgender students in particular experience negative health outcomes that we don’t see in other youth,” says Horowitz. “And it’s pretty clear that a lot of these problems — suicide, anxiety, depression, substance abuse — are likely the result of the disproportionate stress they feel from being discriminated against in various environments: school, community, by peers.”

Pitt student Taylor has experienced the negative effects of discrimination at school first-hand. He says he wishes there were a transgender protection policy in place when he was in high school.

“I probably would’ve been a lot less dehydrated,” says Taylor. “I’d just avoid drinking anything until I got home from school. Before I went to school I wouldn’t drink anything.”

But Taylor also says district-wide policies are just the first step in helping transgender individuals feel safe and comfortable. And he says the national bathroom debate is a clear example of the work that still needs to be done.

“I’m still a student, and I have the experience of going to school every day and avoiding bathrooms if I can because it’s still a really uncomfortable situation,” says Taylor.

And while the national spotlight might cast him and other members of the trans community in a negative light, Taylor says he hopes the debate will ultimately lead to acceptance.

“Most people who oppose it just assume transgender people are child predators or that people who are child predators are going to pretend to be transgender to get to little girls. That’s just not the issue. Those people are going to do it either way,” Taylor says. “For kids in school, it’s a health and safety issue. Eventually I think people are going to realize it’s not as big a deal as people think it is.”