Kochava was 17 when they were first kicked out of home by parents who did not understand their non-binary gender identity.

They slept in friends’ living rooms and, when that option wasn’t available, on the street. The street was terrifying, Kochava said, but it was safer than approaching a homelessness service provider, where emergency accommodation is split into shared rooming houses for either men or women.

“I was living with my parents who were abusive and quite transphobic and at various points they would kick me out for a few weeks to a few months,” Kochava told Guardian Australia.

“I did call one service provider. They didn’t seem to understand that transphobic abuse is a form of abuse, basically saying, ‘You should work it out, you should go home.’

“After that, and having heard a lot of horror stories from other trans people who had tried to go to other services, I didn’t go to any other services.”

Now the president of Ygender, a Victorian advocacy organisation for trans and gender-diverse young people, Kochava said they had heard similar stories from a significant number of young people who had been forced out of home and felt excluded from homelessness support services.

“The is fear that if you access one of these services you are going to be forced into an unsafe environment, either that’s from other people using these services or the staff there are going to force you to misgender yourself, or be homophobic or transphobic,” they said.

“Is living on the streets safer than a space that’s going to get your names and pronouns wrong some of the time? No. But is it safer than putting you in a room with other people who might put you at risk of transphobic violence? Quite possibly.”

Kochava’s story is common among young LGBTI people in Australia, according to research being conducted by the University of Melbourne associate professor Ruth McNair under the LGBTI Housing and Homelessness Project.

LGBTI people are a growing at-risk group for homelessness, particularly youth homelessness, according to anecdotal accounts provided to McNair from homelessness service providers, but there is no formal collection of data around the gender and sexual identity of people seeking support for homelessness and no specific government policies, at either a state or federal level, addressing the issue.

“The services are all telling us that they are seeing a lot more trans and gender diverse people than they have in the past,” McNair said. “This is in the last two or three years, it’s simply exploded.”

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ general social survey in 2014, about 33.7% of people who identified as gay or lesbian had experienced homelessness at some point in their life, compared with 20.8% of bisexuals and 13.4% of heterosexual people. There were no results for trans, intersex and gender-diverse people.

While a number of LGBTI young people who present at homeless shelters also fall into other high-risk groups, including drug abuse and sex work, many are on the street simply because they are not accepted at home. “It’s easy for mainstream people to pathologise this and say, ‘If they weren’t trans, they would be fine,’” McNair said. “It’s actually because society is very transphobic and doesn’t accept them at this point, that is the stem of it. If they were living in a society that was not transphobic they would not be led down this path.”

The Council to Homeless Persons ran a forum in Melbourne on Wednesday in an attempt to encourage service providers to bridge the gap in supporting LGBTI people, who it says are 250% more likely to experience homelessness.

“Although the common stereotype of someone who is homeless is an older man rough sleeping, the reality is that 44% of homelessness clients are people under 25,” said its manager, Ian Gough. “Anecdotally we’re know that some LGBTIQ young people are reluctant to engage with the homelessness system, so may not even be counted in the statistics.”

The only service provider in Victoria that explicitly caters for LGBTI young people is the Family Access Network, a small youth homelessness support service provider in Melbourne.

Its chief executive, Sue Carlile, said the service began to make itself gender and sexuality inclusive in 2005 after being approached by an LGBTI advocacy group. It overhauled the organisation, introducing regular training for all staff on sexual and gender diversity and auditing all the images in their offices to ensure they advertised it as being a safe and inclusive place.

It now operates two share houses specifically for LGBTI people, which can hold a maximum of seven people, runs a weekly support group and provides specific housing assistance funding for LGBTI young people in Melbourne and regional areas.

Up to 25% of their clients identify as LGBTI, according to figures provided to the housing and homelessness project

“We could multiply what we are doing 10 times over and we would still be getting referrals,” Carlile said. “The need is definitely out there.”