Club captains and Brownlow medallists, Collingwood's senior coach and the bosses of the AFL Players Association and AFL, have united in a campaign to mark the international day against homophobia and transphobia.

Chris Judd, Nathan Buckley and Gillon McLachlan are among the instantly recognisable faces imploring sports fans to check themselves on derogatory and damaging language, and influence change by spreading the word.

Melbourne captain Nathan Jones, Fremantle skipper and AFLPA president Matthew Pavlich, Hawks Sam Mitchell and Matt Spangher, and Port Adelaide star Chad Wingard are among the 13 others who feature in an AFLPA-produced video to be launched on Saturday night.

In a co-ordinated campaign the AFLPA hopes will go viral online, players will use their social media platforms on Sunday – IDAHOT Day – to ask the public to #influencechange.

The consistent recent message from AFL players is that they would have no issue with a teammate announcing himself publicly as gay, and that there are no roadblocks within the industry other than the attention it would inevitably gain.

However, no one has been able to say quite as convincingly why, when there are more than 750 elite male players in the code at present, and thousands of others who have played at top level, none has come out publicly.

Hawthorn hall of fame and triple premiership player, Russell Greene, has spoken to Fairfax Media about his passion about the cause and urged the AFL to lift its visible work in the area.

His youngest son, Brent – the brother of Angie and Steven who played 42 games for the Hawks – is gay and felt ostracised from football as a schoolboy. Angie Greene, who has independently enlisted a list of AFL stars to her own "Move In May" anti-homophobia campaign, also believes that the AFL as a code could do much more to raise awareness and educate on the topic.

The AFLPA's IDAHOT campaign is being launched 25 years to the day that homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Diseases. Since becoming the AFLPA's boss, Paul Marsh has formed the view that combating homophobia is a cause players are increasingly passionate about.

Fairfax reported last week how an international homophobia study revealed 87 per cent of young gay athletes in Australia felt compelled to hide their sexuality from teammates. More than half of the respondents feared it would incite bullying and 37 per cent expressed concern about being discriminated against by sports coaches or officials.