When I switched from a co-ed primary school to a single-sex school, relatives joked that I wouldn't be distracted by boys anymore. This isn't an uncommon argument for the pros of single-sex schooling, but its heteronormative implication erases the existence of LGBT youth in schools: who's to say that a female student won't be distracted by the girls in her class? If anything, the absence of male students made me and many of my heterosexual peers even more distracted by any men we came across. Had we socialised with boys on a day-to-day basis, they certainly wouldn't have seemed like such alien creatures – and transitioning from single-sex schooling to university would not have been such a rude awakening for many of us. The pro-single-sex crowd often claims that girls perform better in typically "male" subjects, such as maths and science, when educated without boys – but a recent study has drawn inconclusive evidence regarding the advantages of single-sex education, and suggests no significant difference in the way boys and girls learn. "We don't have sex-segregated workplaces so why would we have sex-segregated schools?" psychology Diane Halpern said in the study's media release. "After graduation, virtually everyone will work for and with females and males – students need to learn mutual respect and the social skills of interacting. They need to learn how to interact co-operatively and competitively and these are important things that are learnt in school."

Single-sex schooling perpetuates tired notions of gender essentialism – girls are like this, boys are like that. In 2016, we know that anatomy has nothing to do with gender, and continuing to define individuals and their experiences by a predetermined social construct hinders social progress. What's more, the entire concept of segregated schooling operates on the model of a cis-centric gender binary, automatically excluding, by definition, any students who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. When half the youth transgender population has considered suicide and a quarter has attempted, adding institutionalised exclusion to the mix does nothing to mitigate feelings of alienation. Children often learn from those around them, so having a more diverse student body is a good step towards fostering an environment that emphasises inclusivity, the tenets of which will hopefully stay with students beyond the end of high school. I remember boys from our brother school being relentlessly taunted for being gay or feminine. So many gay boys I knew didn't come out until long after graduation. With their focus on physical education and other stereotypically "male" activities, all-boys schools are so often a breeding ground for toxic masculinity – the 2001 Trinity Grammar incident has haunted me since I heard about it as a child, and as an adult, I recognise its roots in performative machismo and one-upmanship. Earlier this year, a former student of The King's School wrote a column for Honi Soit about the "entitlement and privilege that comes hand-in hand with attending a prestigious private school and being idolised by everyone there". Describing his peers' poor attitude towards women, he wrote, "These boys feel they have the right to set their own standards of morality."