@CliffJoannou
If you asked me what my hopes were for the future five years ago, it would have been that we would continue progressing with the great strides already made in LGBTQ+ equality.
The reality has sadly proved different. Last month’s British Social Attitudes survey revealed that the proportion of people that characterise themselves as “not at all prejudiced” against people who are transgender has fallen from 82 per cent to 64 per cent since 2019. An unbelievable amount of media coverage is given over to discussing in quite vitriolic detail how trans people, who make up less than 0.4 per cent of the UK population, should be allowed to live.
The last time the LGBTQ+ community’s identity was being attacked so vociferously was during the AIDS crisis, when gay men were treated with horrendous disdain. It would be contemptible to imagine us being spoken about publicly with such disregard today. Yet, here we are…
For years, in the pages of Attitude, trans people like Munroe Bergdorf and Juno Dawson have said that if they are coming for trans people today, they’ll be coming for gay men tomorrow. They were right. Just last month, home secretary Suella Braverman stated how “simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin” is not sufficient to qualify for protection from the threat of death or punishment.
Just five years ago, the long overdue ban on ‘so-called conversion therapy’ was on the way under then Prime Minister Theresa May. We’re still waiting. It remains one of the last forms of legal discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the UK as progress towards it being outlawed is slowly being undone by successive prime ministers. It’s almost disheartening to see how far we’ve regressed. I say almost disheartening because I still have hope. To lose hope is to give up, and we don’t do that here. There is still hope, but in the absence of political support it’s down to us to fight for it.
The MeToo movement highlighted indifference to misogyny. Black Lives Matter made us reassess our racial privilege and what we are doing to elevate the voices of those who are not being heard. Meanwhile, the obsession with trans bodies is the policing of individual autonomy unlike we have ever seen before. And it won’t stop there. When we don’t call out discrimination, it will pivot and point its finger at the next group of people whom that angry section of society deems to be unacceptable in its narrow
