To My Friends and Former Colleagues Posting About Pride Month… Don’t.
Rainbows aren’t just for Pride Month, please read this and rethink how you can actually help LGBT+ people like me.
It’s the time of year I’ve come to dread: Pride Month. It’s meant to be a happy occasion, full of rainbows and parades and, you know, pride! But for the last few years I haven’t been feeling the love and a lot of people in the LGBT+ community feel the same way.
When I first came out as transgender in 2015, the UK was considered the number 1 country in Europe for LGBT+ rights. A decade later and we have dropped all the way down to 22nd, largely in part due to the atrocious way the conversion therapy ban was handled, and of course, the government’s declining attitude towards the transgender community.
In case any of this is news to you, in the past few years the UK has:
Continually refused to allow people in the UK to legally identify as anything other than male or female despite approximately 1.7% of the population being considered intersex, this is comparable to the number of people in the UK born with red hair.
Refused to ban conversion therapy for transgender people on the basis that it may “help them” despite also acknowledging conversion practices as abuse.
Later seemingly gave up attempting to ban conversion therapy at all when pushed to include the transgender community in addition to sexual orientation in the ban.
Abandoned running what was meant to be a global landmark equality conference by alienating over 100 of the organisations that had planned to attend, again due to their refusal to ban conversion therapy for all.
Refused to accept gender recognition certificates from transgender people outside the UK because they “allow people to transition too easily”.
Began banning transwomen from various sports including athletics and chess due to them having a perceived advantage, with the criteria made to ban transwomen leading to cisgender women also getting banned.
Began implementing the recommendations of the Cass Review against transgender children despite the review’s “poor and inconsistent use of evidence, pathologising approaches, and exclusion of service users and trans healthcare experts”.
Scaremongering GPs into refusing or withdrawing hormone treatment from transgender adults due to the Cass Review, despite it not referring to adult patients.
Upheld literally any news article or scaremongering social media post about transwomen and toilets. All of them.
The UK’s score on ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map has almost halved in a decade, being ranked on a scale of 0 to 100% on the basis of laws and policies that have a direct impact on LGBT+ people’s human rights.
This is just a small selection of things that have happened in the UK over the past five years. This isn’t even going into the global influence of America’s anti-DEI stance bleeding into Britain and celebrities such as J.K. Rowling ploughing their money into anti-trans groups in an attempt to push legislation. Not to mention the rising number of murders and suicides of LGBT+ people in the UK and hate crimes going unreported because no one seems to actually care what happens to us…
I’m fed up. We all are. When Pride Month rolls around your rainbow coloured logos aren’t telling us we’re safe and loved. It tells us it’s your marketing magic you bring out once a year to pretend you care and maybe hook a new customer or two. Rainbow merch isn’t to show us we’re seen, it’s to make money and profit off our community.
Pride Month isn’t a holiday, it’s a protest. It’s about letting you all know we’re still here, we still exist, and we are proud to be who we are despite all the shit you throw at us. That we will continue to fight for our rights even when the whole world is against us.
If you’ve already queued up your rainbow pics for your company socials, why don’t you follow it up with action, not just this year but every year. If you’re an ally, now is your time to prove it! What are you doing to actually help us be safe when our right to exist is being taken from us from under your nose?
Will you write to your MPs and your local council on our behalf? Stop funnelling money into For Women Scotland and the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund? Call out the bullshit being said about us day in, day out as if it’s fact?
I want to believe in rainbows again. But I need allies to make that happen. I need you.
